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What Processes are Necessary for Windows XP?
Brickwall asks: "I studied electrical engineering in university (30 years ago, mind!), so I'm not completely stupid about computers. However, I have searched and searched, and been unable to find an answer to this question: if you start up Windows XP from scratch, what processes should be running? I have some P2P software running, so I know I'll have to shut that down, plus my spyware protection, anti-virus software, etc. But what should be left running? Is this documented somewhere that I've been unable to find?"
>>4-6 hours tweaking services? Right. Even when using the list as a reference, it takes at tops 15 minutes to tweak services.
Once you have done the process a few times, it becomes second nature. However, for the first few times, you have to disable a few services and then test your applications to ensure everything works. Can I still browse the network? Does SSL still work? Can I still resolve domain names? Can I still print? Do my games still work? Can I still adjust my video preferences?
All these questions have to be answered after every step. In reality, you should disable a few services and then run the system for a week or so to make sure it's okay.
The first time I ran through this, I read BV's site completely. Couple that with trying to decipher some of the more unusual services and then actually disabling and testing and it can be a weekend job.
>>You also seem to forget that on slower systems the performance boost will be far more noticeable than on a gaming rig. Along the same lines, the time it takes to completely load WinXP into a useable state will decrease. That "10mb" can make a huge difference on a system with low memory - much like the ones they initially shipped WinXP on.
Many of the people running those systems will never even know about disabling services. Chances are, if you really care about performance, you'll care enough to throw in a few sticks of RAM. On low-end systems, RAM is really cheap. I just added a 1GB of pc133 to my mom's computer. I got 512 from a geeky friend who was upgrading for free. The other 512 came from a swap meet and cost about $20.
And no ammount of service tweaking will replace the boost you see from going from 128MB to 1GB of RAM.
Tweaking is fun for geeks. That's what we do. But within the realm of mere mortals, it's a lost art. We'll spend hours to squeeze out a few extra FPS or reduce boot times by a few seconds. We'll install 10k RPM drives in RAID0 to get a few extra MB of transfer. And that's all well and good if your system is already at the top of the heap.
As far as the low end goes, the old adage remains true: you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I remembered seeing this a few months back on /., but you can load WinXP without any services. Doesn't quite answer the question but it still makes for interesting reading.
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/07/running-w indows-with-no-services.html
Black Viper has probably caused more problems for Windows novices than anyone else in the history of the internet. Countless people blindly follow his guides, only to ignore that part that says "keep a list of which services you've turned off", and innevitbaly have problems later on. To add inuslt to injury, there has been no conclusive proof that disabling services improves performance one iota.
The WIndows NT line is not like the Win9x line. It doesn't have the silly resource limits of Win9x and can swap out unused memory ot disk. When you save "20MB of memory" by disabling a bunch of services, you are actually saving 20MB of data in your swap file, since Windows will swap out the memory your services are using to disk to make room for your apps.
Unless you happen to use certain models of Linksys wireless networking hardware. Some of their wireless devices to refuse to work even in a static configuration unless the DHCP service is enabled.