This tutorial shows you how to boost performance by stopping and disabling unnecessary services on Windows XP Home Edition systems with Service Pack 2 installed. In the end, 46 services could be disabled; 16 services could be defined to run in "Manual" mode; only 17 services need to be defined to run in "Automatic" mode.

With less services running, your system will need less than 140MB of memory to start up. This will greatly boost your system performance.

The suggested minimum set of running services can still allow you to visit Internet. But local network services are not supported.

Summary of suggested services settings for Windows XP Home Edition SP2 system:

Service Name	Startup Type	Usage Note
Alerter	Disabled	Used for delivering local network alerts.
Application Layer Gateway Service	Disabled	Base service for Windows firewall or Internet Connection Sharing.
Application Management	Disabled	May needed for removing applications.
ASP.NET State Service	Disabled	Used by ASP .NET applications.
Automatic Updates	Disabled	Automatically getting system updates from Microsoft Websites.
Background Intelligent Transfer Service	Disabled	Used by Automatic Updates to transfer files.
ClipBook	Disabled	Used by ClipBook Viewer.
COM+ Event System	Disabled	Used for System Event Notification.
COM+ System Application	Disabled	Used to support COM+ components.
Computer Browser	Disabled	Maintains a list of computers on the local network.
Cryptographic Services	Manual	May needed for Windows Media Player.
DCOM Server Process Launcher	Automatic	Needed for Windows fireall functions.
DHCP Client	Automatic	Needed for Internet connections.
Distributed Link Tracking Client	Disabled	Used for tracking files over local networks.
Distributed Transaction Coordinator	Disabled	Used for local network resource management.
DNS Client	Disabled	Used to resolve DNS names.
Error Reporting Service	Disabled	Used to send error reports to Microsoft support center.
Event Log	Automatic	This is an essential service.
Fast User Switching Compatibility	Disabled	Used for switching between logged in users.
Fax	Disabled	Used for sending and receiving fax.
Help and Support	Disabled	Used for getting on-line support documents from Microsoft.
HTTP SSL	Manual	Used for visiting secure Websites with HTTPS protocol.
Human Interface Device Access	Disabled	Used to support hot buttons on special input devices.
IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service	Disabled	Used to support Windows built-in CD burning function.
Indexing Service	Disabled	Used to index and share files over local networks.

Continue to Part II.