What services can be disabled?

Is there anyway to quickly and easily figure out which Services can be disabled? 90% of the services I have on my PC belong to Vista itself and I need to disable some of them to free up physical memory. Vista usually hovers around 55% of memory usage providing the only thing open is Firefox and my IM programs along with whatever else I have running like my various Anti Malware programs that I use for protection. But as soon as I load a demanding app like America's Army the mem usage shoots up sometimes to the mid 90 percents and thats dangerous. Sometimes it causes a low memory situation and I have to reboot. I want to disable some of VIsta's services but theres so many it would be hard to check them one at a time. I was hoping there was a easy way to do things, I am familar with setting startup methods for services and manually restarting them.

 

Vista seems to always try to think for you by allocating around 50% of RAM to programs you may or may not want to use during your current session

To begin your quest to tame Vista and it's plethora of services, no better place to start than at the Black Viper site.

There are some default registry patches linked from the top paragraph, they may be a quick fix - careful, disabling services your PC needs stops you playing games at all

 

I'll second that about Black Viper. Excellent service guides on his site - well worth a visit.

A place called Tweakguides also has some good information on tweaking various versions of Windows operating systems.

Like satrow said, Vista is sorta geared toward using the available RAM your system has . . . so just because you have low "free" RAM doesn't have to mean you have too many services running in the back-ground. Vista treats RAM as a cache more effectively then XP. It's a function called SuperFetch . . it learns what applications you run the most, and loads them into memory. Some people like it, some people don't - gamers like yourself say it causes some problems with graphic intensive games and such.

Having said that - there are lots of things you can tweak on a computer - especially the operating system.

 

I also agree that Black Viper is excellent.

Here is a good site that guides you through disabling services and also explains what each one does.

http://www.vistarewired.com/2007/02/18/services

 

As by far the most effective way to improve the performance of any computer is to add more memory, and as memory is so cheap nowadays, then if it's possible for you that is the way I would go. Disabling services often has no immediate or obvious consequence, but six months down the road, when you are trying to find out why something you are trying to do just won't work when everyone else says it works on theirs, you can be tearing your hair out. Believe me, been there - tried it - wont be trying it again

 

Black Viper is a legend, and those of us that have been around here for a while know he is the man. Short of that try "The Ultimate Troubleshooter" nice program for explaining all processes startups, etc. and allows you to set them to automatic, disable, manual start, etc.