Disabling unnecessary services

I'm going through the motions of taking out the services that 'probably' don't need to be running on my system. One that has me slightly curious is:

IPsec Policy Agent

Service Description:

Enforces IPsec policies created through the IP Security Policies Snap-in or the command-line tool netsh ipsec. If you stop the service, you may experience network connectivity issues if your policy requires that connections use IPsec. Remote management of the Windows Firewall will not be available if the service is stopped.

Additional Info:

http://itsvista.com/2007/05/ipsec-policy-agent/

The IPsec Policy Agent retrieves policy information from Active Directory, or from the local registry, and distributes it to other components that make use of the policy information. The typical home user does not need this service, and can safely disable it. Enterprise users, or those that use a VPN will want to leave this one as is.

For a start, I do not access my PC remotely, and it is a standalone system. I operate behind a NAT router, and wonder if the address translation will suffer at the PC end. I can't imagine how, but am just curious.


Oh, in case anyone is interested...

Creative Audio Service is necessary if you have a creative card...you don't see the true effects of some disabled services until a full restart is performed; a log off doesn't do the business.

Print Spooler (Spoolsv) should be left as 'Automatic'. I thought that changing to 'manual' would mean it would run when either a printer was switched on, or a print job run, but disabling that service actually means that Windows has no printers available (they reappear when the service is back up). Leave running.

IP Helper - Only necessary for IPv6 people. It allows IPv6 to run through IPv4 networks. Disabled.

Computer Browser - Not necessary for standalone setups.

Distributed Link Tracking Client - For linking to NTFS files across networks - Not needed in standalone setups or in setups with no NTFS drives.

Function Discovery Resource Publication - In short, allows other PCs on a network to discover your PC...not needed for standalone setups.

HP CUE DeviceDiscovery service (HP printer/scanner/copier only) (hpqddsvc) - As far as I can see, this is the ethernet part of the HP connection to my printer. The other process I have (hpqcxs08) is, as far as I know, essential for HP multi-function devices.

Internet Connection Sharing - Not needed on standalone setup.

Readyboost - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost - Not needed in my system...recommended for slow setups with little RAM.


That'll do for now...no point in listing all of em yet.

The Black Viper is the oracle when it comes to this. Do a search for their website (he is moving things around at the mo).

Yes, I've seen his wiki. That other site I linked to is quite good too.

So far I've disabled over a dozen services. One or two were disabled then re-enabled, just to see what they did. Things like printer ink monitors and such like.

Not sure if it's a good result, but my boot up memory usage is at 31% after five mins, to allow for AV scans and delayed start processes (1.25GB out of 4GB), and have 41 processes (all users).

There's not a noticable change in performance, but it's not slower either.

Mine is 30% with sabnzbd, thunderbird, flux, foobar, pidgin and antivir running, same memory.

Down to 40 Processes and 1.2GB.

It's amazing just how much carp there is on Vista. I don't mind the aero eye candy so much, but weird processes with little or no function unless program 'x' is used, should be relegated to a manual setting at least.

Vista

Ah, mystery solved.

Btw, you can use process explorer to find the main culprits, listed under winint > services > svchost and then the tooltip gives you the services in each instance. Search indexer for takes 60 meg for instance.

Edited by deleted (Mon 28-Feb-11 19:23:47)

If you tell task manager to show all users (processes) and add a few columns relating to memory, you can get pretty much the same thing. Not as colourful perhaps.

I AM YOUR FATHER

It doesn't let you know which services belong to with svchost instance.

eta; although, I see it does if you right click > go to services.

Edited by deleted (Mon 28-Feb-11 22:03:31)