From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

Disabling Windows background services

From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

Disabling Windows background services

- [Man] A background service is a program in Windows that runs all the time. It provides support for certain features, always at the ready in case the feature is needed. To get a tiny boost in performance, you can disable a background service that you don't need. To view all the background services you need to pop up the start menu, type the word, "Services" and choose the services app. Many of these services are items that you need such as Bluetooth, which you see at services here. And I use Bluetooth on this computer. It's a bad idea to randomly disable a service. So instead you must look for services targeted at things the computer doesn't use. For example, one such service, a hangover from earlier versions of Windows is the fax service. Now I don't have dial up, and the odds are you don't either. So you can disable this service. Double click to open it. And from the start-up type menu, choose disabled, okay. The fax services started manually or only when requested. The remote access connection service, however, is run automatically and it runs all the time. And you see right now it's running here. The description says that it manages dial up and private network connections. And again, this computer doesn't have dial up so I can disable it as well. Open it, start-up type, disabled, okay. Here's a list of other services that are safe to disable for most computers. Please read the description associated with each service before you disable anything to ensure that doing so doesn't alter your computer's behavior in a negative manner. Here are more services. Again, ensure that disabling the service doesn't mess up your computer. Pause the screen to view the lot. Further services worthy of disabling can be found by searching for disabling Windows services on the internet. Review everything carefully and take notes on your actions just in case you need to re enable a service at the services console. I've never seen a major performance boost from disabling a service, but if you do on your computer, the effort was worth it.

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