Need Full Windows Services List

[DarkPhoenix]

I want a listing of all winows services that run at startup or that may run sometime during the day, and what they do exactly. I want to be able to decide if I want those services running and taking up resources or not.

I want the bare minimun services running to let the OS do One Job Only - The One Job it was designed to do.. Run my software when I tell it to. Nothing more.

Windows 7 is Only a disk operating system. It's One main function is to be an interface between me and my software, and let me run that software. It really does not need to be doing anything more complicated than that.

Anything else Windows wants to do I can decide on a per services basic to let it run that service or not. This is the way it should be.

Is there a listing like that?

 

[Dwarf]

See http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2495-services-start-disable.html

Specifically, see Windows 7 Service Configurations by Black Viper

 

[DarkPhoenix]

Good places to start.. thanks Dwarf.

 

[CarlTR6]

Be sure to click on each service in Black Viper's list and read his comments and recommendations, if any. I did this last night. What I found was that Windows 7 does an amazing job of handling services. Most of the automatic service are definitely essential and many of the services are set to manual that were automatic in previous Windows version. Windows 7 starts many manual services and stops them when they are no longer needed. I came to the conclusion that Windows 7 services need very little tweaking.

 

[Greg S]

Be sure to click on each service in Black Viper's list and read his comments and recommendations, if any. I did this last night. What I found was that Windows 7 does an amazing job of handling services. Most of the automatic service are definitely essential and many of the services are set to manual that were automatic in previous Windows version. Windows 7 starts many manual services and stops them when they are no longer needed. I came to the conclusion that Windows 7 services need very little tweaking.

I agree and wouldn't waste my time with it. Years back in XP I did. I kept a diary of what I disabled using BV's guide. Out of the 14 or so services that I disabled, I eventually re-enabled all but 4.

 

[DarkPhoenix]

Carl and Greg, I do not understand why you guys would say this.. what services do you feel is still needed to run? It seems to me you are making a conscious choice to let windows do much more than simply run programs.

You find gray areas. If lets say you decide to let windows access the internet, then you wind up letting all kinds of services run that do various things for internet applications. You get to the point where you feel you need them all I suppose.

I believe it depends on what types of software you wish to run what services need to run. I would prefer to disable everything and if windows tells me a program will not run because it needs a service, that's the time to decide how I want that service to run. I would prefer to only run those services that let my programs run and disable everything else.

I use an app called Game Booster by IOBit Software. It shuts down about 15 services that it tells me about them by name, then a number of other services it calls "background" services. It does this to free up resources to be sure you have the most for you games. I can leave this run and keep these services from starting all say. I can run anything on the internet, all my games, and every other program in my computer, including all windows apps, and never get yelled at by windows that it cannot run something because it is missing one of those services.

Therefore I deem these services unnecessary regardless of what Microsoft thinks. Oh sure, there may be a use for them, but if I don't need to use them, I don't even want them in my system.

I cannot paste a list of the services Game Booster shuts down, but if you go grab this app, you will see them.

Out of all the tons of services Win 7 has, this leads me to believe there are a lot more totally unnecessary services running on the system. You have to consider the source.. Microsoft? They tell you to run things for their own benefit. Perhaps Security? I am able to choose how I keep my software secure.
That's like security updates from Microsoft update.. unless I have a problem I need a hotfix for, I refuse to put that trash on my system. I don't let microsoft install anything it says I need.. I decide if I need it or not.

I haven't had the time to go through those two pages yet.. perhaps tomorrow. When I am done, I will let you know what I found about how many services I can disable completely.

 

[Dwarf]

My recommendation would be to carefully read Black Viper's guide and instead of disabling services, set them to manual. That way, they are effectively disabled (i.e. not running), but if required they will start and stop.

 

[CarlTR6]

DarkPheonix, I think Dwarf nailed it -

My recommendation would be to carefully read Black Viper's guide and instead of disabling services, set them to manual. That way, they are effectively disabled (i.e. not running), but if required they will start and stop.

This is exactly the conclusion that I came to. I disabled four services that I do not need: three because I am behind a router with a firewall and one because it relates to something I am not running and probably will never run. Unlike XP and Vista, Windows 7 does a great job of turning off services that are not needed. Services set to manual do not run in the background nor use resources.

Microsoft has to engineer an OS for a huge variety of situations. It isn't that they are trying to control your computer (except for their tendency to make it idiot proof - but that's another subject), they are simply trying to make your computer work in a large variety of scenarios. Yes, there are services that you do not need. Most of these are set to manual and do not run. They do not need to be disabled. Manual setting does the trick. Do take the time to read Black Viper's comments. Windows 7 is not Vista and the services are MUCH improved over Vista.

If you do not have a home network, there are three or four others you could disable. However, all but two of these are already set to manual and do not run anyway.

 

[DarkPhoenix]

I do understand the above Carl. But I also notice some annoying things. I have games that try to contact the internet as soon as start them up. Comodo tells me this. I do not play online games, only single player.. The game should not contact the internet unless I tell it to for a multiplayer game.

I know that's not a service I can disable unless I want nothing to acess the net.. I use a firewall blocker to stop that but I am using that as an analogy.

If that function were a service, it may be set to manual. I choose never to let that service run. But on manual setting another application unknown to me can tell windows to start it up. This is not acceptable.

I am going to try Black Vipers pages today but I have browsed the info and I find it lacking. For each service I need to know four things. What, How, Why and When, a little more in depth than he tells it.

What does the service do? How does it work exactly? Why does the service trigger? and When does it get triggered? This is how I need to understand the services to really know whats going on in any situation to know if I want to disable it or not.

It's the not knowing what my disk operating system may do at any given time that really bugs me.

 

[Thorsen]

Hmm. There is a good program for this from sysinternals TCPView. It shows you exactly what processes are accessing the internet on your computer and allows you to disconnect them. I have not played with this yet on Win7. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

TCPView for Windows

 

[BunBun]

I am in complete agreence with you Dark (was that even a work???).

Why does the OS need to do all these unnecessary things while I am trying to do the things I want or need to?

Further what bugs me is there is still more going on behind services and behind the task scheduler that we have no control over.

I think I need to switch to linux... I wonder if they have fixed the CPU scheduler yet...

 

[davehc]

Hi Thorsen. FWIW You can run it live for windows 7, from here. (For this thread, on my computer, it only showed 2 services current)
http://live.sysinternals.com/Tcpview.exe

 

[pezzonovante]

I never care about which services are running- Microsoft knows a billion times more than I do about their operating system. Disabling services can only cause trouble.

 

[Thorsen]

Hi Thorsen. FWIW You can run it live for windows 7, from here. (For this thread, on my computer, it only showed 2 services current)
http://live.sysinternals.com/Tcpview.exe

Thanks for posting that and trying it out. I saw that on the site, but I hadn't tried it. good to know. all of those programs are top notch esp. ProcessExplorer and AutoRuns

 

[computersplus]

DarkPhoenix you may want to have a look at scheduled tasks in Windows 7 more so than services I think you will be shocked when you see whats scheduled to happen and the event triggers also it sounds like to me that using Vlite on your installation disc would be right up your alley you could pretty much strip out anything you don't want prior to installing Windows

 

[Greg S]

Carl and Greg, I do not understand why you guys would say this.. what services do you feel is still needed to run? .

None of them. In Win 7, I've made the choice to leave it alone. In Xp, after disabling alot of safe services, I was presented at the time with what appeared to be bugs which turned out to not be bugs. It was because certain services were disabled. Just for the record, I wasn't warned by anything that the services were disabled either. The false bugs didn't appear right away after disabling the services which through me offtrack as to what the problem really was.

 

[Frostmourne]

7 turns on services when it needs to. DON'T touch them. It will be a nightmare troubleshooting the side effects. Services also depend on other services. Honestly, why are people still concerned with resource usages? Hardware is cheap and you should never bother touching bits of OS to save 3MB. Put in 8GB of RAM, defrag your HDD, or run wiper.exe on an SSD, ensure your PC has enough grunt and get on with your life. 7 knows what its doing. That's what you pay Microsoft for.

 

[DarkPhoenix]

7 turns on services when it needs to. DON'T touch them. It will be a nightmare troubleshooting the side effects. Services also depend on other services. Honestly, why are people still concerned with resource usages? Hardware is cheap and you should never bother touching bits of OS to save 3MB. Put in 8GB of RAM, defrag your HDD, or run wiper.exe on an SSD, ensure your PC has enough grunt and get on with your life. 7 knows what its doing. That's what you pay Microsoft for.

With respect.. that is not what I pay Microsoft for. I pay for this system so I can learn about it, then cut 3/4's of it out and rebuild it in my own image.

Do I trust Microsoft to know what's best for the operating system I wish to use? No Way. Not since Bill stole the designs for the winows graphical user interface from Xerox and windows wants to phone home even if you tell it not to.. I use Windows operating systems to take advantage of the little good that's in it. If I were not a hard core gamer, I would chuck this system and use a version of linux.

Unfortunatly, the programs I want to run are made for this platform. When React OS grows up (a free version of windows xp) or Linux or another OS gets the ability to run all Microsoft compatible programs, I will leave MS in the dust.

I'm old enough to remember Microsoft as a small company. I remember all the dirty shady deals they tried to pull to try to get ahead. Most people in the know were shocked they ever made it to the top without some mafia type gangster getting in the way and taking them down. Trust them?? Not as far as you would trust Fidel Castro or Sadam Hussain.

 

[MilesAhead]

A good free utility to keep a record of the current state of your services is
FREE PC Profile, Audit, and Diagnostic Report Utility

You can set it to only create a report of the services. It generates an html page with a frame but with an editor it doesn't take long to convert this to a simple html page you can print out. Once you get your settings stable, if you are not sure if something got changed, you can pull the print out from a drawer, or if you are setting up another PC and want to make sure the settings are the same for services.

The printout has nice color codings. A nice way to avoid manual logging.

 

[Frostmourne]

7 turns on services when it needs to. DON'T touch them. It will be a nightmare troubleshooting the side effects. Services also depend on other services. Honestly, why are people still concerned with resource usages? Hardware is cheap and you should never bother touching bits of OS to save 3MB. Put in 8GB of RAM, defrag your HDD, or run wiper.exe on an SSD, ensure your PC has enough grunt and get on with your life. 7 knows what its doing. That's what you pay Microsoft for.

With respect.. that is not what I pay Microsoft for. I pay for this system so I can learn about it, then cut 3/4's of it out and rebuild it in my own image.

Do I trust Microsoft to know what's best for the operating system I wish to use? No Way. Not since Bill stole the designs for the winows graphical user interface from Xerox and windows wants to phone home even if you tell it not to.. I use Windows operating systems to take advantage of the little good that's in it. If I were not a hard core gamer, I would chuck this system and use a version of linux.

Unfortunatly, the programs I want to run are made for this platform. When React OS grows up (a free version of windows xp) or Linux or another OS gets the ability to run all Microsoft compatible programs, I will leave MS in the dust.

Cut it and it will break - 7 knows exactly what it is doing.