If you want to squeeze every last drop of performance out of your PC, you might consider disabling some of the born Windows services. But which ones should y'all disable? And which ones tin you safely disable?

Important: Disabling Services is Not a Silver Bullet

Here at How-To Geek we're not big fans of disabling Windows Services – at to the lowest degree, we don't think that disabling Microsoft services that are built into Windows is a terribly great idea most of the time. Virtually of them are highly optimized and actually have up virtually zip CPU time, and they end upwards being paged out of active memory to the pagefile, so they aren't really wasting your system memory anyway. In that location'southward a lot of others that are critical to proper functioning of the operating system, and you'll break things past but randomly disabling them.

Lest you think we're crazy, we do recommend disabling services – simply not congenital-in services.  The services that you should examine very closely are all of the third-party services that slow your computer down. If you have a lot of software installed, in that location's probably a lot of them. Yous should remove software you don't utilise, then disable services if necessary (being careful since evidently you tin intermission things).

If you're using Windows 8, you'll observe that organization services have been even more than highly optimized, use less memory, and many of them have been combined to utilize less running processes at the aforementioned time. Nosotros'd fence that fifty-fifty though the Modern apps are fairly pointless on a laptop or desktop, the regular Desktop on Windows 8 is a lot more streamlined and optimized for speed, so upgrading is non a bad idea for operation alone.

It's as well worth pointing out that if you're in the mood to tweak your estimator to speed upwardly the functioning, you'll get a lot more mileage out of removing software that yous don't need, 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 most disabling services, our friends over at the 7 Tutorials spider web site have written upwards a set up of guidelines to what tin can be safely disabled, forth with some helpful information about why each ane tin can be removed without hurting your PC. Yous'll discover that they recommend setting many services to manual instead of disabled (and some of those are already set to manual past default, so disabling them won't help performance).

Simply Requite Me a List Already

Since we can't merely refer you to somebody else without adding our own thoughts, hither'due south our quick list of some built-in Windows services which are generally enabled past default that you lot can disable safely. When you read the total list over at seven Tutorials, brand sure to read their explanation for each one before but disabling things.

  • Print Spooler (if you don't use a printer or print-to-PDF)
  • Bluetooth Support (if you lot don't use Bluetooth)
  • Remote Registry (information technology'due south not unremarkably running by default, just you lot tin disable information technology for safety)
  • Remote Desktop (There are 3 services. If y'all don't employ Remote desktop, disable them)

Notation: We don't recommend disabling the Windows Time service. Disabling it won't assistance your PC's performance (it's set to manual already and just runs occasionally, and information technology's much improve to have your computer time gear up properly, for many reasons including file timestamp integrity.

Disabling Services? I Forgot How

Aye, nigh of y'all probably didn't forget. Only in instance, hither's how. Open up the Windows First Screen or Start Carte du jour, type in services.msc and hit the Enter key to bring upwardly the Services panel.

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

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