If you want to optimize your computer and disable services that you either do not need or think are a security risk you are in for some hours of pain. The information that Microsoft provides in the services menu aren’t that useful to decide on the fate of some services. I was able to turn off many services from my experience with Windows XP which I used before. Most services are similar to Windows XP which made it easy for me.

But what if you never took a look at the services before, how would you know which services are relevant and important and should not be disabled ? One site that can help you is the SpeedyVista website which contains a list of all services that could be runnning in Windows Vista with recommendations on how to set them. It also displays the default settings for all versions of Windows Vista in case that you want to revert the changes back to the default values.

The Windows Vista services guide has three different suggestions for the services, those are: safe, tweaked and minimal. It should be very clear what each setting means. Every service of Windows Vista is explained on its on page which is linked from the main services list. The detailed page lists the name, a description, possible consequences for stopping the service and dependencies of the service which should give you a very good understanding and should make the decision whether to disable the service easy.