BlackViper performance gains, true or not?

i know some people swear by his guides, others say the perform you gain doesn't exist...the possible issue you could run into down the road by disabling many things and so on.

Would installing XP in a VM and do a side by side of one with and one with out be valid test, or would the VM play too much of a roll in performance to get numbers of just how much his guides do or do not help?

Or does any one have some links to sites that have already done this?

I want to have some data on this to share with someone, i cant seem to find past threads which such debates in them unfortunately.

You won't see a difference, aside from the good ol' placebo effect. This has been debated and beaten down so many times, I've lost count. If you want hard proof, go with it..in terms of your VM tests. As long as you do your comparisons the same, meaning both in a VM, you'll be fine.

The performance hit for being in a VM will be the same for both, so go for it. A lot of tweaks are snakeoil (the reg keys literally do nothing) or such a minor change that its a .0001% boost. A few do matter though, so it depends what the heck you are talking about doing.

Everything I've read here has been negative -- either it doesn't make much difference, or it has the potential to break things. I've never messed with it myself.

There was a good test done on Anandtech forums showing how the "tweaks" did either basically nothing, or hurt performance, but the forums are down right now.

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=34&threadid=1678445&enterthread=y&arctab=y

Hmmm..

I used to use them in the past when I was building a few public game servers, using Server 2000 and Server 2003. There's a nice unloading of RAM and a little more free CPU which results in more zippiness. It's only logical, disable some services that are not needed, and it's less services. If I remember, with the settings I did, it shaved around 45 megs off the system RAM of a box sitting at fresh reboot with nothing else running.

A default Windows Server install has an awful lot of services that you do not need on a gaming server, and even more...that you without question do not want running on a Windows box sitting directly on a public IP address. You certainly don't want server service or remote registry or netbios or quite a few others running, that is...if you desire to take a few steps in locking down the box at all.

The amount of gain you get? Yeah that will naturally vary based on your box, specs, what is is you wish to run, and what services you actually whacked. Naturally results will vary from person to person.

And the people that say following the guide screwed up their box..hey, they didn't take the time to read the fine print...to do a little homework and actually read what a service does, and what its dependencies do. If someone disables the windows installer service, and then finds his computer can't install anything..well Hello.....McFly..go back to pumping gas or washing dishes for a living.

For me, it was worth the couple of minutes it took, I used them in dedicated game servers hosted in data centers or for huge LAN parties. You don't want server or workstation service or dns client or inet (now there's a nice security hole if sitting on a public IP).

So to have a list available, be it black viper or eldergeek, which importantly..shows default settings, and has some descriptions of services..apply a little of your own smarts to make a computer a hair zippier and a few steps more secure...why not?

Now for a desktop workstation as general use...nah I don't agree with it, I'd recommend a guide like that only to someone who wants to lean down a computer for a specific task.

MrGuvernment said:

side of one with and one with out be valid test, or would the VM play too much of a roll in performance to get numbers of just how much his guides do or do not help?

Click to expand...

I'll save you a whole lot of time. On current hardware there is absolutely ZERO reason to completely cripple your OS. XP/Vista/7 does a great job of turning off services that are not being used.

If you follow his guide and disable 15 services that are not being used, that's 15 x cpu heartbeat = you ain't saving shit but giving up a lot of functionality. A service not being used that is on is using such a minuscule amount of cpu ticks, I wouldn't doubt if it even would add up to a fraction of a % of cpu time.

If you had a system was was incredibly slow (like 128MB ram/400mhz) and needed to run XP, and did not have access to Windows Fundamentals (Basically MSFT suppled crippled XP) then I can see disabling indexing or a few other services that will effect a low end machine. Otherwise ... .leave it alone.

Ya i recall it has been done, i just couldn't find anything on it, will have to check for that anand link once the new forums are up.

I do agree, less things running, less resources, but most services sit idle anyways not using anything, unless they are being used, which means they are needed.

YeOldeStoneCat, you post over on the forum i was debating this on the other guy said the exact same thing as you about game servers..lol

I just wanted to find out for myself really, don't believe it till you see it kind of things, and most game servers i would think would be behind a firewall or something.

It does make sense on a server to make it less exploitable, but again i would hope it would be behind some other protection, unless you were running a *nix box then it is a non issue

Your always better off getting some one who knows what they are doing to decide what you need running or not. That said one of the things you could get from his guide is what the services do. I'm pretty sure that they used to say use at your own risk. I've never actually tested any of his setting because by the time I came across the site I knew more about what the windows services did and was looking for info on a third party service, which was in his guide. That was under win 2K though. I had thought he had stopped righting the guides for a while. I have not spent enough time digging through tech net to know what services to worry about in win 7 / vista so I'd say dig through Tech net for questions about the windows services for vista on but for xp and 2k I listed services below that you DO NOT want to mess with.

That said mess with anything in the section below this and you will screw up your OS. There are third party applications which replace some of these but they add their own services or rename existing ones. Plus if your using them you should know more about the services running on your machine than I do.
_________________________________________________________

Application managament - required for windows to function
Background Intelligent Transfer Service - required for windows to function
Cryptographic services - required for windows to function
DCOM - required for windows to function
DHCP - required to get a dynamic IP address
Distributed Link Tracking Client - required for windows to function
Distributed Transaction Coordinator - required for windows to function
DNS Client - required to resolve websites into IP addresses your PS understands
Help and Support - required to use any help chm or windows help files
HID Input Service - required to interact with windows
IPSEC Service - required for windows to function
Logical Disk Manager - this will prevent access to the hard by the OS
Logical Disk Manager Administration Service - this will prevent access to the hard by the OS

NT LM Security Support Provider (Anything related to RPC do not touch)

Plug and play - required for windows to function
print spooler - required to print anything

Protected Storage - required for windows to function

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) - if you need to interact with anything not on your PC do not touch this. Updates, games, the internet, etc...

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Locator same as RPC

Security Account Manager (SAM) - if you want you hose your machince play with this otherwise leave it alone, as it can cause your machine to wipe your hard drive when you reboot.

Workstation and Server can be disable it just causes problems

any of the ones that start with windows are ones that can be replaced by tird party applications but if you don't know what those application are you should not mess with the services that start with the word windows. ie Windows Management INstrumentation

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What ever guide you read remember it is your machine and your data if you screw it up your the one who has to live with it. So make sure your desire to tinker is balanced against what happens when I hose this machine. Unless you are doing it on an old hard with nothing important on it. Which is what I do my testing on.

Well disabling services will free up some memory for sure, so if you are not loaded up with lots of ram, go for it.

I always disable some services I will never use, I dont disable everything on the list, but it doesnt hurt to kill some stuff. Other services I kill just to feel more secure, like secondary login, fast user switching, remote registry, ect.

So disable services that are not vital to the OS, and that you will definitely never need. If you are unsure of something, just leave it running, or kill it but make a note so if something does break you can go back and enable it again.

I probably disable between 10 and 20 services on every new windows install, depending on what Ill be doing with the box, how much mem is available, ect.

The only legitimate reason for disabling any service might be for security reasons. Otherwise, just buy more RAM; it's cheap.

drakken said:

That said mess with anything in the section below this and you will screw up your OS. There are third party applications which replace some of these but they add their own services or rename existing ones. Plus if your using them you should know more about the services running on your machine than I do.
_________________________________________________________

Application managament - required for windows to function
Background Intelligent Transfer Service - required for windows to function
Cryptographic services - required for windows to function
DCOM - required for windows to function
DHCP - required to get a dynamic IP address
Distributed Link Tracking Client - required for windows to function
Distributed Transaction Coordinator - required for windows to function
DNS Client - required to resolve websites into IP addresses your PS understands
Help and Support - required to use any help chm or windows help files

Click to expand...

Thats what makes a VM a perfect place to test. If you did into the nitty-gritty details, you will find that theres more to a lot of these than simply "required for windows to function". And you will learn more about your PC and Windows in the process.

For example, if you disable DNS Client what happens? Actually, nothing horrible happens. It doesnt do what the name implies, DNS will still work. DNS caching will cease, so it will look up IP addresses every single time instead of assuming x.x.x.x = google.com. Of course, your ISP caches DNS, so if you are constantly asking for IP lookups you are still getting a cached response. So not much reason to disable this service. A lot of these services have a long explanation like this one, with an actually good reason to leave them running that gives more detail than "required for Windows".

Primarly I did not feel like breaking down why they were useful and pointed people toward technet if they wanted to know what the services actually did.

The required for windows ones were more complex explanations. The list was targeted at anyone playing with the system services because a list told them it was safe to disable.

For example, if you disable DNS Client what happens? Actually, nothing horrible happens. It doesnt do what the name implies, DNS will still work. DNS caching will cease, so it will look up IP addresses every single time instead of assuming x.x.x.x = google.com. Of course, your ISP caches DNS, so if you are constantly asking for IP lookups you are still getting a cached response. So not much reason to disable this service. A lot of these services have a long explanation like this one, with an actually good reason to leave them running that gives more detail than "required for Windows".

Click to expand...

This is not quite right, if you disable the DNS service you fall back on the LM host file and per session ARP cache. This is one of the reasons that did not explain it, because when you turn DNS off you are basically hitting the slam for a name which if it is cache (meaning someone else looked it up recently) your ARP cache stores a local copy, as soon as you log off that goes away. If it has not been searched recently the slam then asks the top level domain what it is, it is cached there it returns an address, if it is not a second tier ie tier3.tier2.top it then has to ask tier2 what the address is. Your connection can and will time out before the slam returns the IP address at which point it tells you the site can not be found and ignores the info from the slam at that point. All this causes everyone's' connections to slow down because you are saturating the bottleneck.

With DNS service on your computer maintains a continues record of DNS <-> IP addresses. When you have the recorded IP is simply routes the packets through the slam to the trunk, meaning the sites pop up much faster. Also instead of asking the slam where the site is your computer maintains records for the top level domains as part of your root directory which is not the same as your local root directory. and I thought as was just being lazy not bothering to explain this. Anyway it is less likely to time out querying the top level domain than the slam and faster to boot.

So yes, your OS will function without it, but your internet might not, and it will slow down anyone stuck going through the same slam as you. So maybe I should have written something different but I wrote the list as a these as going to cause problem if you turn them off the list of services is easily twice as long as the ones I picked. I just know that those are ones I've had problem users turn off and not understand why things start breaking. I also said if you want to know what a service does go to technet. It does not cost any money and and has very detailed info on microsoft stuff. It might not teach you enough to connect two offices over a WAN or why DNS is used instead of LM host file but generally if you are at that level I should hope you have a much better grasp of where to look for information if you don't know what a service does.

I was trying to avoid confusing people so the list does have simple reasons, hell the information tab in the services panel is more detailed than what I wrote my point was that if you start playing and don't know what these are don't turn them off, unless you know what you are breaking. As to "Actually, nothing horrible happens" well I think I actually explained the only ones that are really bad which are the logical disk manager which when you turn it off you can't boot into windows or the RPC which screws up connecting to anything else or the SAM which is your access to the OS. But I did not think that I needed to put details since people should look them up if they are going to change them.

wow, lots of info here!

MrGuvernment said:

i know some people swear by his guides, others say the perform you gain doesn't exist...the possible issue you could run into down the road by disabling many things and so on.

Would installing XP in a VM and do a side by side of one with and one with out be valid test, or would the VM play too much of a roll in performance to get numbers of just how much his guides do or do not help?

Or does any one have some links to sites that have already done this?

I want to have some data on this to share with someone, i cant seem to find past threads which such debates in them unfortunately.

Click to expand...

His guide combined with Windows XP Performance Edition (179MB ISO) is one of the reasons why I still use XP. Minimal ram usage, minimal fluff and will run on almost any computer ever made and still have incredible good speed with both startup/shutdown combined with a good Defragging program like Ultimate Defrag where you place your system files on the outermost part of the HD.

from the days when i used viper on xp, like 5 + years ago, i recall at most after disabling service i think i saw about 10-15mb less ram usage on boot, that was it.

MrGuvernment said:

YeOldeStoneCat, you post over on the forum i was debating this on the other guy said the exact same thing as you about game servers..lol

I just wanted to find out for myself really, don't believe it till you see it kind of things, and most game servers i would think would be behind a firewall or something.

It does make sense on a server to make it less exploitable, but again i would hope it would be behind some other protection, unless you were running a *nix box then it is a non issue

Click to expand...

Yeah, the game servers I built ran some games which had server components and server managers which were Windows only....so Windows Server it was.

As mentioned in the other forum, I had those servers sitting on OC3 bandwidth ...commonly banging a solid 15-20 meg upload at busy times, and we'd have between 60 - 100 peeps connecting during peek hours. The data centers had ACLs on the public IPs, we couldn't afford a hardware firewall powerful enough to stick in front of the servers. (hey, with game clans it's hard enough to scatch up the monthly funds). Over the years of building 'n supporting these servers, didn't have problems with them.

Eh, you'll have people that don't believe in it, and do believe in it. I didn't write the article, nor do I sell anything and make money pimping it..so it's not like I gain anything by saying it worked for me. I wouldn't bother doing it on a desktop OS like XP or whatever, but it did definitely help in the game servers I built. I'd see something like a 30-40 meg drop in RAM use at idle, and the rigs were noticably snappier...and naturally with lots of networking services disabled...it was more secure.

Blackviper is like Herpies. He keeps poppiing up.

Useless crap.

pcgeek11 said:

Blackviper is like Herpies. He keeps poppiing up.

Useless crap.

Click to expand...

Yeah, last time I was at his site was when it was mentioned on Screen Savers in like 04. I visited it again the other day, and really, the whole idea is pretty pathetic.