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What can I safely disable on Windows 7 or do to speed up Windows 7 if I'm developing ASP.NET apps on it? I suspect there are services and things I don't really need, but I'm not sure where to tweak without disrupting the dev environment.

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  • There is nothing you can change in the services that would speed up your pc.
    – ZippyV
    May 29, 2011 at 18:04
  • @ZippyV not true. For example some devs have SQL running on their machine for no reason. Services can consume memory making swapping more likely. May 29, 2011 at 20:27
  • I was thinking more about a standard Windows installation. SQL Server is not a service that gets installed by accident. Does it use a lot of memory even when no calls to a database have been made yet?
    – ZippyV
    May 29, 2011 at 20:47
  • Exactly. I have VS 2008 and SQL 2005 installed, and I am usually good about disabling the SQL services on the localhost since I develop remotely a lot. Just disabled VSS writer today. Stuff like that moreso than Windows services.
    – Caveatrob
    May 29, 2011 at 21:04

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Though disabling services would not be the first choice for improving the performance of a development machine, if you really do want to go down that path then you may find the guides at BlackViper a good place to start. He provides a very detailed chart of services and gives suggested "Safe", "Tweaked", and "Barebones" configurations.

Again, there are better ways to improve the speed of a development machine, but as you asked specifically about services, that's where I would start.

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  • Let's talk about the other ways, short of adding an SSD, which I can't afford for now...
    – Caveatrob
    May 30, 2011 at 1:51
  • @Caveatrob - get a hybrid drive - barely more $ than a regular drive with some very impressive speed gains.
    – KevinDTimm
    May 30, 2011 at 7:08
  • I agree with Kevin, the main improvements would come from speeding up disk IO. Scott Guthrie has blogged about the performance of Visual Studio and the focus was on fast hard drives.
    – Ryan
    May 30, 2011 at 12:59

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