Most of us who are attempting to turn Windoze into a useful & efficient tool that’s a pleasure to use will, sooner or later, attempt to reduce the number of services running in the background. In order to do this in a rational, logical manner it should be obvious that before we can decide whether or not to disable (or otherwise change the state of) any service we need to know what that service actually does on our system. Now you could just kill all the services that you don’t like the name of or you could try and find that mythical secret list of services that are “Safe” to disable on every computer. But as you can see I prefer the 1st method.
For a variety of reasons getting real-world info on M$ services is not easy. And I was whining about this problem here on NTL a while ago and garlin replied with a link to this M$ page that lists their recommendations for 21H2 & later IoT Enterprise versions as to which services could be disabled. I was (initially) so enthused I decided to build a worksheet that I could use to make an list of candidates of services that might be disabled. Doing this with a spreadsheet allowed me to display all of the necessary data in a pageview that didn’t have to be scrolled horizontally. Like this:
Great, you say, but “where’s the info on what each service does?”. For that I built a comments box for each service that holds all the descriptive data. (see the tiny red arrow in the 2nd column) Pulling up the comment window looks like this:
So, yes, this was a lot of work. Perhaps more than can be justified in order to tweak one single computer. For example each service entry contains info from the M$ page linked above, the CIS W10 Enterprise recommendations, Black Viper’s W0 recommendations as well as many other misc sources for each and every entry. Which is why i’m uploading here in the hopes that some of you will check it out and find it useful. But, more importantly, I hope that those of you that know way more than I do about Windoze (ie: most of you) will also post your corrections and additions. Because, as I found while doing this project, there is no comprehensive, publicly accessible database of what M$ services actually do. None. So let’s build one that we can all use.
(i’ll collect your feedback and update the database accordingly)
1/10/25: Added updates from AsadAlrafidain, garlin & Ihadaface
For a variety of reasons getting real-world info on M$ services is not easy. And I was whining about this problem here on NTL a while ago and garlin replied with a link to this M$ page that lists their recommendations for 21H2 & later IoT Enterprise versions as to which services could be disabled. I was (initially) so enthused I decided to build a worksheet that I could use to make an list of candidates of services that might be disabled. Doing this with a spreadsheet allowed me to display all of the necessary data in a pageview that didn’t have to be scrolled horizontally. Like this:
Great, you say, but “where’s the info on what each service does?”. For that I built a comments box for each service that holds all the descriptive data. (see the tiny red arrow in the 2nd column) Pulling up the comment window looks like this:
So, yes, this was a lot of work. Perhaps more than can be justified in order to tweak one single computer. For example each service entry contains info from the M$ page linked above, the CIS W10 Enterprise recommendations, Black Viper’s W0 recommendations as well as many other misc sources for each and every entry. Which is why i’m uploading here in the hopes that some of you will check it out and find it useful. But, more importantly, I hope that those of you that know way more than I do about Windoze (ie: most of you) will also post your corrections and additions. Because, as I found while doing this project, there is no comprehensive, publicly accessible database of what M$ services actually do. None. So let’s build one that we can all use.
(i’ll collect your feedback and update the database accordingly)
1/10/25: Added updates from AsadAlrafidain, garlin & Ihadaface
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