Disabling services in Vista

Warning - disabling services can cause your system to behave unpredictably, reduce security, not boot at all, or rupture the space-time continuum. Proceed with caution, only if you know what you are doing.


* I am not to be held responsible for any damage that may occur.

If you don't know what your doing....Just don't do it.

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Navigate to: control panel - administrative tools - services
Then try disabling the following (doubleclick, select disabled under startup type, click OK).

- Background Intelligent Transfer Service
- DHCP client
- Diagnostic policy service
- Diagnostic System Host
- Distributed link tracking client
- DNS client
- IP Helper
- IIS Admin Service - if you don't plan on using IIS, you don't need this enabled
Disabling this helps to speed up Windows Explorer when performing network tasks
- Peer Name Resolution Protocol
- Portable Device Enumerator Service
- PRNP Auto Registration
- ReadyBoost (if you are not using this feature (no flash drive)
- Secondary Logon (This may prevent you from using the “Run As/Run as Administrator” option.
- Security Center (prolly kills off defender etc).
- Shell Hardware Detection Service (Kills autorun - and good riddance).
- Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) if your computer isn't going to be running as a mail server, you don't need this
- SSDP discovery (Something to do with UPNP devices. Darned if I know or care)
- Superfetch (This is Vista's amazing caching service. Think of it as Vista's Smartdrv. In theory it will slow down some operations but AFAIK it didn't make much of a difference, and released a LOT of RAM).
- System Event Notification Service.
- Tablet PC Input Service If you do not use a Tablet PC or you're on a desktop computer, you don't need this
- Terminal Services.
- Web client.
- Windows Defender (First disable it from control panel).
- Windows Error Reporting.
- Windows Event Log.
- Windows Image Acquisition (if no scanner and you are using your digital camera via a card reader).
- Windows Search (This is that annoying indexing utility. Keep it if you need to find files fast).
- Windows Time.
- Windows Update (if you can't manually update, turn this back on).
- Print spooler (if you don't have a printer).

Don't disable task scheduler as defragment depends on it.