Windows 11 services

inoperable · Apr 7, 2023

Hello everyone,

Is there any kind of sane documentation about background services critical to run with an default Windows 11 installation (insert random verison number here from 22.xxx+)? What I mean by that is, I can strip down my Windows 10 installation to < 50 background services running incl. drivers without compromising functionality, but
with reasonable latency improvement (meaning instead of being sluggish it gets more responsive)

There is 0 (at least I couldnt find it) documentation about Windows 11 kernel/os critical services that absolutely need to be started during initial boot stage (meaining past the rotating circle thing before login prompt) - changing "Error control" to ignore of those services will BSOD Windows anyways - clearly the OS does not care about the Error control but has some uhmm "critical" services list that need to run before its happy.

Disabling/Enabling services randomly does not really help, since there is 0 os feedback about whats critial or not. Windows just BSODS with one of their totally usefull 0x123456790 error messages that half of redmond crew does not understand

cereberus · Apr 7, 2023

The simple answer is services are much more efficient in Windows 10/11 and there is no significant benefit in turning off services. There are so many interdependencies that you are more likely to break things than help. You end up with appsd not working etc.

Regarding a directory of settings, only MS would have such a tool, as it is dynamic and changes.

I have experimented with minimising number of services and could not get any measurable difference. I gave up in the end - the effort far outweighed and perceived benefit.

SlicEnDicE · Apr 7, 2023

There exist a lot of tutorials and guidelines for most Windows operating systems. But configuring the services to suit your need exactly is it's own science. No document can really assist you there.

What you should do instead, is pick one service at a time, open the properties for that service, read it's description and check it's dependencies. If it still is unclear what the service does or if you really need it, you can lookup more information about that particular one and then decide if you need it or not.
Some services are critical and some are less vital, but all of them play a huge role in each usage scenario. Only you can know what you need or don't need.

I know what I just told, is a daunting task. But you will come out as a winner in the end and the results will be very rewarding if each freeable CPU cycle and byte in RAM is important to you.

glasskuter · Apr 7, 2023

Welcome to the forum.
As @cereberus said, some services depend on other services, some apps depend on certain services. They each have a purpose depending on how a system is used. Many are stopped until called upon to perform a certain function.

I have to disagree with @SlicEnDicE on this one. For even an experienced user researching a particular service, its description is most times vague or highly technical and doesn't say "this service does such and such." Unless one is using a hugely under-equipped machine, why risk breaking your OS or apps for very little, if any, benefit. We know nothing about your computer since you didn't tell us.

It makes no sense to me why one would mess with services unless one is causing a problem. IMO, it is best to leave them alone.

TM21 · Apr 7, 2023

You just bought a beautiful little 1/4 ton pickup truck. It will do zero to sixty in under ten minutes, so you're happy with it.
However it came with 200 cement blocks in the bed. Now the question, , , which one to remove first?

Windows, going back several years, has been a lot like that 1/4 ton pickup. It was overloaded right from the start.
MS put a service in there, to accommodate anything that anyone would ever want to do with Windows. Thank goodness, many of them never run. But of the ones that do, many are not really needed.

Up until more recently, we had a friend who called himself The Black Viper, who spent his time and effort to go through all the Windows Services and explain each one, and designate which ones that could be either disabled or put into Manual Start mode.
I think it was back in Win-7 days, when I used his information, to write a batch file, that would either disable or manualize several of the services with lesser importance.
That Batch File still works today, with Windows 11, but it's not as complete as it was with Windows 7.
Regrettably, I must admit that I've been too busy to update that old Batch File, for Windows 11.

And I also regret that The Black Viper has given up his work on Windows Services, in fact he's given up on MS Windows all together, in favor of a completely different OS.

For anyone who gives a hoot, here is a snippet from that old Disable-services.bat program.

@echo off
cls
rem This batch file will Stop selected Services and set them to Disabled.
rem The following are a few examples of task name vs actual program name.
rem Schedule = Task Scheduler
rem Themes = Themes
rem W32Time = Windows Time
rem SysMain = Superfetch
rem WinDefend = Windows Defender
rem
sc config Appinfo start= demand
sc stop Appinfo

sc config ALG start= demand
sc stop ALG

sc config AppMgmt start= demand
sc stop AppMgmt

sc config wbengine start= demand
sc stop wbengine

sc config CertPropSvc start= disabled
sc stop CertPropSvc

***********************************************

the above was just the start of my Batch File. I added about another dozen entries.
I spent many hours, going through all the services (RUN, Services.msc) and analyzing each one.
I disabled several by mistake, and had to go back and re-enable them again. So, be careful!
Since my first look at the system services, years ago, several more have been added. The "AllJoyn Router Service" is a good example. Do we need it?

Y'all have a very Happy Easter,
TM

TairikuOkami · Apr 7, 2023

Those are the minimum services I am running. MSA, Edge with Android sync (CDP) and OneDrive, Store allowed.

hsehestedt · Apr 7, 2023

Maybe my opinion is a bit different than others. To my thinking, if I had a Pinto, no matter how many parts I strip off the thing to make it lighter, it's never going to run like a Ferrari. If I want Ferrari performance, I'll purchase a Ferrari

.

Being more serious, I've gone down that rabbit hole trying to strip services, and clean every possible thing from my system that I could, but in the end, it simply made no appreciable difference. Remember, many services in Windows are event driven. In other words, they sit there doing absolutely nothing until some event, be that a timeout period, an interrupt from a piece of hardware, it is called upon by something else, etc. happens.

I'm not trying to discourage you from experimenting, heck, that's what I do all the time. However, just be aware that what you learn in the end just might be that those hours spent in this pursuit are hours that you will never get back

.

TM21 · Apr 7, 2023

Yeah, but, if you put an LS6 with a Supercharger in that pinto, you could have some fun and save the thousands you'd waste on a Ferrari. lol

Personally, I'm having a blast, running Microsoft's Flagship OS, on an old, and very incompatible Mini Desktop PC, that's already been hit by lightning, recovered from the dumpster, refurbished and restored to health.
And Windows 11 runs better on this PC than Windows 7 or 8.1 ever did.
For instance, when I boot her up, my email is on my desktop before my Startup Music is even done playing.
(it's all in the programming)
And, when I click my Quick Shutdown shortcut icon, it's DOWN by the time I get my finger on the OFF switch on the power strip.
And, the hours I've spent, tweaking and tuning Win-11 have paid off admirably. Obviously!

Happy Easter
TM

inoperable · Apr 8, 2023

cereberus said:
The simple answer is services are much more efficient in Windows 10/11 and perceived benefit.

I made a lot of measurements with real workflow (gaming, adobe, visual studio) - and there are benefits.
However, even taking your claim as granted - if a system has 1000 threads running instead of 500 threads running, whatever super fancy
semaphore/parallel magic microsoft implements you are basically saying, there is no difference between 100 or 5000 services running
and that's just not true.

Disabling all spyware/telemetry services is a benefit - since it does not wear constantly on your ssd
Disabling all auto-loggers is a benefit - reducing i/o, disk wear and available ram.
and on and on and on... so how is that not a benefit? (assuming the benefit I want is at least similar to your understanding of benefit)

I don't mean to be an arrogant troll or anything, but you cant seriously say "more efficient" to have
200 services running in the background - doing something (since I cant tell 90% of those what exactly they are doing), intervened and wowed together more them 1000miles of spaghetti.

I can show you empirical results how the perceived benefit looks like from my perspective.

kelper · Apr 8, 2023

inoperable said:
I can show you empierical results how the perceived benefit looks like from my perspective.

Please do!

inoperable · Apr 8, 2023

Still, does anyone know how to dig up the list of services that MUST be running before Windows BSODS?
How can I find those? What properties do they have vs. other services. I can't find a reliable information about it.
IF there is none to your knowledge, what be your approach to find those?
Worst case scanario is toggling them on/off and run 2 VM's with kernel debugging on and record when a BSOD
happens and when not with the hope to either catch the property that declare a service as must-have (for lack of a better word)
or go through all of them until you get of a ~reliable list.

Any ideas on that?

inoperable · Apr 8, 2023

kelper said:
Please do!

Do you want a specific metrics or just a whole bag?
I will need a day or so to make a viable package with data you can verify in terms of not being manipulated.

kelper · Apr 8, 2023

inoperable said:
Any ideas on that?

There are more important things to get obsessive about!

inoperable · Apr 8, 2023

Important things are relative, so please...

kelper · Apr 8, 2023

TechnoMage2021 said:
Yeah, but, if you put an LS6 with a Supercharger in that pinto, you could have some fun and save the thousands you'd waste on a Ferrari. lol

Personally, I'm having a blast, running Microsoft's Flagship OS, on an old, and very incompatible Mini Desktop PC, that's already been hit by lightning, recovered from the dumpster, refurbished and restored to health.
And Windows 11 runs better on this PC than Windows 7 or 8.1 ever did.
For instance, when I boot her up, my email is on my desktop before my Startup Music is even done playing.
(it's all in the programming)
And, when I click my Quick Shutdown shortcut icon, it's DOWN by the time I get my finger on the OFF switch on the power strip.
And, the hours I've spent, tweaking and tuning Win-11 have paid off admirably. Obviously!

Happy Easter
TM

Please share some of your ideas in your own thread, ie start a new topic.

SlicEnDicE · Apr 8, 2023

inoperable said:
Disabling all spyware/telemetry services is a benefit - since it does not wear constantly on your ssd
Disabling all auto-loggers is a benefit - reducing i/o, disk wear and available ram.
and on and on and on... so how is that not a benefit? (assuming the benefit I want is at least similar to your understanding of benefit)

I agree that there are benefits, especially when gaming for instance. All that logging takes up resources that you don't want to be taken up while doing eSports etc...anything that is related to disk IO in particular is important in such scenarios.

I wish i could help more... I don't have a good list of things that can be disabled, but a good start is going through the ones that are related to logging and telemetry, as you said.

kelper · Apr 8, 2023

inoperable said:
Important things are relative, so please...

You could run msconfig as admin, go to the Services tab, hide all the Microsoft services and disable all the rest.

inoperable · Apr 8, 2023

SlicEnDicE said:
I agree that there are benefits, especially when gaming for instance. All that logging takes up resources that you don't want to be taken up while doing eSports etc...anything that is related to disk IO in particular is important in such scenarios.

I wish i could help more... I don't have a good list of things that can be disabled, but a good start is going through the ones that are related to logging and telemetry, as you said.

Exactly my point, I measured input latency / fps / fps post processing latency for win10 default installation vs win10 customized
(both 10.0.19044.272) and after stripping down the background services:

FPS gain in BF2042 is averaging from ~70 to ~90
FPS postprocessing latency dropped from 15ms to 7ms
Boot time is reduced from ~11 seconds down to ~3 (with all gpu-z, hwinfo, fancontrol, zfs pools mounting, etc incl.)

SlicEnDicE · Apr 8, 2023

inoperable said:
FPS gain in BF2042 is averaging from ~70 to ~90
FPS postprocessing latency dropped from 15ms to 7ms

This is significant

TairikuOkami · Apr 8, 2023

inoperable said:
Any ideas on that?

I made some notes, but dependencies change with an each update, so it might not be up to date.

Code:

rem Application Information / required by UAC
rem AppX Deployment Service (AppXSVC) / required by Store
rem Background Intelligent Transfer Service / required by Windows Updates / depends on Network List Service (starts even when disabled)
rem Base Filtering Engine / required by Windows Defender Firewall
rem CNG Key Isolation / required to login to Windows Insider / Switch to Local Account / Set up PIN / Basically everything Credentials related
rem Connected Devices Platform / required to open Settings - Windows Backup and to sync Edge with android
rem Credential Manager / required to store credentials (check User Accounts - Credential Manager) / required by apps like Windows Mail to store passwords / An administrator has blocked you from running this app
rem Cryptographic Services / required to update certificates for browsers, digital signatures 
rem Delivery Optimization / required by Windows Updates
rem DevicesFlow / required to open Settings - Bluetooth and devices 
rem Diagnostic Policy Service / required by Windows Diagnostic (Troubleshooting)
rem DHCP Client / sometimes required by Windows Updates (0x80240022)
rem Distributed Link Tracking Client / sometimes required to open shortcuts and System apps - "Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permission to access the item"
rem Geolocation Service / required by some Windows Store apps, it can not be enabled when Connected User Experiences and Telemetry is disabled
rem Microsoft Account Sign-in Assistant / required to login to Microsoft Account
rem Network Connections / required to manage old Network Connections
rem Network Connection Broker / required to change Network Settings
rem Network List Service / required by Windows Update and to change Network Settings (when disabled desktop fails to load)
rem Network Location Awareness / required by Windows Update and Windows Defender Firewall
rem Network Store Interface Service / disabling disables Windows Firewall (when disabled Windows might fail to boot - Critical Service Died)
rem Print Spooler / required by printers
rem Radio Management Service / required to display WiFi networks
rem Security Accounts Manager / when disabled, explorer.exe (Desktop) crashes constantly
rem System Guard Runtime Monitor Broker / when disabled Windows might fail to boot - Critical Service Died
rem Storage Service / required to update store apps
rem Text Input Management Service (keeps ctfmon.exe running) / required to be able to login at all
rem User Data services / required to be able to change PIN/password at lockscreen or to login via Microsoft Authenticator
rem Web Account Manager / required to login to Microsoft Account/Store
rem Windows Biometric Service / required by biometric devices like a fingerprint reader
rem Windows Connection Manager / required by WiFi and Data Usage and Windows Update (starts even when disabled)
rem Windows Defender Firewall (Base Filtering Engine/Network Location Awareness) / required by Windows Update and Store Apps (0x80073d0a)
rem Windows Driver Foundation - User-mode Driver Framework / required by some drivers like USB devices
rem Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) / required by scanners
rem Windows Management Instrumentation / required by wmic commands / disabled to prevent some fileless malware
rem Windows Push Notifications User Service / required by Logitech Setpoint to avoid Runtime Error and upon disabling, Windows and network is sluggish

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