What Windows services can I safely disable?

"Black Viper maintains what is considered by many the definitive guide to Windows services.

http://www.blackviper.com/category/guides/service-configurations/"

"With services, it all depends on which services do jobs you need. I fould a good link that talks about this here. Here's a small snippet from that link:

""To have your system boot in a short time, you also need to enable only useful services.
Here comes the problem: which are the useful services?
The simple answer is: useful services are the ones that do a job you're interested in. As you can note, this is not a real answer.""

The advice is really good for Service Optimization.

Other than services, I use some Sysinternals tools to keep track of what's bogging down my PC. Notably, Autoruns, Process Explorer, and Process Monitor are quite effective to identify processes that run on your system and hog resources.

On a reasonably well-used PC, I would run defrag once a week, or once every two weeks. If it's used for only small things like internet access and a few applications, maybe once a month."

"My philosophy is to almost never disable services. I believe in having a very consistently configured machine with the least number of tweaks possible. That gets me, IMHO, a stable machine and no surprises at Windows Update. (I guess that means I'll never use vLite! :))

The well known tweaking guides out there are not written from a sysadmin's viewpoint.

However, you can go to Add/Remove Programs and go to Windows Features, and turn off those you don't use. I never ever use, for example, Simple TCP/IP Services, on anything. There are no doubt other examples. If you find you need the feature you can turn it back on.

Same goes for server roles; if you have SNMP installed but don't use it because you don't have a device that uses it (or the tools to use it costs too much/are bloated/make no sense) then remove it.

But I never go and disable a service just to try and make things ""faster""."

"I try to keep my prefetch clean (c:\windows\prefetch), disable most (if not all) of everything in start>run>msconfig >startup, and I constantly check and tweak start>run>services.msc

Also remember that almost everything on your machine wants to run something at startup. Check it every time you install something. Java and quicktime both want to run something at startup. Your wireless card manufacturer most likely has something running at startup. I use Windows to manage my wireless.

Oh...and I disable System Restore and Hibernation.

My XP laptop has amazing boot time."