Sunday, February 19, 2006

Minimal Windows XP - stop unnecessary services


Im currently having to demo Office 12 Server using a pair of cpu/memory intensive VPCs (one with O12 Server / SQL - the other with AD/Exchange/LCS) on a single laptop. To maximise the resources I wanted to stop all unnecessary XP services and found a useful batch script here which gave me a good start.

I then decided I wanted to be more brutal and stop all services / task tray applications to create a minimal OS ... so i'm now using Process Explorer to kill nearly everything.

Check Mark Russinovich blog article Running Windows with No Services to see how to run Windows XP with zero services and in particular it explains how to stop things in the correct order to avoid any blue screens.

I now can demo with just three processes:
  • Virtual PC
  • NuMenu - so i can startup processes again
  • csrss.exe
Note that turning off unnecessary services in Windows XP can greatly increase your exploit risk, whilst improving system performance. So its only recommended for demo machines in a standalone environment.




2 Comments:

  • Anonymous Shawn Wheatley said…

      This sounds like a really good setup. How exactly are you using NuMenu to restart services?   

  • Blogger Mark said…

      You can amend the XML config file to define what options you want in the menu.

    Ive currently enabled options for a command prompt, Notepad and Process Explorer. From Process Explorer I can invoke any program.   

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