Recommended Source That Tells Me Which Automatic Services To Disable

Barman58 · 21 Nov 2017

All I can suggest is that you check out the Black Viper site - the descriptions there may allow you to find something that you feel you can do without,

Please take heed of my warning about disabling services being dangerous.

If a service is not being used a modern operating system, like anything from Vista onwards, will "sleep" the process to free the memory and CPU usage for user processes, the best thing to control memory and CPU usage in windows 10 is the system itself, It "knows" more and is quicker to react than any human.

Back in the 90's & 00's I was developing industrial control systems where speed was critical, and I did disable services to a great extent but this was on systems that only did one job to do and in some cases never displayed the windows screens at all for months at a time, so did not need a lot of services. For example what use is a screen saver on a system that could never have the screen not displaying status and warnings

These days I do on occasion stop and prevent a service from running, but only for diagnostic purposes, and the majority of these are third party

lx07 · 21 Nov 2017

Did you look at this? Black Vipers Windows 10 Service Configurations | Black Viper | www.blackviper.com

Or a better resource is from forum member @TairikuOkami who has a set of tweaks here you can look at: [Batch] Windows Tweaks - Pastebin.com (from his/her sig). You may not want to do all of them (up to you) but the script is well documented and easy to understand.

Problem with disabling services is that the dependencies aren't really clear or documented. You can end up breaking something seemingly completely unrelated but as long as you keep track of what you are doing you can always reverse it. Note, some services (BITS IIRC) will start even if disabled.

Whether disabling services will make any (non placebo) difference is debatable though. Most likely you'll spend a lot of time breaking things for no benefit but it can be quite fun to do that sometimes. I think so anyway.

TairikuOkami · 21 Nov 2017

pepanee said:

I gotta disable other ones too like ctfmon, LockApp?, RuntimeBroker?, and a few other ones. There are many duplicates too like csrss, dllhost, fontdrvhost, RuntimeBroker, etc. I'm the only one that uses the computer with one account only.

ctfmon - can be shut off by disabling "Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Panel Service"

LockApp - appears when a computer becomes locked, like when it goes to sleep and you have locking enabled

RuntimeBroker - it can not be disabled, it is required to open Settings/Start/etc

fontdrvhost - is basically a sandbox for fonts, if I got that correctly

dllhost/csrss - are required system processes, they run multiple times, as needed

pepanee said:

Everything that I have customized uses very low memory, yet the addition of the memory of all the svchost processes does take up a fair amount of MB.. roughly somewhere in between 100,000 mb - 200,000 mb. The majority of that is, for sure, a waste of memory that I can be using in the other projects that I do on the computer.

You can use CleanMem Free to prevent memory leaking. For the record Windows "cleans" the RAM, not Cleanmem.

lx07 said:

Whether disabling services will make any (non placebo) difference is debatable though. Most likely you'll spend a lot of time breaking things for no benefit but it can be quite fun to do that sometimes. I think so anyway.

Well said. Sometimes it is not worth the effort. It is a trial and error and with an each upgrade MS changes rules.

Barman58 · 21 Nov 2017

It's interesting to check the current recommendations on the Black Viper site for Windows 10 services, ( currently still at 1703 so may change soon), and find that the fact is that the vast majority if not all the system services are recommended to be set to their Microsoft defaults.

TairikuOkami · 21 Nov 2017

Barman58 said:

It's interesting to check the current recommendations on the Black Viper site for Windows 10 services, ( currently still at 1703 so may change soon), and find that the fact is that the vast majority if not all the system services are recommended to be set to their Microsoft defaults.

I think, that he keeps the webpage running for legacy purposes (ADs?), since it is being recommended as number one source, but he does not really care about tweaking services anymore by the looks of it. He just adds new services and that is it.

pyramid10 · 21 Nov 2017

There are 67 (sixty seven) svchost.exe files that are running. That's just ridiculously stupid.

From my taskman/details, I only have 17, seventeen, svchost.exe's running.

f14tomcat · 21 Nov 2017

Please refer to this tutorial by Shawn, here on TF. The number of SVCHOST.EXE you are seeing is not by mistake. It has been like that for over a year, by design. For machines with adequate memory (Approx. 4GB+), the MS memory management was changed to take advantage of services running in separate processes for stability and efficiency. It's explained well in this tut. You can modify the behavior, if you wish.

Change Split Threshold for svchost.exe in Windows 10 General Tips Tutorials

pepanee · 21 Nov 2017

Hi, yes I disabled ctfmon. Was a bit of a pain to figure out how to disable it (again), don't even know why it decided to come back after 1709 update.

Oh yes, one very sketchy thing in my life, in general, how things don't happen when they're supposed to. I got my 1709 update... in mid-November (a few days ago). That's a September update. That doesn't make any sense. Please no explanation to why I got it so late.

I used to really enjoy using the computer when I practically had all the memory I needed for any project I'm doing on the computer. I still have the same exact minimal programs/processes that run in the background as before, yet things have really slowed the hell down.

LMiller7 · 21 Nov 2017

I fully agree with Barman 58, disabling system services is a bad idea. Certainly there are services that could be safely disabled in specific situations. The difficult question is, which ones? The problem is that there is no documentation outside of Microsoft that fully describes what each service does. Many do more than what the official documentation states. And with an OS like Windows 10 that could change from one update to the next.

There was a time in the past when I experimented with disabling services I thought were not needed. This resulted in some difficult to troubleshoot problems and cost much time. I have no desire to repeat that. The performance benefits, meager as they are, are not worth the risks.

Process memory usage in any modern OS is highly dynamic. On bootup the memory usage of the svchost.exe processes may seem high but that is only because there is no better use for it. When available memory is plentiful the system memory manager will let processes use pretty much whatever memory they want. But if you start a large application this usage will be automatically trimmed back, drastically if necessary, to meet the demand.

Determining the impact a specific service has on performance, even with expert knowledge, would be very difficult. Subjective evaluations of performance, subject as they are to the placebo effect, mean almost nothing. Actual performance measurements are needed and that is far more difficult to do than most people imagine.

There is a good reason for having the larger numbers of svchost.exe processes in Windows 10. In older systems most services were hosted by a relative small number of svchost.exe processes. This minimized memory usage but had some problems. One problem was that determining the resource usage of individual services was very difficult. Another is that a failure in one service could bring down all those shared in the same svchost.exe process and that could have serious consequences.

The general policy of one service per svchost.exe as in recent versions of Windows 10 solves these problems with a relatively small increase in memory usage. On low memory systems the policy reverts to the previous shared svchost.exe model. One service per process also allows the security permissions of each svchost.exe process to be fine tuned to what is needed and no more. This enhances security.

Recommended Source That Tells Me Which *Automatic* Services To Disable

Recommended Source That Tells Me Which Automatic Services To Disable