Services to Disable in Windows 11

Catnip said:

I disagree. Maybe you are technically savvy enough to disable stuff and have a good result. Good for you. My point is the average Joe User does not know how to do these things successfully and can seriously mess up his installation. Then he winds up back here with a problem that is very difficult to troubleshoot and is all of his own making.

How many threads have we seen that start with "I disabled (X) and now my PC won't start..." or something or other doesn't work anymore?

Just because you can tinker with something doesn't mean you should.

I don't, and I rarely, if ever, have an issue with my PC that is not driver or update related. My machine runs like a top, for the most part, and I have all of that "horrible, evil" service bloatware still installed. At least if I do have a problem, I don't have to re-enable a whole bunch of services to rule out a problem with them when I am troubleshooting. I dunno. It seems like a no brainer to me.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

(And right to repair is simply corporate greed. Nothing more. Big companies don't give a damn about your stuff as long as they get their money. And then more of it when you are dependent on them for repair. Right to repair does not even count in this case.)

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In some cases there can be valid reasons to disable certain stuff. But these cases are not very common, and, in the vast majority of cases, it takes a bit of advanced knowledge and experience to be able to avoid falling into the usual trap of adding unwanted side effects, I agree.

Most users don't even know things like the fact that, much more often than not, blocking all UWP apps in the list of apps that are allowed to run in the background does not make a PC run faster, as the vast majority of these apps don't actually even have the ability to run in the background anyway in the first place. Next thing you know, you get forum posts from users who are wondering why they've missed an appointment after their Calendar app stopped popping up reminders in their Notification Center.

The same with disabling Search indexer. They choose to disable the whole service altogether, not knowing that there can be other things besides Windows Search that rely on the indexing service. To avoid breaking such dependencies, a better approach to get rid of the pesky slow green progress bar that appears in the address bar of File Explorer is to remove folders from the list of indexed folders and/or to add folders to the list of folder exclusions.

I could easily fill up a whole website with more topics like this, but won't. People want to struggle with Windows and Windows software in ways that can simply be avoided? OK. Let them struggle. The more they keep struggling like this, the better IMO. Eventually, their eyes will open. Or not...

Catnip said:

I disagree. Maybe you are technically savvy enough to disable stuff and have a good result. Good for you. My point is the average Joe User does not know how to do these things successfully and can seriously mess up his installation. Then he winds up back here with a problem that is very difficult to troubleshoot and is all of his own making.

How many threads have we seen that start with "I disabled (X) and now my PC won't start..." or something or other doesn't work anymore?
...

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I guess the problem I have with this line of thinking is this: While, on the one hand, we encourage users to tweak the Windows' 11 GUI to fix stupid features like the Carpal tunnel-inducing context menu, we say you shouldn't tinker with other stuff. As I pointed out in another post, Microsoft itself provides lengthy list of services it says are safe to disable and many scheduled tasks on Windows 11 are nothing more than routines that use precious bandwidth to send user data back to Microsoft. The key is to have a reliable backup, or better yet operating system drive image, that you can restore incase something gets screwed up. If people don't do that then, yes, they are gonna have problems.

i have 55 system services disabled. they are disabled on two home computers both running Win11 home 23H2
some were disabled via the services app some by the power shell.
everything is working just fine and has been since Win11 was installed.

best of luck. Steve ..

When I get bored, and have nothing to do, all email has been answered, etc. I start looking for something to either shut down or Delete.

For the longest time, I've been bugged by that #8%$@ Ctfmon.exe running all the time.
I think we've talked about that in this forum, once or twice.
I do have an old program called the "Ctfmon Remover", but it does not work to stop Ctfmon.exe from running.

Well, today, I finally killed that little bugger! I first found the .exe in the system32 folder, then I took ownership of it, with "Grant Admin Full Control" and finally I changed the .exe extension to .xxx. It can't run like that!!! So it's DEAD!
No fooling around in the registry required.

I've used a similar technique before, to kill files that I did not want to run. It worked a treat on Cortana.

Cheers Mates,
TM

TechnoMage2021 said:

Well, today, I finally killed that little bugger!

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Can you type in store apps? It was also required to type PIN or password at login.

It is so obvious, that you really don't know me at all. Just like you don't seem to know where you live. Posting your true location would be nice, and respectful to your fellow forum members.

First I don't use Store, or even have it installed. And secondly, I have no use for PIN, or password login. Capiche'?
That's nothing new, because it goes all the way back to my first 8088 PC, that I built in 1983. I never use passwords on any PC.
Even that far back, some folks were setting passwords, and then loosing their passwords. Dumb, really Dumb!

I'm perfectly happy to be rid of "Ctfmon.exe" always running in the background. I loose nothing!

TM