If you lot desire to clasp every last drop of performance out of your PC, yous might consider disabling some of the built-in Windows services. Merely which ones should you disable? And which ones can you safely disable?

Important: Disabling Services is Not a Silver Bullet

Here at How-To Geek we're non big fans of disabling Windows Services – at least, we don't retrieve that disabling Microsoft services that are built into Windows is a terribly bully thought nigh of the time. Most of them are highly optimized and actually accept upwards almost zero CPU time, and they stop up beingness paged out of active memory to the pagefile, and so they aren't really wasting your system memory anyhow. At that place's a lot of others that are critical to proper performance of the operating organisation, and you'll break things by just randomly disabling them.

Lest you call back we're crazy, we do recommend disabling services – merely non built-in services.  The services that y'all should examine very closely are all of the third-political party services that slow your computer downwardly. If yous take a lot of software installed, there's probably a lot of them. You should remove software you don't apply, and so disable services if necessary (existence careful since obviously you lot tin can break things).

If y'all're using Windows 8, you'll discover that organisation services accept been even more highly optimized, use less memory, and many of them have been combined to use less running processes at the same time. We'd argue that even though the Modernistic apps are fairly pointless on a laptop or desktop, the regular Desktop on Windows viii is a lot more streamlined and optimized for speed, and so upgrading is not a bad idea for performance alone.

Information technology's also worth pointing out that if you're in the mood to tweak your figurer to speed up the performance, you'll become a lot more than mileage out of removing software that you don't demand, replacing lousy software with better alternatives, and making sure that you don't have any spyware on your PC.

Since y'all still probably want to know virtually disabling services, our friends over at the vii Tutorials web site have written upwards a set of guidelines to what can be safely disabled, along with some helpful data about why each one can be removed without hurting your PC. You'll notice that they recommend setting many services to manual instead of disabled (and some of those are already fix to manual by default, so disabling them won't assist performance).

Simply Give Me a List Already

Since we tin can't just refer you to somebody else without calculation our own thoughts, here's our quick listing of some congenital-in Windows services which are by and large enabled by default that you can disable safely. When you read the total list over at 7 Tutorials, make sure to read their explanation for each 1 earlier simply disabling things.

  • Print Spooler (if yous don't use a printer or print-to-PDF)
  • Bluetooth Support (if you don't use Bluetooth)
  • Remote Registry (it's non normally running past default, simply you can disable it for safety)
  • Remote Desktop (There are iii services. If you don't utilise Remote desktop, disable them)

Note: Nosotros don't recommend disabling the Windows Time service. Disabling it won't assist your PC's functioning (information technology's gear up to manual already and simply runs occasionally, and it's much ameliorate to accept your computer fourth dimension set properly, for many reasons including file timestamp integrity.

Disabling Services? I Forgot How

Yes, nearly of you probably didn't forget. Only in example, here'south how. Open up the Windows Kickoff Screen or Starting time Menu, type in services.msc and hit the Enter cardinal to bring upwardly the Services panel.

Double-click on the item you want to disable, and change the drop-down to Disabled (or Manual if you lot prefer).

Are you a system tweaker? Do you have feel disabling services? Sound off in the comments and lend your expertise to your fellow readers.