Services to Disable Windows 11

Ed Tittel · Nov 28, 2021

I not only agree, I wrote a blog post about it: Modern Windows Service Tweaking Is Counterproductive. Kudos to @Bree for a beautiful and succinct analysis of why disabling Windows services to lighten the "load" just isn't worthwhile anymore. Good stuff.
--Ed--

SightUp · Nov 28, 2021

Yeah, you pretty much said it. It is pretty much XP. How I long for a Windows OS that is like XP that doesn't have 100 services that report somewhere, enable printers VPNs that I do not use, or install a bunch of Xbox crap.

hdmi · Nov 28, 2021

Bree said:
(background apps, for example).

The vast majority of apps that appear in the list that allows you to choose which apps you want to allow/deny to keep running in the background aren't even capable to run in the background. People see this long list of apps and then they go like, "There's so many of these in that list that I'm willing to bet both shoes on that it'll hurt performance substantially", and so they lose both shoes...

hdmi · Nov 28, 2021

unifex said:
may give the appearance of a tidier system.

Keeping up appearances was a great TV show.

glasskuter · Nov 30, 2021

Many services are co-dependent on other services. I agree with the others who have said you gain little to nothing by disabling any of them as the impact is minimal on modern-day cpu's. The only ones I would ever disable would be those that came along with some app I installed, and I wouldn't even disable those if I expected that app to work. The only time I've ever encountered crashes was when I dickered around in a place I should have left alone.

Stigg · Nov 30, 2021

Ed Tittel said:
I not only agree, I wrote a blog post about it: Modern Windows Service Tweaking Is Counterproductive. Kudos to @Bree for a beautiful and succinct analysis of why disabling Windows services to lighten the "load" just isn't worthwhile anymore. Good stuff.
--Ed--

Ed, I think the Services Tweaking religion was started by Black Viper's service configuration lists many years ago. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm not going to link to them as I don't think they're worthy of it on a credible forum like this.

hdmi · Nov 30, 2021

Stigg said:
Ed, I think the Services Tweaking religion was started by Black Viper's service configuration lists many years ago. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm not going to link to them as I don't think they're worthy of it on a credible forum like this.

Yeah, I purposely decided not to bring up the Black Viper website on here because they have so much disinformation, I consider them to be the antithesis of what credibility factually stands for.

abactuon · Nov 30, 2021

Even this site recommends disabling WSearch.
And on laptops, there are a lot of services from Taiwanese comrades that don't know what they're doing.
'Spooler' is a permanent security hole.

Feuer · Nov 30, 2021

Project: Which Services can be Disabled WITHOUT Drastic Impact. - Windows 10 Help Forums

Good afternoon, I have finished preparing my customisations for a Clean Install on this particular Laptop. My final part of this project is to Disable some of the Services. I produced a list of the Running Services and the Services that potentially Start.

www.tenforums.com

I recommend Paul Black's guide about Windows 10 Services.

abactuon · Nov 30, 2021

Services are the crutches on which Windows NT is shackled to the 21st century.

abactuon · Nov 30, 2021

I remember my first computer, an IBM/360. Everything was better. And the girls were prettier.

Ghot · Nov 30, 2021

Ed Tittel said:
I not only agree, I wrote a blog post about it: Modern Windows Service Tweaking Is Counterproductive. Kudos to @Bree for a beautiful and succinct analysis of why disabling Windows services to lighten the "load" just isn't worthwhile anymore. Good stuff.
--Ed--

On top of all that... MS is gonna keep turning them back on every month, at least some of them.

On the other hand, I do like most of @TairikuOkami 's list also.

SightUp · Nov 30, 2021

Ghot said:
On top of all that... MS is gonna keep turning them back on every month, at least some of them.

On the other hand, I do like most of @TairikuOkami 's list also.

I turn off Windows Updates until I reinstall.

fruh · Jan 9, 2022

hdmi said:
Just because SysMain (former SuperFetch) uses up a little bit of your CPU resources and a lot of your memory, doesn't also mean that it steals the resources from your other processes like playing videogames. Read up on the concept of InvisiTasking, which allows background processes to use up only those system resources that would otherwise be left unused, so for example if you have Condusiv Diskeeper service running in the background, then it can optimize performance of your HDD (it works for SSDs too, but on a modern SSD the performance gain will typically be negligible) and 1/ you never need to defrag because it prevents HDD fragmentation before it happens, while 2/ it greatly reduces the total number of I/O operations on the HDD in addition to keeping enough free space near the outermost cylinders of the HDD which is where the write speed is higher in comparison to the innermost ones─yet another reason why dividing your HDD into separate partitions never was among bright ideas. SysMain touches on the same principle that preventing I/O at the only sacrifice of using the specific part of CPU and RAM that would otherwise just sit there, doing nothing besides costing a lot of money of course. You see, other processes don't have to wait until these background processes release the system resources that they use. There's no delay there, the other processes take immediate priority.

That being said, with a modern Intel CPU, although this greatly depends on system design, you could say that temperatures should also be seen as system resources. That's just because technologies like Turbo Boost and Speed Shift can be used to increase performance, only temporarily when needed, and in such a way that the heat energy resulting from this temporary increase in power (far above the TDP) has to be throttled back down again after a certain period of time in order not to exceed temperature constraints. These constraints are configurable and can be set by the system manufacturer. Some of the settings are accessible via the powercfg command, some aren't. But that is why I use ThrottleStop. Anyway, my point is that disabling the SysMain service isn't going to have any noticeable impact on temperatures, any more so than homeopathy is. So I'm not too worried.

What's funny is that SysMain is by far the worst example of engineering choiche regarding memory usage, so much that it's hilarious. SysMain was designed to make your PC faster by preloading at system startup the programs you use based on your typical usage etc. This means that your PC's startup, specially if you are on HDD, is slower and slower the more you use your PC. The best part is that Microsoft themselves made an ad trying to convince you to buy an SSD because of the slow startups on HDDs (I think it said "now that I have an SSD I miss making tea during my PC's booting time) when the only thing slowing down the PC was SysMain taking up all the disk activity to preload programs nobody has ever asked it to, rendering the PC unusable, so that if you had to print a document on the fly you had to wait all that crap to load for nothing.

Also, if the operating system uses memory for debatable reasons, it means that if I want to randomly open a big program the OS itself would make worse my experience instead of speeding it up, and having to buy new hardware (storage or memory) just for an optional software engineering choiche made at Microsoft is kinda silly to me.

So PLEASE, if anything, at least try do not try to save SysMain. That Windows feature is just EMBARASSING (or now that we have SSDs, it's useless at the very least).

TairikuOkami · Jan 9, 2022

Not to mention that there now 2 forces fighting against each other, SysMain vs cached RAM (+preloaded/background apps).

hdmi · Jan 11, 2022

fruh said:
What's funny is that SysMain is by far the worst example of engineering choiche regarding memory usage, so much that it's hilarious. SysMain was designed to make your PC faster by preloading at system startup the programs you use based on your typical usage etc. This means that your PC's startup, specially if you are on HDD, is slower and slower the more you use your PC. The best part is that Microsoft themselves made an ad trying to convince you to buy an SSD because of the slow startups on HDDs (I think it said "now that I have an SSD I miss making tea during my PC's booting time) when the only thing slowing down the PC was SysMain taking up all the disk activity to preload programs nobody has ever asked it to, rendering the PC unusable, so that if you had to print a document on the fly you had to wait all that crap to load for nothing.

Also, if the operating system uses memory for debatable reasons, it means that if I want to randomly open a big program the OS itself would make worse my experience instead of speeding it up, and having to buy new hardware (storage or memory) just for an optional software engineering choiche made at Microsoft is kinda silly to me.

So PLEASE, if anything, at least try do not try to save SysMain. That Windows feature is just EMBARASSING (or now that we have SSDs, it's useless at the very least).

What's funniest is that I have never had to wait for SysMain to load anything at system startup, as the loading that SysMain does is immediately paused the moment when other processes need the I/O bandwidth, and also that the memory that it uses has never exceeded the amount of memory that would otherwise have been left completely unused. And I have done side-by-side comparison tests to verify that this is exactly how it works.

TairikuOkami said:
Not to mention that there now 2 forces fighting against each other, SysMain vs cached RAM (+preloaded/background apps).

I have never seen them fight against each other on any of my systems in spite of the fact I am quite familiar with memory caching (from Outertech, Romex, Condusiv and a few others). Further, I am not sure what you mean by "+preloaded/background apps". Are you talking about running this:

Disable-MMAgent -ApplicationLaunchPrefetching
Disable-MMAgent -ApplicationPreLaunch

...and deleting everything under this registry key:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Superfetch\PfAp
...and disabling "background apps" for all apps that appear on a list of apps most of which aren't even capable to run in the background anyway in the first place so that, therefore, the ones who are so hilarious are you two guys?

fruh · Jan 11, 2022

hdmi said:
What's funniest is that I have never had to wait for SysMain to load anything at system startup, as the loading that SysMain does is immediately paused the moment when other processes need the I/O bandwidth, and also that the memory that it uses has never exceeded the amount of memory that would otherwise have been left completely unused. And I have done side-by-side comparison tests to verify that this is exactly how it works.

Please consider that I am making fun of Microsoft's choices, not you. Anyway, I'm quite interested in the SysMain behaviour you are describing since it never happened to behave like that in my experience (windows 7 and 10 machines), nor I have ever seen anything about it on the web. Admittedly, it would make a lot more sense if it actually paused to prioritize user needs.

In any case, as an engineering and design approach, I think the user should explicitly be able to enable or disable everything that implies some sort of automated guesswork above the bare minimum, while SysMain doesn't appear anywhere else except for in Services (at least to my knowledge). In my opinion, nobody should arbitrarily impose me what is the best way to use my machine without letting me choose.