Monday, March 27, 2017

The hunt for Win 10 crapware

Take a look at Task Manager in Win 10.   Good old XP used to run with 25-30 processes active.  Win 10 has nearly 100, at least out of the box.  A lot of 'em are un necessary and can be shut down for good, freeing up RAM and CPU time.  The trick is to tell the useless ones from the essential windows-will-crash-without-them processes.  Win 10 Task Manager has a "search on-line" feature that googles on the  process name and serves you up 10 or more opinions off the Internet about the process.  A lot of 'em are worthless boiler plate, but sometimes you catch a post by Black Viper or Bleeping Computer, or even Wikipedia which are very useful useful.
   Many, perhaps even most are "services" which Windows loads and runs behind your back.  There is a services manager program, buried only medium deep in the Win 10 menu scheme.  Right click on the Windows Logo button in the screen.  Pick "Settings" which will show a zillion options.  Click on "Administrative Services" which comes up at the beginning since it begins with "A".  Slide down and click on "Services".  This will display every service known to Win 10 whether it's running or not.  Find the service you want to kill.  If it is running, click to stop it, just the see if the service manager is working and nothing drastic happens to Windows when you stop it.
   Then to make the kill permanent, you want of modify the "start up option".  Automatic means start it at boot time every time.  Manual means don't start it until some program asks for it.  Setting to manual is usually enough to prevent the service from running.  And it's safe.  Stronger is disable which means never run the service no matter how badly programs whine and cry for it.  Disable can be dangerous if you disable one of those windows-will-die-without-it  services.
 

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