Showing posts with label Administrative Tools. Services. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Administrative Tools. Services. Show all posts

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Washing Windows 8 (again)

Today's Windows 8 crapware kill is a service called "Bonjour".   Bonjour is an Apple invention for "hands off networking".  Bonjour works by going on the local network and finding all the other computers, shared printers, and other useful stuff, and with such info it can then support programs that want to talk with other stuff on the network.  All of these activity runs in parallel with the regular Microsoft networking support which has been there since Win98 and has gotten better over the years.
  Itunes is the program that wants Bonjour support.  I don't have an Ipad, so I don't run Itunes.  There are a bunch of other Apple programs, none of which I had ever heard of, which Wikipedia lists as wanting Bonjour as well.  I don't care about them and so adieu to Bonjour. 
  Bonjour being a service, is best killed using the Windows services tool.   Get to "Control Panel".  I have "Control Panel" as an icon on the desktop.  Some long ago tweaking of "Personalizations" gave me that very useful desktop icon.  If you don't have the icon, do the bang-the-mouse-on-the-righthand-screen-edge thing to bring up the Charms bar.  Select the "Settings" charm.  Inside "settings"  select "control panel". 
   Once in Control panel select "Administrative Tools".  Then select "Services".  This  shows every service in the machine and allows you to stop them, start them, and program Windows useage of the service.  Services are programs that Windows loads into RAM at boot time, or upon demand.  STOP means just shut down the copy in RAM.  I usually STOP a service, just to make sure I have control.  Then reprogram the "Startup type" to "manual" or "disabled".  Manual means don't load and run the service until some program asks for that service.  I set Bonjour to "manual" and it never started up, indicating that no program every requested the Bonjour service.  "Disabled" means never load and run the service no matter how hard programs beg and plead for the service. 
  With Bonjour service turned off, I could still access my desktop from the laptop and transfer fines back and forth.  Home networking runs just fine without Bonjour, the regular Microsoft networking carrying the freight. 

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Washing Windows 8

The Micro$ofties stuffed Windows 8 chock a block full of crapware,  programs that suck up RAM and CPU time but don't actually do anything for you.   Every so often I go out on a crapware hunt, and I always find something.  Today I scored three kills.  First off is a program "DasHost.exe".  It is supposed to alert you to incoming email, sometimes.  My email client, Thunderbird, has been successfully detecting incoming email for years with out it.   After a net check, the consensus of opinion was "worthless", so I went after it.  It's a service.  Services are little (and some times not so little) programs that Windows runs behind your back. They all suck up precious RAM, and hog CPU time. They show up in Task Manager as processes and there is a special Windows program to manage them.  Go to Control Panel.  Pick Admin. Tools. Pick "Services".   Find "Device Association Service.   First STOP the Device Association Service.  This shuts down the copy running in RAM at that moment.  Then hit "properties" and change the startup type to "disabled".  That preventsWindows from starting it up on the next boot.
   While you are in there, find service "Themes" and give it the same treatment.  Themes suppores the fancy Aeroglass look in the display.  It sucks up a lot of CPU time and I don't like the look, I prefer the standard old Windows look. 
   My last kill today was "Power2Go Gadget".  This is not a Micro$oft program, and several websites called it useless.  It is NOT a service, so you cannot zap it thru the Services program, like Dashost and Themes.  I found it with Task Manager, and the Windows 8 Task Manager can stop it, and prevent it from reloading (disable it).  I'll double check tomorrow to see if it stays dead, but it's stopped now.
   For doing all this, laptop feels livelier, it can keep up with my typing now. 
   Be careful messing with services.  Back in XP, there were a couple of services, Remote Job Entry for one, that were essential to Windows.  If you disabled Remote Job Entry in XP, Windows would never boot again.  The only fix was to reinstall Windows from scratch, a tedious task, especially if you lacked the install CD-ROM discs.  I suspect the Micro$ofties have planted similar booby traps in Win 8, but I don't know what they are.  So don't disable anything unless you are sure, or have searched the internet and found an authoritative site like Black Viper to say that you can disable it without a disaster.