Black Viper's Windows Xp Services Configuration

[JSKY]

After years of playing with the services. Trying them every way there might be. (on...off...on...off)

And getting into heated debates over them. This is what I recommend anymore.

If your just doing everyday stuff with your PC, and that includes many, many things. Just leave everything alone for services.

The ones I know, that it really makes a difference with. Are those running very intense graphic or music creating related software. Where they need every ounce of free system resources. They have the very limited things installed on their PCs for what they are doing. They mostly never run (or never) an on-line connection. Their PC's are strictly work related to what they are doing or creating. So just running with bare components is what they need.

For even the advanced user. there is really nothing to worry about with just leaving the services as they are. If any.....maybe two or three thing that could be changed.

Just my half a nickels worth anymore on the subject.

[dequincey]

My appologies for not letting a sleeping dog lie. However, I'd also like to chime in on this discussion.

The rule of thumb for anyone running a Linux system: if you don't need it, turn it off.

I agree that for most services, turning them off will not save you a ton of resources. (One MAJOR expection to this is the Themes services. Turning that off will save you around 12 MB of RAM.)

That said, there are security considerations to take into account. That's one of the two reasons that most Linux/Unix admins (and for that matter any admin running just about any type of server) will tweak their builds to turn off whatever they don't need running.

Turning off services without placing any thought about what you're turning off is not a good idea. Do some research and determine what trade-offs you want to make. For example, I always turn off the Indexing Service. This means that searching for files on my hardrive is slower. However, I'm willing to deal with that trade-off, as I'd rather organize my directory structure in a way that makes sense to me in order to avoid thrashing my hard drive by searching for things on a regular basis.

This discussion will never really be resolved. It very much comes down to preferance.

Some tweaks will certainly make visible differences. For example, turning off the Themes service to save 12+ MB of RAM or turning off the Indexing Service to save on some hard drive activity (not to mention space for the index itself). Other tweaks will only make incremental differences and is very much akin to over clocking your system to squeeze those extra few percentage points of performance out of your system. For most people, their is no point in going to the trouble to do so. For some entusiasts, it certainly is.

A note on Black Viper's website: It wasn't flawless, but it was a decent resource. However, it wasn't an end-all, be-all resource for tweaking your system. I don't believe he ever tried to "sell" it as such. I always saw it as another resource to use in order to tweak your system.

Finally, don't ever trust ANYTHING that says it automatically configures itself. Always make sure that the configuration makes sense.