Service tweaks debunked

[Tarun]

Many people love to "tweak" thing XP machines. The most common way they do so is by disabling services. Often people refer to the "Black Viper Services" website(s). Unfortunately, those "tweaks" do more harm than they do good.

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[BeenThereB4]

The title should be "Service Tweaks Debunked for Gamers" as that was what he tested.

Edited October 9, 2006 by BeenThereB4

[LLXX]

He's doing it wrong. Properly done, here's the kind of results you can get (my own system):

Task manager: Processes: http://img165.imageshack.us/img165/9742/taskmgrmr2.png

Task manager: Performance: http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/8457/taskmgr2la6.png

Services: http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/2052/servicesnx1.png

(last pic was taken after doing some editing/browsing etc. so some services might've started up, the first two were taken just after boot.)

Edited October 9, 2006 by LLXX

[Hamins]

Hi,

Disabling certain services is also used for OS Hardening. This link may help ...

http://theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm

[TheTOM_SK]

Great setup LLXX, I envy you your customized porsche. I have 13 processes & 5 services.

I do not care, what Fresh Daemon says, I got great performance gain. Thanks Black Viper.

BTW, it is not just about performance gain, but about better security too, he misses the point.

Edited October 9, 2006 by TheTOM_SK

[Tarun]

The entire reason he used game testing software and games is because they would be very intensive on the system.

"I went back to System 1, because it's much easier to waste 160MB of RAM than 640MB. On bootup, I loaded Task Manager, 2 instances of Internet Explorer (Google home page), Windows Movie Maker (no file loaded), Outlook Express, and 4 instances of Paint, each with a 1152x864 24-bit BMP file loaded.

Total load is about 185MB, so we know for sure that we're hitting the pagefile. This is borne out in benchmarks. The same system without any extra load gets around 25FPS in a Quake II timedemo, at exactly the same settings with this load, it gets around 20."

Also note that he has said, "Bare-bones level: Did not complete (system too crippled at this point), but the individual results are similar.".

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If you knew what you (not you as in YOU, but you as in anyone) were doing, you'd know not to disable services at all. Also, disabling idle services offers zero performance gain. Idle services take no RAM or CPU power at all. I'd love to quote the MSDN article, but I can't find it at the moment. The basic summary is that disabling a service that wasn't doing anything frees absolutely no resources.

You should never disable the error reporting service. Error reporting allows the end-user to obtain information after "serious error" crash dumps (STOP errors/BSoDs). It also provides the user with feedback if an issue has already been resolved. Example: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=894391

I had submitted an error report about this crash one day, and got no response back. The problem kept happening, and on multiple computers, so a few days later, I submitted it again, but this time, error reporting took me to a page stating that the cause was unknown but it research was in progress. Four days later, I submitted it again, and it took me to a page with the patch and the error never happened again.

There is going to be a program written just to undo all the bull that users are doing to their systems these days, including disabling what they think are "unused" services. If there weren't used, why would they exist? If they were unused, then they would be idle, and not taking up any resources at all. When the time comes to use the service, it will work fine, and all will be well. 6 months later, a program attempts to use a service that you've disabled because you think you are better than your OS, and you get a generic error: "The RPC server is unavailable". Now you think that the program you're using is a piece of crap, or Windows is a piece of crap, and you format/reinstall, and it works for a while... until you do your "tweaking" routine again.

[severach]

For $20 I can run twice as many unnecessary services as I am now with no performance hit.

[Zxian]

For $20 I can run twice as many unnecessary services as I am now with no performance hit.

Think about it for a second... what does Windows do with unused portions of memory? It pages them to disk... oh wait... Most people who disable services are also the same ones who either limit the size of their pagefile or don't have one at all.

If you keep your pagefile at a reasonable size or leave it system managed, then the unused services will lie in the pagefile - sitting there - not doing anything at the moment. There is no performance hit from this.

[Takeshi]

BV's list is in my opionion overrated and has been blindly worshipped and adopted by too many users. It's mostly common sense really.

I agree with the comment about security. And there're some there's no harm disabling them. Afterall, Windows lets you configure them.