A service is a software application that runs continuously in the
background while your computer is on. The Windows operating
system has numerous services that run in the background that
provide basic functions to the system. Network connectivity, visual
support, and external device connectivity such as printer services
are all examples of the types of services that the windows services
provide. Each of these services that are running in the background
take up system resources such as memory and CPU time. Also, during the booting of the operating system, the service has to be
loaded. On most computers, there are nearly 20 services that are
loaded upon startup. Of these 20 services only a handful are
system critical services. All of the others can be disabled. In order
to disable a service, first you will need to know more about what
the most common services do.
You can find a list of services launching with Windows Xp by going
to start -> run and typing “services.msc” without quotations. You
will see the following:
