Stopping Services for better gaming

Exactly how did you kill Norton and other background programs in your batch file? I've been searching for the commands, but have come up empty so far.

Disabling the services will increase performance by a significant margin depending on your system. There are other resources consumed other then physical RAM and CPU time. Also, having any background service CAN and WILL have an effect, just by having it there. Killing as many services as possible is great, especially for lower end machines.

Sure, on an Athlon XP 2200+ with 768mb RAM and a 64mb geForce4 or smth it's not gonna be life and death difference, but it is there and is noticeable.

Yet another update to the ongoing project of mine. I've added some commands to kill background tasks. Here is the current list I have going. I will add more once I learn more about some of the background tasks and what they do.

taskkill /S Insert IP Address /F /IM kazaalit.exe /T
taskkill /S Insert IP Address /F /IM Blads.exe /T
taskkill /S Insert IP Address /F /IM navapw32.exe /T
taskkill /S Insert IP Address /F /IM wimampa.exe /T
taskkill /S Insert IP Address /F /IM Mediadet.exe /T
taskkill /S Insert IP Address /F /IM MBM5.exe /T
taskkill /S Insert IP Address /F /IM explorer.exe /T
taskkill /S Insert IP Address /F /IM Prime95.exe /T
taskkill /S Insert IP Address /F /IM taskmrg.exe /T
taskkill /S Insert IP Address /F /IM SKSMAILD.exe /T
taskkill /S Insert IP Address /F /IM EM_EXEC.exe /T
taskkill /S Insert IP Address /F /IM CTNotify.exe /T
taskkill /S Insert IP Address /F /IM Navapsvc.exe /T

Doing this saved me an additional 30 or 40 MB of memory space. A big improvement IMO considering I'm not counting the 15MB I can save by disabling the services. Let's see some quick math tells me that's around 50MB of extra memory and I have 512 already installed so I've gotten a 9.765625% improvement in overall memory when gaming. Not too bad!!! Let's see if you had 256MB then it would be a 19.53125% improvement!!! Good Stuff.

I'll post the other background tasks I stop when I update my batch file, until then happy tweaking!!!

I have a AMD Athlon XP 1600+ and 1536MB DDR, and a GeForce2 MX 400 64MB DDR and there is no noticable difference when I shut down all services that aren't absolutely necessary and when I run as normal. I haven't run any benchmarks to see the actual difference but it has absolutely no noticable impact on any of my games or applications.

That's why I couldn't do it! I kept using "task kill", instead of "taskkill". Silly me. And I thought I remembered....

As something extra, instead of your IP address, you should be able to use your user name. This might make it a bit easier and self-explanitory

With that much memory you can't really expect to have a noticable difference. We're only freeing up around 50MB of memory, and I have a hard time believe a game can take up 1.5GB of memory space, so you have plenty of memory to go around. Still every little bit helps. The best thing you can do is the upgrade your graphics card.

P.S. Thanks for the tip Rick, I thought there was another way to go about it.

You misunderstood my intent SuperCheetah, my point was that while my performance doesn't seem to change, there is nothing wrong with it. I am perfectly happy with my graphics card also. I was just trying to point out that if you simply add RAM, you can avoid the hassle of stopping and starting services.

Often people overlook the importance of RAM and go for the fastest CPU, but as most of us know, it doesn't matter if you have the fastest CPU, if you don't have much RAM, your system won't perform as well as a slower CPU with a lot of RAM.

Sorry if I misunderstood you StormBringer. The reason for making this batch file is to make it easy to turn the services and background tasks on and off without much hassle. Not everyone has the money to buy extra memory so this is an easy way to gain some extra memory while gaming or doing some other task. Believe me I know how important RAM is to a system, that is why I'm taking the time to make this batch file.

I often leave mIRC running when I play so this wouldn't really be a good idea in my case. Stopping the DNS service & a few others will make me loose my internet connection until I start them over.

This was what I knew was going to happen at the beginning:- people begin killing off tasks one by one, and lose all of the extra functionality they have spent time adding. I don't personally see the point of removing stuff that you actually use. i.e. removing services that you don't need is a good idea, but why not just stop them from starting permanently, rather than running a .bat file to kill them all the time.

I think what could make this better is if there is a way to make it faster. It takes awhile to turn off my services.. Maybe 1 per every second or so and some of them ask me if I'm sure I want to turn them orr or not which consumes more time.

If I'm not mistaken, there is a registry tweak that removes the delay on stopping services. Perhaps this would speed up the batch file's progress. And, there is probably a switch of some sort to shutoff services without asking for the user's consent. This could really enhance the batch file.

I personally have already done this. Most people don't really know what the services do so they don't mess with them, hell I didn't until I started doing this.

I agree Rick, it takes alot of time to kill my services too, I plan on investigating this more and see if there is a fix.

Here is a quick little update. I found a way to cut down on the service kill time.

Here is what you want to go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WaitToKillServiceTimeout

The default setting is 20000 or 20 secs, setting it to 5-10sec should do the trick (that's 5000 to 10000).