What services are Absolutely required for browsing & network?

Nicely said. Tweak guides of any kind are this way. Tweak tools are worse as they make it easy to implement. I don't believe in just taking someones word for it who puts together a guide. I don't believe most people should even mess with this stuff. However, that does not mean it is all bogus. I have messed with hundreds of tweaks, manually, to see which ones work and which do not. I have researched them, and monitored the system to see if they actually do work. A lot don't do much if anything, but some do make a difference.

I am willing to bet my kidney that you would lose your kidney I agree that most "slow" issues are likely not service related. However, there are times when managing services is the answer, so betting your kidney might not be a good wager... how about an ear lobe instead lol.

Ah. subjective vs objective. I see. I understand the difference but did not realize things were being taken that literal. Fair enough.

I find this topic to be a very interesting one. I agree with a lot of you in that most people should not mess with such things, most systems probably won't benefit from such things and most sites/guides do nothing more than change a bunch of settings that could be very hard to reverse and cause a lot of problems.

What I don't understand is why there is such obstinate resistance to believing that such things can and do benefit users. And why you would need empirical evidence. Many who have an extensive amount of knowledge and experience with windows operating systems have shared how disabling services, as a specific example, has provided a performance boost. What is it that is not believable? I guess I don't understand. It is only some geeks here at Wilders discussing services, which ones need to be running, sharing experiences about how different configurations have helped or hindered things. I could see some resistance if we were publishing a guide for the masses or trying to convince everyone here to turn of "service X".

Oh well. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

Sul.

 

@WhiteDragon

Which is exactly what I said.

The issue here is that services are being used when they don't need to be. Go to services.msc and check out "Started" services. For me there are a few running by default that I don't use.

Multiple of the ones started have been exploited in the past.

Multiple of the ones started serve no purpose for me.

Disabling multiple programs will free up RAM.

On a system with low RAM every 50-100MB can make a big difference, especially ones with slow HDDs.

@Mrkvonic

I agree to an extent, it's usually best to ask why the system is the way it is.

But what if the answer is "I have 1GB of RAM and I'm running Windows 7" - what would your solution be exactly? Because I'd say having more RAM would help.

If you take system A with 100 running services and system B with 50 running services system B will be using less resources. That's a fact. Whether there is a performance impact on the system and whether it's noticeable depends on the OS, hardware, and usage.

edit: I think TC has mentioned having a slow system. If so then saving 50MB of RAM could mean caching another 50MB of system files that would otherwise have to be accessed from the HDD over and over again. If he's disabled a considerable number of services he's actually more likely to have gotten back even 100MB of RAM or more. That can mean a lot to someone on 1GB of RAM. And while most services won't be using IO/CPU unless actively in use the RAM alone can make a difference for a system with an old HDD - RAM being a thousand times faster.

 

Slowness is also subjective, what one considers slow may be fast to another. Some people may not notice a difference between having indexing service enabled or disabled on XP, particularly if they have a lot of background processes running, I found it to be a clearly faster system with this service disabled. XP systems may not be necessarily slow with indexing service enabled, but they are faster without it.

 

Correction. My wife's processor is ancient - Pentium 4. My processor is an AMD Sempron II thats only a few years old.

 

I did also find out today that Virtual Box is a serious bottleneck. That's the main reason I needed to free up resources. VMware has this same slow effect, even the new VMWare workstation 8.0. Those are both Crap in my book now.

I found this out because I came across Parallels Workstation. Testimony on the website says it's almost just like running an OS with a native install and they had benchmarks showing how much faster it was than VMware. Of course I had to try it, this was too hard to believe for claims of a VM.

Instead of the Lite version of Linux I was running, I installed a full standard version in parallels Workstation and to my surprise it was almost like having the OS natively installed. It smoked the heck out of VMware and Virtual Box. This time I only gave it 1.5 gigs of Ram where as my Lite version running in VBox has 2 gigs of ram. I tested it with all my disabled services and without. It still ran faster with my extra 50 services disabled - so fast, after 20 minutes I forgot I was in a VM. I had none of the problems I have like mouse dragging or Flash freezing up like I do with VBox or VMware. I was amazed a VM could run so well - never thought I'd see that on my PC.

Of course the drawback is they charge 50 bucks for the program but if you need it.. I'd say it's worth it. Go download a trail version and compare the 3 VM's yourself.

Of course, I'm still hoping I can get my hands on an old system to dedicate to running my Mud but this is the closest I could come otherwise. I'll be crying in 30 days when this program quits. LOL

 

One of the main reasons I upgraded to a 64BIT OS system was to be able to add substantial RAM, if needed, and not have to worry about increased load wrought by a WIN7 OS and software that is memory intensive.

I would agree that disabling a few services here and there would not give much, if any, of a performance boost to the system and disabling too many services without careful refined testing may lead to unstable performance. When I found that 4GB of RAM was insufficient for my purposes and that I could not add additional RAM to the motherboard that I had used with WINXP, I decided to upgrade my motherboard to one that would allow me to add additional RAM -- 12GB on my system. So, I do not have to contend with slowdowns -- only incompatibilities. I just won't tinker with WIN7 services apart from disabling those few services that create security issues but are otherwise unnecessary to system stability.

By the way, I found VMWARE WORKSTATION 8.0 to utilize a lot of space on my hard drive but, with the additional RAM I have, I don't have a problem with slowdowns.