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I remember there were guides for Windows XP on all of the unnecessary services and things that you could turn off in a default install to make the system a bit more 'snappy'.

Is there such a guide for Windows 7? Suggestions?

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4 Answers

up vote 15 down vote accepted

By and large the rule of thumb for Windows 7 is: Don't Overtweak Anything. Seriously. Just leave the services on and don't try to turn off things you don't think you need. Microsoft Engineers have spent more time thinking about optimizing the system than you have, and the best you'll ever be able to do is save a few megabytes of memory at the cost of hard to diagnose technical issues down the road when you've forgotten what you turned off and why.

The system is quite good enough as it is; it's not 1998 any more.

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Well said. I have Win7 on a slightly older laptop and let the base install do its thing. I think the only thing I did was turn off the Tablet PC services and a few other things I really didn't need. – Dillie-O Jul 15 '09 at 17:05
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Blackviper has a lots of good information on service configurations here.

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I'm sure if you look hard enough you can always find services and features you can disable simply because you don't use them. However unless you really know what you are doing, you really shouldn't try. Especially on Windows 7. Its loads faster than any previous Windows OS and is already tweaked to perform very well on any relatively modern machine (even netbooks!).

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up vote 1 down vote

As others already said, you shouldn't really tweak anything cause it already works quite well.

Only thing I do after installing it something like this:

  • Setting a registry setting which gives you more informative messages on shut down and start up.
  • Setting automatic restart on failure to false (If my computer blue screens, I want to know why).
  • Setting the time it takes for taskbar previews to pop up to zero.

Disable automatic reboot after system failure
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl]
"AutoReboot"=dword:00000000

Activate Verbose Status
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
"VerboseStatus"=dword:00000001

Change the taskbar mouse hover time
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse]
"MouseHoverTime"="0"

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Out of curiosity, what are the more informative messages on shut down and start up? (And the registry setting) – Umber Ferrule Feb 26 '10 at 10:29
Added the registry settings in my answer now. What messages appear, you can just try out for yourself. I don't remember what they are. But I do like to know what is going on. Like if something takes more time than usual I like to see what it is working on instead of just Shutting down Windows, cause I already know that hat is what it is doing :p – Svish Feb 28 '10 at 8:36

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