Microsoft Windows comes with a lot of services you probably won't need. Running today's high end games is demanding enough without the games having to compete with Windows components. You can shut down some services permanently but there may be some that are required some of the time.
For example, do you really need that nice Luna theme hogging resources when you're playing a game? If the game is offline only, do you need all your networking services up and running? I will explain how to automate the starting and stopping of services.
Several resources on the Internet can help you decide which services are needed and which services aren't during gameplay.
Here is an excellent site for Windows Services.
It is very easy to stop services on the fly: open
Computer Management by right clicking on the
My Computer icon then select
Mange and choose
Services from the left hand side (Alternatively go to
Start>Run and type
services.msc then click
Run). Select the service you wish to stop and right click. Then choose stop. You can just as easily start services in the same way.
There is a quicker way, using batch files. A batch file runs a particular command or list of commands in the shell which is the non Graphical User Interface (GUI) side of Windows. The GUI is the desktop, mouse pointer, windows, and task bar (everything you see on the screen under normal Windows). Batch files are just text files that the computer reads as a set of commands. There are many commands you can use in batch files, but we only need one or two to change the status of services.
First, create a new text document in Notepad or similar. Now enter:
net stop "SERVICENAME". Replace SERVICENAME with the actual service name you want to stop. You can find this by opening services.msc or the Computer Management and double clicking on the service (to open its preferences). The Service name is greyed out at the top. Now save the text document as anything memorable with
.bat at the end (.bat is the file extension of a batch file).
Example:
net stop "Themes"
You can repeat those steps for starting a service by replacing
net stop with
net start. It is possible to stop multiple services in a single batch file. Just add another net stop below the first and repeat for as many services as you want.
Example of starting multiple services:
net start "Themes"
net start "Netman"
net start "Dhcp"
Double click on the new stop batch file to execute the commands before launching a game. After exiting the game double click the start batch file, unless you are shutting down as the status of the services will be reset with a restart.
You can also make a new batch file for each game, and add the command:
start "" "C:\Program Files\Game\game.exe" after the
net stop commands (substituting in the game's path). This will launch the game after all the services have been stopped.
If you really wanted to get smart you can add
/wait in between the
"" and
"C:\Program Files\Game\game.exe" then add all the
net start commands to the end. This would stop the services, launch the game, and then when you quit the game it will start the services again automatically. Please note that this keeps cmd.exe open while the game is running (it uses 1700KB RAM).
If you want to integrate these game-running batch files into your system you can place the batch files in a folder out of the way and point the game launching shortcuts towards your batch file instead of the game executable (.exe). In this way I have all my game shortcuts leading to the batch file which shuts off the services I don't need during gameplay.
An example of my finished batch file (with only three services stopped, my actual files have more) is:
net stop "Themes"
net stop "Netman"
net stop "Dhcp"
start "" /wait "C:\Program Files\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\Oblivion.exe"
net start "Themes"
net start "Netman"
net start "Dhcp"
