Optimizing XP by Disabling 'Running Services'

Sept 20, 2008

Hi MG Tech-folks,

I have been going over the "Black Viper's" list of running services with suggestions for tweaking by disabling needless ones.....
....and I find I have many services on my screen that are not on his list. Alot of 'em.

I don't know how to generate a report to attach which shows all that I see up there, but it would be nice if someone could look over my list and tell me what's there that I don't need.

Or is there a list somewhere that explains every single entry I see on the list ?

Any help would be appreciated.

-scottportraits

 

Sep 20 2008

Okay, thanks for the info. I have alot of services running, and there's so many that are not on the BlackViper list. I took your advice and made a print-out of the BV list, and then generated my own list.

I changed many that were set to "Manual/Stopped" to 'Disabled'. I figured if there were no dependencies on the service (last tab, bottom half box) and it was already 'stopped' but in 'manual-mode', then it would be safe to disable it.

I kept a fastidious list of what I did, always checking what the service said it supposedly did, and for any dependencies that would be shut-off as a consequence. Many services are pesty, such as MS's 'Error Reporting Service' and those darn pop-ups they generate. Also, since I do PC 'searches' rarely, I shut off the Indexing Service.

Rebooted and will surf around and launch different installed apps tonight and see how things run. Doesn't seem as if any appreciable difference in speed so far, and the point was to gain speed by optimizing.

Any other hints RE: optimizing XP Home 32-bit SP3 ???

I have pared down to 5 StartUp items: my firewall (Sygate), anti-virus (AVG), BO Cleaner, CTFMon (for MS Word), and Windows Defender. Use CCLeaner and JKDefragger every other day. Have two 512 MB RAM sticks, and an Intel Celeron 'D' chip (cheap-o).

Thanks for the hints re: BlackViper, and save a list of what you did.....

-scottportraits

 

Sept 22 2008

Thanks !! That link told me how to finally turn off that pesty ctfmon startup item, which kept coming back every time you launch MS Word. I had learned to live with it for so many years !!
Yes, I run a defragmenter, JKDefrag almost every day, even twice in one day at times. I will try the IOBits Defragmenter, but I'm not sure how to judge if one is really better than the other. I know XP has a defragmenter in its 'system tools', but heard it was slow and not that great. JKDefragger works fastest that I've seen so far.

Perhaps switching almost every one of the running 'Services' (in Computer Management) that was set to 'Manual - but Stopped' into the "Disabled" status will not get me much more appreciable spped out of my machine.....it still seems like less baggage to lug, and I can't really be harming anything, can I ??

I have two 512 MB RAM sticks, and yes it would be nice to have the $$$ to buy two brand new state-of-the-Art 1 GB RAM sticks, preferably DDR2 if I'm not mistaken. I'd really like to have lots of $$$ and just buy a new machine with a Pentium 4 rather than a Celeron D processing chip. Ah well....... "If wishes were horses, beggars could ride free".

Thanks for the info, and I will post soon whenever a new topic pops up and I need good advice. Unless there's anything more to add, like if this little dinky app called "FreeRAM XP Pro" is really any good, as some have told me it is and some have said it isn't. It's a RAM optimization program, and gets on the startup menu, running in the background, freeing RAM every 30 minutes, or so.

If there's nothing more we can consider this topic CLOSED and the matter resolved.

-scottportraits