Should You Ever Disable a Windows Service?

If you’ve ever looked for ways to make your Windows PC faster, you’ve probably come across several websites offering to disable or disable certain Windows services. Other websites say this is dangerous and you should never contact Windows services. So who’s right?

Well, the argument can be basically broken down into whether you know what you are doing. In my opinion, if you don’t even know what a Windows service is, you really shouldn’t turn off any service. If you have a basic understanding of services and programs, you can only turn off third-party services.

As a rule, I never disable any services that are installed by default in Windows or from Microsoft. If you think that a service is unnecessary and might slow down your computer, you should Google it and then try to uninstall the program or Windows component that originally creates the service.

However, when you disable third-party services, your chances of messing up something on your computer are greatly reduced. Most of these third party services do not need to be enabled. They usually check for updates in the background or something similar.

Windows Services website

First, there are two ways to view all the services on your Windows PC. You can go to Start and type services to open the desktop application, or you can type MSCONFIG to open the system configuration utility.

Click on the Services tab and you will see a list of all services with checkboxes next to each one. If you uncheck the service, it will be disabled the next time you restart your computer.

Another way is to hit the start button and enter services, which will also list all services, but each service must be manually disabled and you cannot quickly hide all Microsoft services like in MSCONFIG. The only advantage is that it gives you a detailed description of each service.

Check non-Microsoft services

In MSCONFIG, select the Hide all Microsoft services check box. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t even bother with disabling any Microsoft service because it’s not worth the problems that you will run into later. Many sites will tell you that it is possible to disable service X or service Y because it is only used when your computer is part of a domain, or only required when a certain feature is enabled in Windows, etc., but you can never be sure when you suddenly need to start and use the service.

After you hide Microsoft services, you should really have no more than 10-20 services left. If you have more, there may be too many programs installed on your computer. If you have a lot of them and need all of these programs, turning off some services will probably make your computer run faster.

So how do you know which service to disable and which to leave? The only third party services I’ve come across that you shouldn’t touch are those that have the words wireless, intel, or display in them. Wireless monitors your wifi card, and if you disable this service, your wireless connection will disappear.

Intel has quite a few services, and I usually just leave them alone because they never use a lot of memory or consume a processor. Finally, all video card services must remain enabled. This includes everything NVIDIA or AMD or the word graphics in the name of the service. Otherwise, everything else is fair play.

Let’s take a look at some of the services on my computer. As you can see, I have practically disabled all update related services. Does this mean that Adobe and Google software will never be updated? No, it just means that I have to do it manually, which I do all the time, so it doesn’t really matter to me. I also disabled Steam and TechSmith because I don’t use these programs very often and the services are automatically enabled after starting the programs.

It is worth mentioning right away that unchecking a service does not mean that it will never run on your computer again. It just means that it doesn’t start automatically when you first boot your computer. When you start a program manually, the services associated with that program are automatically started.

I left Intel Rapid Storage, Malwarebytes, NVIDIA, and Realtek audio services enabled for obvious reasons. I want my anti-malware software to work and I want my graphics and sound to work properly. If you are not sure by the name of the service what it does or what program it is associated with, go to the other service application I mentioned and try reading the description. Anything you are not sure about should be left on.

Also, if you disable what you need, just go back to MSCONFIG and check the box to enable it again. If you’re just messing around with third party services, you can’t mess up that much. I also recommend disabling one service at a time, restarting it, running on your computer for a while, and then trying another service.

Finally, you may find that certain programs are launched that do not appear in the list of services. In these cases, you need to disable startup programs, which is in another section. If your computer is running slowly, read my previous post on how to speed up Windows Enjoy!

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