Disabling Windows 7 Services

[Buddahfan]

To skip the reason for my question below you can go directly to the bottom of the post "My question is:"

Over the last week I decided to take some steps to improve the amount of available Physical Memory and Performance on my main use computer.

I have already posted that I was able to pick up well over 200MB of constantly available Physical memory by defrgmenting the Registry. (disclaimer: This is not a recommendation to defragment the Registry) This was discussed on another thread.

So today I started to look into disabling some Windows and Applications program services that either "Auto Start" or "Auto-Start Delayed"

The first two that I took an ax to were Windows Network File Sharing and Windows Search. As good as these services are I have no use for either so there is no reason to have them Auto-Start.

In addition I disabled some Applications programs there were either Auto-Starting or Auto-Starting delayed.

Disabling these services that I do not need has added another 300MB or so of available Physical memory.

I have 4GB RAM on a Windows 7 HP x64 system. Before I defragmented the Registry and disabled these services my system would normally show between 2.2 and 2.4GB of available Physical memory. Now it is regularly showing over 2.9GB of available Physical Memory and going as high as 3.05GB if I am at the Desktop with only my Start-Up applications running. Note: I have trimmed the number of start-up applications to what I consider an absolute minimum for my needs. I did this a while back so there can be no further savings of available Physical memory in this area.

I have also noticed an improvement in performance as a result of the Registry deframentation and the disabling of some Services.

When you go to into the "Services" function it lists all the Services that are on your computer and indicates whether they Auto-Start, Auto-Start Delayed, Manual or are Disabled.

There is also a small description of each service. In some cases this is enough for me but in many cases I am not familiar with what the services does.

I know I can individually Google each one and go from there to find out more information but that would not be my preference.

My question is:

Is there a web-page or web-pages that lists all the Windows 7 related services that come on a computer with Genuine Windows 7 installed and gives a full description of what the services does or provides links to another URL that does?

Thanks

 

[Bill2]

Black Viper's Website

 

[Buddahfan]

Black Viper's Website

Thanks

 

[Buddahfan]

Here is the current direct link

Category:Windows 7 Services

Windows 7 Services
Pages in category "Windows 7 Services"

The following 165 pages are in this category, out of 165 total.

P.S. Looks like there is a lot of great stuff on www.blackviper.com. Makes me wish I was a speed reader

Here is the link to
Black Viper's Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Service Configurations

 

[gregrocker]

Many of us lived by Black Viper's service edits in XP and especially early Vista before Win7 developers put many Auto services on Manual with fast triggers. In this way, Win7 effectively became the Black Viper and made service edits unnecessary.

Unless your RAM is pegging at 100% which would require other troubleshooting, the goal of having 75% of it available (even at idle) is unnecessary.

You want your RAM to be used, otherwise it is wasted. If 4gb would max out with no issues to resolve then it would be time to upgrade RAM.

As beta testers learned over 1+ year's time, Win7 requires no tweaking whatsoever, as this will always come back to bite you. CCleaner and Auslogics defraggers are all I use any longer, and many experts don't even think they are needed.

 

[Buddahfan]

Many of us lived by Black Viper's service edits in XP and especially early Vista before Win7 developers put many Auto services on Manual with fast triggers. In this way, Win7 effectively became the Black Viper and made service edits unnecessary.

Unless your RAM is pegging at 100% which would require other troubleshooting, the goal of having 75% of it available (even at idle) is unnecessary.

You want your RAM to be used, otherwise it is wasted. If 4gb would max out with no issues to resolve then it would be time to upgrade RAM.

As beta testers learned over 1+ year's time, Win7 requires no tweaking whatsoever, as this will always come back to bite you. CCleaner and Auslogics defraggers are all I use any longer, and many experts don't even think they are needed.

With all due respect I totally disagree with your comment above.

IMO you want your RAM to be available for use in case you need to use it without experiencing a degradation in performance.

You do not want spikes in RAM or processor usage to slow down your system. So in the case of Windows 7 you want as much available unused physical memory as you can get on a 4GB and less system in order to minimize the negative affects of spikes in memory usage. Such spikes can occur when you have for example an anti-virus program that is on an auto start schedule.

I schedule two daily anti-virus scans. A complete one my internal HDD at night and a quick scan at mid-day or so just in case my computer caught a morning cold. When the scan starts it will impact the available memory because I set my anti-virus scans to use Transient Cache with significantly speeds up the scan and it all works together,

 

[logicearth]

IMO you want your RAM to be available for use in case you need to use it without experiencing a degradation in performance.

I'm sorry but that is utter BS. I've been running on 2 GBs with a unmodifed install of Windows 7 since Windows Vista was released. The memory manager in Windows Vista/7 is not like it was in Windows XP. Your preconceptions do not apply.

Using memory does not slow down a system. Using the hard drive instead of RAM is what slows things down.

 

[gregrocker]

I have an old HP 510 business notebook Celeron 1.4ghz with a gig of RAM which I planned to sacrifice with use on the beach (it's lasted almost ten years).

It runs anything without any hangs ever, although I don't do video editing.

During beta I experimented with removing Services using Vlite to find if Win7 could run on 528mb RAM, finding that it will default (mainly turn off aero) to run on lesser hardware on its own without the need for any service edits or even a lesser version. But 1gb RAM is the bottom limit. I could not run Avast or gadgets with 528mb without hanging.

Your mileage may vary.