Which windows XP services can I disable without major consequence? [duplicate]

Solution 1:

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

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

Solution 2:

If you wish to tweak the windows services to reduce memory usage theres quite a well known and respectable list here of what you can and cannot disable:

• Windows XP SP3 32-bit
• Windows XP SP3 64-bit
• Vista SP1
• Windows 7 Beta

Although that said, be careful, and only disable services you're absolutely sure you don't want/need. Don't be trigger happy, this isn't going to save you massive resources.

Solution 3:

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.

Solution 4:

Which services that need to be running on you pc really depends on what you use it for. There is usually a process of trial and error where you'll have to experiment a little to find out what actually helps and what you need.

Check out this article which has an explanation of services, and a video walkthrough where he goes through all the potential services that could be disabled.