Services, Processes & Startup items that are safe to disable and why

Hi all.

I wish to compile a list of Services, Processes & Start-up items that are safe to disable with reasons as to why.

Primarily targeting Windows 7 Home Premium (32-bit, x86 edition) to start with, then leveraging from there.

This will enable faster boot ups, and much more responsive systems.

I do not wish to cover registry tweaks, fsutils, or other tweaks outside this scope - at least not in this topic!

I also wish to discuss various ways to start/stop, end, disable, etc these items. Including batch files that just end processes.

For example, how to create a batch file to perform the following:

1) Terminate everything you may want to stop prior to loading an intensive application (such as a game)

2) Wait 20 seconds

3) Do it again up to three times (as most auto reloads of services give up after their process is terminated three times - this is standard Microsoft Windows behaviour).

4) Wait 20 minutes and do it again or terminate.

Specifically I have an interest in terminating, or ideally not even loading:

1) Services, Processes & Start-up items that are memory intensive but do not use much CPU Time.

That is, Services, Processes & Start-up items with a large Peak Working Set, Private Working Set, and Working Set.

2) Services, Processes & Start-up items that perform an excessive amount of Page Faults (hard, or soft).

3) Services, Processes & Start-up items that perform an excessive amount of storage I/O (Reads, Writes & Other).

4) Other undesirable Services, Processes & Start-up items.


I believe that this is the kind of task that would both require & strongly benefit community input.

As a user I am only currently running 11 processes, however there are currently 49 processes running on my system.

They are easily split into categories:

LOCAL SERVICE

NETWORK SERVICE

(LOCAL) SYSTEM

Microsoft or 3rd party