Vista Services

[Croz]

From where u can see how many Services running ??If this is from task manager i have over 55 services and some shows stop and some running and i disabled few after read guide from here.But still over 55!!!!!Crazy...
and thr shows CPU usage 3-5% and Ram 46%

So if somebody can guide me how to get rid of this unnecessary services ..
I read many ppl have only 25 20 service running

Any help would be highly appriciated.
Thanks......

[Just Rachel]

If you've disabled the ones listed on Black Vipers list and disabled all unnecessary programs from starting up, that's about all you can do.  I have 52 services running and my computer runs pretty fast.  Vista runs a bunch of stuff!!!

If your machine seems slow and speed is your goal, how about giving us some computer info? How much ram?

[couttsj]

The best way to look at services is to run services.msc. I have been fairly aggressive at cutting things back with 31 services running. One of them includes the Task Scheduler, which knocks out a whole whack of useless background tasks.

J.A. Coutts

[Tudor]

Running 78 services! Machine still fast.

ASUS P5NT WS, Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 o/c at 2.76, Windows Vista Ultimate, 4GB DDR2 800 RAM, NVIDIA 7950 VIVO,
2 x 320GB RAID 1, 3 x 500GB RAID 5 (1 TB), DNTV capture card, Netgear EVA8000

[Spawn]

One of them includes the Task Scheduler, which knocks out a whole whack of useless background tasks.

J.A. Coutts

It also renders some useful (at least to me) information tools unusable such as the Reliability Monitor under the Reliability and Performance Monitor.  I use that quite a bit, and with Task Scheduler disabled it will not run.  At least not with any solution I found.  Windows Sidebar will not operate either.  There may be several other things that I didn't try that are crippled as well.  Sure, I know many people don't use either of the tools I mentioned, hell I don't use the Sidebar either, but some people do use those tools, and it may be good for them to know that disabling the Task Scheduler will prevent them from working.  And quite honestly, when I re-enabled the Task Scheduler, I didn't notice any performance decrease.

Spawn

[couttsj]

It also renders some useful (at least to me) information tools unusable such as the Reliability Monitor under the Reliability and Performance Monitor.  I use that quite a bit, and with Task Scheduler disabled it will not run.  At least not with any solution I found.  Windows Sidebar will not operate either.  There may be several other things that I didn't try that are crippled as well.  Sure, I know many people don't use either of the tools I mentioned, hell I don't use the Sidebar either, but some people do use those tools, and it may be good for them to know that disabling the Task Scheduler will prevent them from working.  And quite honestly, when I re-enabled the Task Scheduler, I didn't notice any performance decrease.

Spawn

One of the issues I had with the Task Scheduler was the constant background hard disk activity. It never stopped even when the machine was supposed to be asleep. And every time I woke the machine up, annoying little quirks would pop up, such as losing the license for certain Microsoft programs, powering itself down, blue screens of death, etc, etc, etc. The Resource Monitor still works like a charm, but the Performance Monitor utilizes "snapshot" log files that contribute to the constant disk activity that I was referring to. There were so many scheduled tasks that I could not find information on, so I just took the easy way out and disabled the Task Scheduler. Call me old fashioned if you want to, but I want to know what my computer is doing and when. I don't trust tasks being done in the background, and I have been able to maintain a much higher degree of reliability without the Task Scheduler.

J.A. Coutts

[Spawn]

That's great. My post wasn't a "chime in" of how I think your wrong...I could care less, people do what's best for them.  I just know many people come here who are novices.  They read something like disabling the Task Manager, and don't understand that it renders many things they may like or rely on unusable.  It also renders System Restore unusable as well.  Many people ( although I don't know why) like to use it.  That was the point I was making.

Spawn

[Just Rachel]

Disabling the auto defrag cut my hard disk activity drastically.

[IH8U]

I have been entertaining, my own idea, of all that hard disk activity cannot be good for the hard drive. Whether this is true or not, I don't have anything to support that idea, other than speculation. 

[couttsj]

Being mechanical in nature, hard disk drives have a limited life. Solid state drives usually have a much longer life. A SATA drive is typically rated at 600,000 hours, but that is an average and many things can influence a drive failure. All of the failures that I experienced as an ISP were bearing failures, and bearing failures are not easy to predict. You can monitor bearing vibration and predict an impending failure, but the nature of the beast makes long range predictions impossible.

There are 2 schools of thought on prolonging the life of computers. One is to shut the computer down when not in use, and the other is to leave it running. Powering up and down is hard on the electronics, so it is better to let it run with a good power source (UPS). For mechanical components such as hard disks and fans, it is better to shut them down when not in use. A good compromise is to let the electronics run and just shut down the mechanical devices, as in letting the monitor and hard disk turn off when the computer goes to sleep. The monitor is not a mechanical device, but it is the largest power consumer and largest heat producing component. Of course this doesn't apply to servers, because they usually don't have monitors and the hard disk must always be ready to respond to a request.

The bottom line is that anything that reduces the cycling of a mechanical device will prolong the life of the device.

J.A. Coutts

[NTxLS]

That's great. My post wasn't a "chime in" of how I think your wrong...I could care less, people do what's best for them.  I just know many people come here who are novices.  They read something like disabling the Task Manager, and don't understand that it renders many things they may like or rely on unusable.  It also renders System Restore unusable as well.  Many people ( although I don't know why) like to use it.  That was the point I was making.

Spawn

Spawn,

You & I make a very few that look at these systems some what the same.  "Novices?" I am not even that good, still working on my KBD with training wheels.  My background is 'Journeyman Electronics Technician'/w some computer experience, NO formal training.  From DataGeneral 19" MainFrame 64bit computers to desktops and many dead systems around me for spare parts.

The 'System Restore' is a VERY important part of one's need for stability and confidence.  My system is only about three weeks old and have had a "BSOD" last Sunday, 19 July, 2008, and if it were not for the system restore feature I probably would not be on here now.

Sys: Dell Inspiron 531S AMD Athlon(tm) 64bit X2 Dual Core Processor 2.3GHz RAM 3.0G Windows Vista Premium with very limited knowledge on these more secure systems.  A very short time, about six months, on WinXP SP2 to gain a little leg up on here. To start Windows 3.1, moved up to Win98SE then Windows XP SP2.

Thank you for this post of yours as I thought I was the only one that looked at these 'glorified scratch pads or note pads' as just a tool and not something that was smarter or better than ME.  So many people, strictly users, are intimidated.  Most of those users do not know they can adjust or make the system perform the way they want.

Very refreshing,