Murder by service, 1-2-3

“But my new system’s so slo-o-o-w.”

That’s among the worst complaints for the consultant looking to get out the door within the next half hour. The complaint never has a single root cause; it’s usually a combination of installed software and a posse of native services that run by default. A good way to minimize this particular whiny buzz in your ear is to take a page out of Tony Soprano’sbook and start eliminating enemies of the Good Network Family by removing unnecessary Windows XP services — and in case you’re wondering, the system installs 36 services by default. Massacring a few of these bad boys speeds up not only boot time, but often general performance, as well.

Disabling a service is simply a matter of opening the Control Panel, hitting the Services icon and disabling selected services in their Properties box. Pushing these changes out to users can be a desk-to-desk jaunt, or a properly configured Ghost-ing episode.

To begin, as Sasserso aptly demonstrated, Automatic Windows Update is a prime candidate. In any enterprise with more than five machines, it’s best to push out your updates after testing them, so there’s simply no need for each workstation to track this stuff on its own. And as a side benefit, you’re closing off what’s rapidly becoming a new security hole in your network. Bang, bang!

Related to Windows Update is the Upload Manager. This stool pigeon sends Microsoft information about the workstation so that Redmond’s resources can go to work hunting up new drivers for everything you just spent weeks tweaking so it would finally work together. Users can then automatically download the new drivers using Update and mess up your entire asset list, if not the machine itself. Personally, my workstations are tested prior to releasing any new drivers into production, and I’ve been much happier that way in the long run. If you’re killing Update, murder this one, too.

Another service you should certainly kill regardless of performance reasons is Remote Registry. This service allows the user to access and modify the registry of other systems on the network. Fabulous for administrators, it’s a flaming horror in the hands of malevolent users or even someone having a Curious Georgemoment. Make it die.

My next most-hated enemy is Messenger Service. OK, if you’re running Live Communications Serveror have some similar need for IM, then I’ll be outvoted. But for the rest of the country that simply uses IM to keep in touch with relatives and online dating services, I say do those things from home. It’s a resource hog, it’s constantly annoying users with pop-up dialogs, it’s usually not for business, and, yeah, it’s another security hole. Two behind the ear.

Next, check your Scheduled Tasks folder in the Control Panel. A few anti-virus or backup programs make use of this service to schedule scans and updates, but others install their own schedulers for this purpose. In a network using Norton AntiVirus Corporate Edition with LiveUpdate and local folder network syncing for server backup, there should be little need to schedule anything on local machines. If the Scheduled Tasks folder is empty, then your system is running the Task Scheduler service for no apparent reason. Nuke it.

Now we come to a bunch of the most useless services, rather than those that might actually cause harm. Server Service is on the border between useless and potentially harmful. This service provides RPC support and manages file and print serving on any workstation where it’s running. If your network is like most normal ones, however, your workstations aren’t doing file and print sharing; that’s what servers are for. Bury it in a hole somewhere.

The Error Reporting service is that annoying cretin that pops up the dialog asking you to send an error report every time one of Redmond’s fragile code bases has an episode. If you’ve ever tried it, you know you won’t be getting anything back anyway, so what’s the point in running it? Rub it out.

Killing these services, and more, may sound blood-thirsty, but it speeds up local machine performance and keeps you in tighter control of what’s running on your Windows network. Capice?