Services.msc database

Can anyone please advise if there exists a database for Windows Services covering Windows 10 and also Windows 7? It should at least give me an idea of what services are safe to disable. Also is there a big performance difference resulting in disabling certain services? Is it not advisable to change the service to Manual if unsure? I normally only look at services from services.msc in the Control Panel and not from the Task Manager.

I normally only use msconfig > Start-up and disable applications from there to improve boot times. Apparently it is also safe to disable all applications from Startup in CCleaner. Some applications are left over as enabled in CCleaner even after I disable all applications in msconfig and I am not sure where they originate from.

Thanks for the feedback. I will have a look at Black Viper. I have no real problems myself but do services like Adobe Acrobat Update Service really need to be on Automatic (see attached screenshot)?

I guess if it isn't consuming RAM in the task manager it isn't a problem. Maybe Resource Monitor is good to look at as well.

Thanks for the Tweaking.com tip.

I tried fiddling around with services.msc in the past but it was not of much use in terms of performance.

There is no publicly available database that fully describes what each service does. The only place such would exist is in internal Microsoft documentation. The lists that do exist are incomplete and subject to error. Some services are known to do more than documented.

Black Viper must often resort to educated guesses. There are known cases where he has been wrong.

"Also is there a big performance difference resulting in disabling certain services?"

No, there is not. In the large majority of cases there is no measurable difference. Measurement is important. Otherwise you can easily become a victim of the placebo effect - seeing what you want to see, even when there is nothing there.

The potential for the performance gain of disabling services is vanishingly small. Even drastic disabling of services, even to the point where functionality is impaired, is likely to provide no noticeable gains.

The risks of disabling services are very real, particularly in an OS that is in active development like Windows 10. Microsoft is free to change undocumented behavior of services at any time without notice. Disabling a service that appeared to be unneeded may become important after even a minor update.

In one case with Windows 7 I had disabled a service which I thought was safe. I will not say which one it was. Later I made a system change and there was a serious problem. Eventually after much time it was determined to be due to the disabled service. I have no desire to repeat that experience.

Incidentally, setting a service startup to "Manual" is not a safe alternative to disabling it. In this case either the system or an application can enable it if needed. But it is not safe to assume this will actually happen. When something fails due to a service not running, even when it is set to to "Manual", typically neither the system nor an application will attempt to determine why. Typically it just fails. The only time it is really safe to set a service start to "Manual" is when that is the default setting.

Personally I would consider it a bad thing for the system to start a service set to "Manual" unless this behavior was documented, such as would be the case if it was the default setting. The service may have been set to "Manual" for testing purposes, fully expecting the failure. Programmers in particular strongly dislike this kind of unpredictable behavior.

Use at your own risk.

I think this sums up the general opinion on changing anything in services.msc!

I think I'll stick with msconfig > Start-up for the moment...

meridius said:

I think this sums up the general opinion on changing anything in services.msc!

I think I'll stick with msconfig > Start-up for the moment...

msconfig > Start-Up will just prompt you to use Task Manager's Startup tab instead.

I have never had any problems with msconfig > Start-up. From my understanding if you do not disable applications such as 'Microsoft Windows Operating System', 'x Internet Security Suite' or applications you use regularly etc. that should be running at startup you should be OK and this may improve your boot times...

CCleaner reports in its Startup items both AdobeAAMUpdater-1.0 and AdobeGCInvoker-1.0 as enabled which I have the option to disable. These items have been disabled in msconfig > Start-up but as you can see in my previous screenshot there are Adobe services running on Automatic in services.msc. so maybe this is a reporting issue...

I disabled Adobe Reader and Acrobat Manager in msconfig > Start-up so does that overrule the Adobe settings in services.msc?

I don't understand why all of services.msc items running on either Automatic or Automatic (Delayed Start) are not immediately considered as Startup items in msconfig > Start-up..?