I think you'd be floored... or maybe not... on just how many "services" are preloaded onto Vista. Most of these applications are running unseen and in the background of your system. Fortunately, quite a few are not necessary to the function of Vista so they can be disabled!
Click the following...
Start ->
Control Panel ->
Administrative Tools ->
Services.
Double click the service you want to disable and that services Properties box will pop up. In this example we see the
Properties box is that of
Block Level Backup Engine Services.
To the right of
Startup Type you'll find a drop down menu, select
Disable.
There's some debate on just how many of these services can be turned off safely. Here is PC101's list of "safe to disable" services...
- IKE and AuthIP IPsec Keying Modules
- Remote Registry
- UPnP Device Host
- Webclient
- Windows Error Reporting Service
- Windows Image Acquisition (WIA)
Now, if you're not doing any networking you can also disable...
- Computer Browser
- Distributed Link Tracking Client
- Net Login
- Network Access Protection Agent
- Peer Name Resolution Protocol
- Peer Networking Identity Manager
- PnP-X IP Bus Enumerator
- SSDP Discovery
- Server
- TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
- Workstation
We'll do some more research on what other services you can turn off!
Linear Mode
