If you want your computer to be able to print, don't plan on disabling the Print Spooler service. It manages all printing activities for your system. You may think that lack of a printer makes it safe to disable the Print Spooler service.
While that's technically true, there's really no point in doing so; after all, if you ever do decide to get a printer, you'll need to remember to re-enable the service, and you might end up frustrating yourself.
When the Print Spooler service is not running, printing on the local machine is not possible. Windows is a pretty complex beast, and many of its underlying processes need to communicate with one another.
RPC allows processes to communicate with one another and across the network with each other. A ton of other critical services, including the Print Spooler and the Network Connections service, depend on the RPC service to function.
If you want to see what bad things happen when you disable this service, look at the comments on this link. As is the case for many services, the Workstation service is responsible for handling connections to remote network resources. Specifically, this service provides network connections and communications capability for resources found using Microsoft Network services. Years ago, I would have said that disabling this service was a good idea, but that was before the rise of the home network and everything that goes along with it, including shared printers, remote Windows Media devices, Windows Home Server, and much more.
Today, you don't gain much by eliminating this service, but you lose a lot. Disable the Workstation service and your computer will be unable to connect to remote Microsoft Network resources. As was the case with the Workstation service, disabling the Network Location Awareness service might have made sense a few years ago -- at least for a standalone, non-networked computer.
With today's WiFi-everywhere culture, mobility has become a primary driver. The Network Location Awareness service is responsible for collecting and storing network configuration and location information and notifying applications when this information changes. For example, as you make the move from the local coffee shop's wireless network back home to your wired docking station, NLA makes sure that applications are aware of the change.
Further, some other services depend on this service's availability. Your computer will not be able to fully connect to and use wireless networks. Problems abound! Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol DHCP is a critical service that makes the task of getting computers on the network nearly effortless.
Before the days of DHCP, poor network administrators had to manually assign network addresses to every computer. Over the years, DHCP has been extended to automatically assign all kinds of information to computers from a central configuration repository. Windows automatically starts up some services in the background.
Most of these services are unused by common PC users. Here are some listed unnecessary services which you can safely disable if not used which can speed up the performance of your computer to a certain extent. Try them at your own risk. We would suggest that you check the description of each service on the Internet before you disable them and also try disabling them one at a time. As I pointed out on 19 October, in point number four of the article 10 security tips for all general-purposes OSes , an important step in the process of securing your system is to shut down unnecessary services.
As long as Microsoft Windows has been a network capable operating system, it has come with quite a few services turned on by default, and it is a good idea for the security conscious user of Microsoft's flagship product to shut down any of these that he or she isn't using. Each version of MS Windows provides different services, of course, so any list of services to disable for security purposes will be at least somewhat particular to a given version of Microsoft Windows.
As such, a list like this one needs to be identified with a specific Microsoft Windows version, though it can still serve as a guide for the knowledgeable MS Windows user to check out the running services on other versions as well. If you are running Microsoft Windows XP on your desktop system, consider turning off the following services. You may be surprised by what is running without your knowledge. On your system, these services may not all be turned on, or even installed.
Whether a given service is installed and running may depend on whether you installed the system yourself, whether you are using XP Home or XP Professional, and from which vendor you got your computer if MS Windows XP was installed by a vendor. Obviously, this is not a comprehensive list of everything running on your computer that you may want to turn off. It is merely a list of ten items that you most likely do not need to have running, and constitute a security vulnerability if left running.
Most users will never have need of any of the services in this list, once the computer is up and running.
Other services may be disabled without ill effect as well, though you should research each item in the complete services list before you disable it to ensure that you actually do not need it running. Some of them are quite critical to the normal operation of your system, such as the Remote Procedure Call RPC service.
Every running -- but unused -- service on your machine is an unnecessary security vulnerability.
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