Windows Vista Services Explained

Do you remember Blackviper's Windows Services recommendations for Windows XP? The site helped me a lot when I started using Windows XP as it provided detailed information about each Windows XP service. It also provided users with recommendations sorted into groups such as safe, tweaked or bare bones that helped you turn off services on the system to improve its performance and often harden its security at the same time.

SpeedyVista is offering a similar list for Windows Vista. It is even more important for Vista users to turn off services that are not needed as the operating system is using more resources than XP. By disabling unneeded services, it is possible to drop that resource usage to free up resources for other tasks.

You can still open the Services Manager by opening the run box with Windows-R, typing in services.msc and hitting the enter key on the keyboard.

The table of services has the following structure. It starts with the service name and an explanation of it. It then lists the status of the service in Vista Home, Vista Business and Vista Ultimate and finishes with recommendations for safe settings and tweaked ones.

All services link to additional information that list the dependencies and requirements which is a good way of checking if it is safe to disable the service. If another service that you have to use depends on the service that you want to disable you can't do it.

Update: The Speedy Vista web page is blocked by several antivirus applications. Our suggestion is to visit the Black Viper Windows Vista SP2 service configurations page instead for all the services explanations and guidelines that you will ever need.

Here you get a list of all Windows Vista Services, including those integrated in Service Pack 1 or 2, and recommendations for specific usage cases.

I recommend you start with the safe option first and go from there. Why? Because you may end up disabling services that are needed on your system otherwise. You can click on any service on the website for detailed information about it that may help you decide whether it is required on your system or not.

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