Sean Henderson Dot Com

Windows XP by default comes with a bunch of useless services enabled that waste memory, take up CPU time, and open up security holes.  About a year ago, someone told me about this guy on the internet called "Black Viper" who created a table of all Windows XP’s useless services.  One of the columns was called "Safe" which "is the configuration that 95% of the people will be able to use with little side effects."  One day, I installed a clean copy of Windows XP Pro SP2.  Then I went through all the services’ default settings after the install, compared them to Black Viper’s table, and created a new list of only the services that were changed from Automatic to either Manual or Disabled by Black Viper.  I used this configuration many times on hundreds if not thousands of computers with minimal complaints from people.  For the most part, this configuration seems credible.  I marked four services in red that might need to stay set to Automatic
depending on the person’s needs.  The rest are pretty much garbage as Black Viper asserted.  Below is the "Safe" list that I put together:

Set these services to Disabled as suggested by Black Viper’s "Safe" settings:

• Computer Browser
• Error Reporting Service
• Indexing Service
• Net Logon *might need to keep this automatic if doing a net use command from a remote machine*
• NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing
• Network Location Awareness (NLA)
• Network Provisioning Service
• Portable Media Serial Number Service
• QoS RSVP
• Remote Desktop Help Session Manager
• Remote Registry
• Secondary Logon
• Security Center
• Server *keep this automatic if doing file and print sharing*
• Smart Card
• SSDP Discovery Service
• System Restore Service *keep this automatic if you want the ability to go back to a "last known good configuration" *
• TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
• Telnet
• Uninterruptible Power Supply
• Universal Plug and Play Device Host
• WebClient
• Windows Time
• Wireless Zero Configuration *keep this automatic if using windows to configure wireless networks*
• WMI Performance Adapter

Set these services to Manual as suggested by Black Viper’s "Safe" settings:

• Distributed Link Tracking Client
• Help and Support
• Logical Disk Manager

For awhile, I used to disable all these services one by one using services.msc which took a lot of time.  To speed things up a bit, I created a registry script to disable them all at once in one click–a real time saver!

download the .reg registry script

I spent a few hours double checking everything in this registry script.  I’ve had great success with this method.  I am however open to suggestions or skepticism.