What services are Absolutely required for browsing & network?

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by DarkPhoenix, Jul 21, 2012.

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  1. DarkPhoenix

    DarkPhoenix Registered Member

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    I keep searching for this answer and no one seems to know the answer.

    I need a list of the windows services that are absolutely required to run to make web browsing and connecting to a network work.

    I'm sure there must be 4 or 5 services that handle all of that and that only.. no bluetooth etc.

    I'm trying to create a profile for slimming down system resources and I need those to run. Out of all the tons of services, I only allow about 18 to run, and I need to add those few in to complete the profile.

    This has saved me tons of resources running or trying to start in the background or when windows starts to help make my system faster and use some software I could not use otherwise - but I need to add those features back in so I can have my fast more powerful system AND surf the net and connect to my Lan.

    This is for Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. Thank you.
     
  2. OldMX

    OldMX Registered Member

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    Do you really think it wil make a difference to disable all services? Why dont you increase your computer memory or use a lighter OS like XP?
     
  3. whitedragon551

    whitedragon551 Registered Member

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    In tests Windows 7 is faster than XP.

    OP increase your RAM or check out BlackViper.
     
  4. DarkPhoenix

    DarkPhoenix Registered Member

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    I don't think it will make a difference. I KNOW it makes a difference.

    I have apps I cant hardly run unless I disable a bunch of Microsoft's bloated junk. And no, not all Microsoft stuff is necessary for the system to run in an optimal state. This is what Microsoft told people when Vista and Win 7 came out so people would not disable services like was the norm with XP. Microsoft lies through their teeth every chance they get, have for 20 years that I've been using their systems.

    I have 4 gigabytes of Ram and a gig for video. I'm a hard core gamer. I have seen huge improvements by disabling tons of services. They try to scare people from disabling services by telling them they will damage the system. If you study the services to know what they do, you can know if they are safe to disable or not. The problem I'm having is the docs that tell what services are made for networking are not complete, telling what other services are also needed to run in conjunction with them, thus it's harder for me to find all the ones I need. I could do it by a lot more trial and error, but after getting my system down to 18 services, I figured I'd rather see if anyone else has already done the work.
     
  5. Kerodo

    Kerodo Registered Member

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    You'll just have to do a little trial and error and see what's needed and what's not by experimenting a bit. I personally never bother touching any services, as I found ages ago that it made little or no difference in my system's performance at all. I gained a bit of ram, but that was about it. If you need better performance, I'd recommend getting stronger hardware...
     
  6. DarkPhoenix

    DarkPhoenix Registered Member

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    I can't add any more ram than 4 gigs in this system. BlackViper's site is a good starting point, but I surpassed his info long ago. BlackViper also recommends not using MSConfig to make your changes. There are things you can disable in MSConfig you cant disable from services.msc. I was able to disable lots of stuff permanently that BlackViper doesn't touch. I got to a point where his info no longer helped me.
     
  7. whitedragon551

    whitedragon551 Registered Member

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    What apps do you run that you cant run with 4Gbs of RAM and a 1Gb GPU? Highly doubt there are services so crippling that you cant run something because of a 24kb service running in the background.

    Also if your so advanced and you know it works, youve done it before, then why are you asking if you already know it all?
     
  8. Sully

    Sully Registered Member

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    He is asking for help because of the changes in the services to vista/7. There are some big differences from w2k/xp.

    Would it matter why though?

    Sul.
     
  9. Sully

    Sully Registered Member

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    This is a blanket statement that is only true within certain context.

    The same is true of tweaking services. It can be faster, in certain contexts.

    Certainly people who use lots of those functions of running services need them, in the same way some people don't need some that are always running.

    Many people should not mess with services because they don't understand what they are doing and can very easily muck things up.

    For those intrepid souls who decide to tweak them, they might see improvement. Can't know except on a per machine basis, highly based upon what you do and use.

    Sul.
     
  10. swami

    swami Registered Member

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    You gain what, a couple of hundreds of megs at the most? New hardware or more RAM or fix the situation you have now.
     
  11. RJK3

    RJK3 Registered Member

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    For our edification, would you mind giving some examples?

    I'm surprised you feel that BlackViper doesn't give the minimum profiles for what you ask for.
     
  12. Mrkvonic

    Mrkvonic Linux Systems Expert

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    It's all a placebo effect.
    Mrk
     
  13. whitedragon551

    whitedragon551 Registered Member

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    Agreed. Services take up almost nothing. And if a program isnt using them they sit quietly in the background. Take iTunes for example. It has the iPodService.exe, AppleMobileDevice, and mDNSResponder.exe that it runs. They take up about 6Mbs of private space. However without actually using iTunes they take up no I/O and no CPU when they arent in use.
     
  14. Sully

    Sully Registered Member

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    I find it odd that I have, many times, found performance increases by tweaking services.

    So, what sort of placebo is it that has tangible effects?

    Mind you, I am not talking about mind-blowing increases across the board. But small and specific tangible increases.

    Doesn't matter though as long as your computer runs the way you desire it to.

    Sul.
     
  15. luciddream

    luciddream Registered Member

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    That would have had to have been a very subjective test. XP ran well for me with 512 megs of ram, and like greased lightning with 1 GB. I'd like to see how 7 would fare with those specs... would it even boot up? My XP Pro machine with 1 gig of RAM would run circles around every Win7 box I've yet seen with 4+ gigs.

    For the OP: The only services on XP that are essential for proper functionality & networking are:

    Event Log - Automatic
    Network Connections - Manual
    Plug and Play - Automatic
    Remote Procedure Call (RPC) - Automatic
    Windows Audio - Automatic
    Windows Management Instrumentation - Automatic

    6 things... that's it. 5 if you don't care about sound. That is no mere placebo I'm feeling. The performance increase by trimming the dead wood goes beyond mere RAM, CPU usage, etc... you can't quantify it that easily. But you can certainly "feel" it. It's quite tangible. And it's easier on your hardware as well. Your machine will run quieter, and cooler.

    I doubt the same claim can be made regarding Win7. I doubt you are allowed the same granular control over services without seriously crippling your box.

    I'm in no hurry whatsoever to "upgrade". In fact the day that I'm forced to I'll consider it quite to the contrary.
     
    Last edited: Jul 23, 2012
  16. Sully

    Sully Registered Member

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    True to a degree. Win7 has many services that are new (obviously) and many of the older services (that mainly ran under svchost) seem to have been split. Actually, svchost has quadrupled in size I would estimate. No longer can you know how many instances of svchost should run because there are too many to keep track of.

    Ever seen a rogue svchost process? I have, many times.

    win7 isn't so bad once you spend the time studying it. I don't like it as well as XP, but it is about the same in the end. Oh, except it consumes a lot more resources no matter how far you trim it.

    Sul.
     
  17. Stigg

    Stigg Registered Member

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    I would just leave the services as they are.
    Nothing to be gained there. Only to be lost.

    And that BlackViper site that has been around for years has no rocket science involved.
     
  18. Pliskin

    Pliskin Registered Member

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    My idle XP uses about 100 MB of RAM (including startup programs: PowerPro, HotkeyP, Taskbar Shuffle and Rename-Manager).

    I didn't just tweaked the services, I've removed them.

    My hard disk was dying 3 years ago (demon noise coming out of it), so I've removed a lot of XP components including services, plus I don't have installed .NET Framework, Java, Anti-virus, ... anymore and the same old cheap hard disk is still alive and no demon noise coming from it.
     
  19. Sully

    Sully Registered Member

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    I know that noise of which you speak.

    Some applications cause that too though, not just certain services. One that comes to mind is Threatfire. It is the primary reason why I stopped playing with it actually.

    Sul.
     
  20. Sully

    Sully Registered Member

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    You should leave services as they are. You probably won't see any gains. These aren't the droids you are looking for.

    None of this is rocket science. BlackViper site was the first that I remember to put up a comprehensive list of all services. When descriptions were hard to come by, you could go there and learn a lot.

    Sul.
     
  21. RJK3

    RJK3 Registered Member

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    Good question. Although I'm not certain that tweaking Microsoft services in Win7 has the same effect on performance that it did in XP, since most things only really seem to run when needed, I've never been fond of dismissive word 'placebo'.

    Also there's at least one study that shows that people are more than capable of sensing a slow computer:

     
  22. Sully

    Sully Registered Member

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    Well, the effects on performance can be different.

    For example, if you have hdd thrashing (hear head seeks a lot) they can be coming from the indexing type services. Opening sys32 in explorer then immediately scrolling down can show little stutters as indexing features go to work. Disabling such services is very tangible because you can see smooth scrolling, simply by turning a service off.

    In my case I had this experience, but also had to turn other services off and had to turn off some more geeky stuff as well both through command prompt commands and through registry tweaking. I wrote about it a few times here, how my hdds were slower in read and writes, how my network throughput was slower. That is, very much slower than XP. The example of scrolling through sys32 in an explorer window was something that I needed to fix, as I do that a LOT. It took quite a bit of fine tuning to get things as they normally were in XP, but I did get it to happen.

    It is no placebo, that is for sure. But, some of the services are not so clear cut on whether you can feel the difference. As I said before, you have to have a reason to shut it down and it has to be pretty specific. Just turning things off willy-nilly doesn't accomplish much, niether does turning a bunch off at one time. You have to know what a given service is responsible for, and whether it might effect you (good or bad) and then turn it off (or multiple off) until you "see" if it acheives what you want. You also have to understand the dependecies of services to know if disabling one you don't use effects others you do use.

    That is why BlackVipers site is so/was so popular. He condensed all the services and dependencies so you could disable ones that you did not need or ones that might give you a benefit, while easily knowing how it might effect others. Looking at the properties of every service in the services snap-in is painstakingly slow..

    But overall in win7, if you study it enough, there are lots of performance enhancements to be had. But first you have to be open to the existence of such benefits and second you have to learn about the services and finally you have to experiment to see if it works for what you wanted to achieve.

    Sul.
     
  23. Hungry Man

    Hungry Man Registered Member

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    Just use blackviper.

    And anyone who's saying it will make no difference is lying to themselves.

    Let me ask you what uses more CPU, IO, RAM....

    A running process?

    A not running process?

    I think the answer is obvious.

    Not to mention the multitude of attacks in the past that could have been stopped by disabling services.
     
  24. DOSawaits

    DOSawaits Registered Member

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    I have neven seen any responsiveness gains from following Blackviper's service advices, quite the contrary actually. The only services which could be turned off to improve responsiveness are the Indexing service & the Disk Defragmenter service, but then again, the gains from turning off those will not last that long.
     
  25. Hungry Man

    Hungry Man Registered Member

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    Any running service will take up RAM. Any RAM not in use can be used for cache and buffer, which can significantly reduce disk IO.

    Therefor any service is taking up space that cache could.

    Some services are actively running and can cause slowdowns all on their own.

    But for the most part they're just asleep, taking up RAM.

    Your OS won't clear out or kill processes just to cache information. So the services won't be killed off to improve performance.

    On a system with 1GB-2GB of RAM having an extra 100-200MB of cache can be really helpful.

    And, of course, disabling services disables valuable attack surface. Stuxnet wouldn't work on my system even without patches as I've never had print spooler enabled.
     
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