SERVICES & $NTUninstall (blue)

Take a look at this page.  I ended up disabling 37 of the services that are started by default in most XP Pro systems.  My startup time decreased greatly.

http://www.blkviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

After you work out which services to disable, here is how you do it:  Click on Start, then type services.msc in the Run dialog box.  For each service listed in the window which opens up that you want to disable at the next boot, right click on it, select Properties from the context menu that scrolls out, then click on the downward pointing arrow at the end of the list box for Startup Type on the General tab, choose Disable, then click OK. After you've done all your disabling, reboot.



Uhoh, the original page is still under construction.  Try this page instead:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041128084144/www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

And here's an informative page about the $NT uninstall files:

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/Hotfix_backup.htm

The "Blue" entries you are talking about are the uninstall folders for your Windows Updates.  If you ever needed to uninstall one of them, this is where it would get the files from. You can remove them if you are sure you won't be uninstalling the updates.  They appear blue because they are compressed since they have not been used for some time.

I don't quite understand why it matters what number of services you are running and why you would want to cut them down by any random number but the BlackViper page LeeTutor posted is the best source I've found for knowing which ones you can stop.  After a few rebuilds of my computers I just gave up on it though since my machine seems to run decent even with the defaults running.

1. Disable services cautiously, as some may be necessary for proper operation. The black viper page has some very good ideas. the downside to disabling services is that even though performance is improved, you may not have total functionality.

allways a tradeoff.

2. The "Blue" files are for windows updates uninstalls. Just ignore them.

Good Luck,

Black Viper's pages have been widely debunked as nonsense, for both old, medium, and new "high-end" systems.

If these tasks are not malware or "bad", I see absolutely no reason to change anything.  You may wish to clean out tasks that you no longer use that run at system startup (Adobe's junk, etc.) but unless you break out your stopwatch when you restart, and you also restart many times per day, what's the issue?

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=34&threadid=1678445&enterthread=y&arctab=y

^^  Above is a good site detailing exactly how and why the Black Viper site is nonsense.  It shows tests done with a variety of machines, and discusses downsides to doing as BV suggests - and there are many downsides.  

Microsoft configured these machines this way for a reason.  

To respond to my fellow members' comments:

for Eagle6990 and dclive: the "issue," my wonderful friends, is that I have over 40 services loading and it slows things down quite a bit.

Next, not only are there a lot of services; but, I noticed one thing in particular: the startup is very slow (2 minutes+). Although I get to the desktop very quickly, the systray (which normally displays only 4 or 5 icons -relatively small amount) is very slow in displaying the icons; and, sometimes, only 2 icons (instead of the usual 4 or 5) are displayed.

I just want to speed things up a bit and get the icons in the systray to display regularly.

Thanks so much, all of you, for your wonderful help.  You guys/gals are GREAT!!!

P.S. What with the new intel chip and the new dual-boot program, I am considering going over to apple. I have just about had it with Bill Gates & Co. and their bloated OS.

GadgetDude