Gallery

How windows works

Posted on 27 Jan 2005 at 12:14

Another way to access the Management Console is to go to Start, select Run and then type services.msc in the Open window before hitting Enter.

But Microsoft provides an alternative route to Services: the System Configuration Utility, better known by its abbreviated title of MSConfig. To invoke the utility, type msconfig.exe in the Open window of the Run dialog and press Enter. You will see that the fifth tab is labelled Services. But you should avoid this utility.

Quite apart from anything else, it gives access to services that are absolutely critical to the continued health of your operating system. It seems to have a nasty tendency to disable services simply by clicking in the checkbox next to their title, rather than waiting for the Apply button to be pressed, and it has a button on it labelled Disable All, the purpose of which I cannot even begin to imagine.

About the only thing in its favour is a checkbox labelled Hide All Microsoft Services, which does let you see what third-party apps are running. But as there is a detail column that does precisely the same thing, even that function is of limited use.

The actual number of services running on a system will vary a great deal. While this article covers only the services provided by Microsoft, you will also come across a range of others.

For example, looking at the services running on our test system, I can see that the Panda anti-virus software has several installed and running services; there are single tools from Executive Software's Diskeeper; an iPod service from Apple Computer (presumably placed there by iTunes); a Macromedia Licensing service; one from nVidia; another from SoundMAX and yet more besides.

According to the details column labelled Essential in the MSConfig utility, only three of the running services seem to be indispensable. Two are for Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) and the other is for the Distributed Common Object Model (DCOM). You could do some serious damage if you took that to mean you could disable everything else to save a shed-load of resources and then your machine would run much faster.

Even if we regarded all other Microsoft services as non-essential (which some most assuredly are not), I cannot imagine the anti-virus software would operate too well if we turned off all its services. Avoid MSConfig where services are concerned. It is dangerous.

Trying to work out which services to disable can be tricky. The safest option is to leave everything alone, but that's never a reasonable excuse for people who want to get more from their PC and understand how it works. So let's examine which of the default Windows XP Professional services set to run automatically can actually be configured differently in order to optimise processor and memory usage.

There are 96 Windows XP Professional services installed by Microsoft, never mind the ones placed there by third-party programs, so the Services dialog can be a busy place. Fire it up now (Start/Run, services.msc) and let's take a look at them.

You will notice there are two tabs at the bottom of the dialog, one labelled Extended and the other Standard. Always keep it on Extended, as the service descriptions will be displayed on the left-hand side of the window when you click on the service entry. In Standard mode, you will need a 30in screen or you will have to be prepared to do a lot of scrolling.

Click twice on the Status heading and then count up how many services you actually have running. The machine I used in this instance tests all sorts of software, and is also used for word processing, so it is never needed to be optimised. Consequently, there were 57 services running.