Hi,

I was wondering if it's possible to have a simplified list of services that we need and don't need. I don't know much about services and the requirements so it'd really help me a lot.

Disabling services to increase performance is a MYTH. SERIOUSLY. DONT BELIEVE ANY "Service Tweak guides" on the internet, LEAVE THEM AS DEFAULT.

Windows 5.x [Windows XP and Windows 2003] have inferior CPU Priority Scheduling compared to the new Windows 6 [Vista/2008] family. I have done a LOT of research on this, and my own tests. And I have a very slow computer - a P4 with only 1GB of RAM. Disabling EVERY service that wasnt critical provided NO performance increase in gaming compared to the default service configuration. Windows 5 is sh*tty and will benefit from disabled services, but Windows 6 is uber l33t and has very VERY impressive kernel-level thread prioritization. It is the single reason why I refuse to go back to XP

With that said, there may be some services that you actually DO want to disable for non-performance reasons. Windows Update for example to sure-shot block Auto Updates, or the DOMAIN-SERVER related services because you are 101% sure they will never be needed. But I highly suggest that you leave the defaults for maximum compatibility - I made the mistake of disabling things like "Application Compatibility" among others and half my programs crashed randomly or InstallShield programs [90% of games] would fail installing.

If you don't know much about services, I highly suggest you just leave it. If it aint broke, don't fix it.

JonusC, I agree to an extent. Disabling unneeded services will not by any means result in a snappy or more responsive computer. Sure you free some more memory but over time as the operating system and memory gets consumed from computer being on for a long time your resources slowly begin to creep back to the level it was normally at when no services were disabled. However, by disabling services you don't need you reduce system overhead and Windows does not need to load as much at once on startup, thus you are reducing your boot time which can be seen as a performance gain. However once you are booted to desktop its really no different then having every single service enabled.

I'd amplify what halladayrules is saying: while individual performance tweaks like disabling services alone will not typically offer noticeable performance improvement, and may even be in the window of margin of error of any performance measurement because tweaks of this kind are not effecting substantial performance bottlenecks -- a concatenation of performance adjustments to Windows NT 6.1 that includes disabling unnecessary Services does in fact free valuable resources, not just RAM, but reduces i/o traffic, frees threads etc. for a performance improvement that is measurable with demanding applications, benchmarks, and games. Not 'myth' but measureable fact...