Essential Services

Hello all. First post.
My Old Dell is about ten years old. I treat it pretty good and thus far it has treated me good. It shows no sign of kicking the bucket.

The PC was running very poorly (slowly) and in a moment of desparation I went into the msconfig and shut down all of my services that were running because I thought it would fire up programs as I needed them. It all worked pretty good, but I had to manualy start a number of services. I am just wondering what are the essential services to run as a skeleton type crew for my PC to run.

Mostly I use it for surfering the net, downloading and running a winamp media player. It is old and does not have much memory so I want to eliminate all the pointless services I do not need. Take away any of the memory hogs.

I went into services.msc to restart many of them. When I restarted my PC it came back unable to connect to the internet open winamp etc. I had to restart most of the services because I am unaware of what they do.

So any advice or maybe a good link for some good web pages to help me along would be greatly appreciated.

I am running windows xp

 

Hi zenarrrow and Welcome.

You did not mention which Service Pack you have installed and whether it is XP Home or XP Pro.

Below is the best reference I know of for Services info. for XP SP3:
Black Viper's Windows XP x86 (32-bit) Service Pack 3 Service Configurations

You can click on a column heading to sort the listing.

Another resource:
The Elder Geek: Services Guide for Windows XP

If in doubt about a specific service, use the Default setting and check the info. at both sources.

 

Hi,

I don't, personally, mess around with enabling/disabling services so I can only give you a link to the go-to site for services information: Black Viper.

He made his name on figuring out which XP services are necessary and which are optional. Since I don't have any personal experience I can only direct you to the homepage for further reading. Glancing at the homepage I see that under popular content is a link to XP SP3 services information. If you are running XP with a different SP# then you will have to navigate the site to get to the proper link for your OS.

I still see references to Black Viper on MG so I hope someone more familiar with the site can give you more specific information.

***
You are asking about tweaking services so I assume you have some knowledge of PCs. I'm hoping that you have done at least a few fresh installs of the OS in the last 10 years. Even if things are running fine, I don't think there is anything that will improve performance better than a fresh install of the OS every year, or thereabouts.

 

I Have used that information to adjust Services with XP Home SP3 and it has worked well for me, primarily Black Viper, but I do consult both.

 

I have the XP home, sorry about that and thanks for the awesome links. I will see what I can come up with. Thank you guys for the reply's.

 

Thank you guys I went through them and put them all into the "tweaked" configuration. Rebooted and it seems to be A OK !!!

 

I often refer to http://www.processlibrary.com/