Windows 10: Recommended Source That Tells Me Which *Automatic* Services To Disable

It's interesting to check the current recommendations on the Black Viper site for Windows 10 services, ( currently still at 1703 so may change soon), and find that the fact is that the vast majority if not all the system services are recommended to be set to their Microsoft defaults.

 

I think, that he keeps the webpage running for legacy purposes (ADs?), since it is being recommended as number one source, but he does not really care about tweaking services anymore by the looks of it. He just adds new services and that is it.

 

From my taskman/details, I only have 17, seventeen, svchost.exe's running.

 

Please refer to this tutorial by Shawn, here on TF. The number of SVCHOST.EXE you are seeing is not by mistake. It has been like that for over a year, by design. For machines with adequate memory (Approx. 4GB+), the MS memory management was changed to take advantage of services running in separate processes for stability and efficiency. It's explained well in this tut. You can modify the behavior, if you wish.

*Arrow Change Split Threshold for svchost.exe in Windows 10 General Tips Tutorials

 

Hi, yes I disabled ctfmon. Was a bit of a pain to figure out how to disable it (again), don't even know why it decided to come back after 1709 update.

Oh yes, one very sketchy thing in my life, in general, how things don't happen when they're supposed to. I got my 1709 update... in mid-November (a few days ago). That's a September update. That doesn't make any sense. Please no explanation to why I got it so late.

I used to really enjoy using the computer when I practically had all the memory I needed for any project I'm doing on the computer. I still have the same exact minimal programs/processes that run in the background as before, yet things have really slowed the hell down.

 

I fully agree with Barman 58, disabling system services is a bad idea. Certainly there are services that could be safely disabled in specific situations. The difficult question is, which ones? The problem is that there is no documentation outside of Microsoft that fully describes what each service does. Many do more than what the official documentation states. And with an OS like Windows 10 that could change from one update to the next.

There was a time in the past when I experimented with disabling services I thought were not needed. This resulted in some difficult to troubleshoot problems and cost much time. I have no desire to repeat that. The performance benefits, meager as they are, are not worth the risks.

Process memory usage in any modern OS is highly dynamic. On bootup the memory usage of the svchost.exe processes may seem high but that is only because there is no better use for it. When available memory is plentiful the system memory manager will let processes use pretty much whatever memory they want. But if you start a large application this usage will be automatically trimmed back, drastically if necessary, to meet the demand.

Determining the impact a specific service has on performance, even with expert knowledge, would be very difficult. Subjective evaluations of performance, subject as they are to the placebo effect, mean almost nothing. Actual performance measurements are needed and that is far more difficult to do than most people imagine.

There is a good reason for having the larger numbers of svchost.exe processes in Windows 10. In older systems most services were hosted by a relative small number of svchost.exe processes. This minimized memory usage but had some problems. One problem was that determining the resource usage of individual services was very difficult. Another is that a failure in one service could bring down all those shared in the same svchost.exe process and that could have serious consequences.

The general policy of one service per svchost.exe as in recent versions of Windows 10 solves these problems with a relatively small increase in memory usage. On low memory systems the policy reverts to the previous shared svchost.exe model. One service per process also allows the security permissions of each svchost.exe process to be fine tuned to what is needed and no more. This enhances security.