Services Tab in XP

In MSCONFIG, under the services tab, there are a ton of services running. Which ones can I disable and which ones must I leave on.

I checked my "System Information" and it stated the following:

Total Physical Memory: 1,024.00 MB
Available Physical Memory: 804.20 MB

Are these services taking up the 200MB difference between total memory and available memory? If so, I would like to know how to reduce this safely.

IMO, just leave the services running, I see no reason why you think you need to free up ram when you have 1GB of it. And no those services do not take up 200MB of ram anyhow, maybe 20 at most.

Good to know. Thanks.

If you want to learn more about XP services, look at the guide prepared by blackviper. Link directly to the XP guide is:

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

Somewhere on his site is a link to download it in pdf format. He also has a guide to win2k. Useful stuff.

I like to stop the "messenger" service because that eliminates that oh so annoying messenger pop up spam.

I feel there are definitely some services which should be disabled for security reasons, like the one that allows for remote editing of your registry. The guide at the link rayik posted is excellent and certainly worth perusing.

Also if you access Services through Administrative tools rather than MSCONFIG I believe the interface is a bit more robust.

there are alot of guides that make claims like all but 8 of these can be left running or something, however I tried one of these and my system started showing very strange results - like crashing when going into certain modules within control panel etc

however there are a couple I would say are ok to disable, these include that messenger, the imapi cd burning service (if your not using it) - if you have an nvidia card the Nvidia help center. There is also the background intelligent transfer if your having the problem specific to that, but it has been patched now...all others I dont know, after I simply followed the guide and disabled the majority it would of been one hell of a job to work out what service, or even worse, what combination of services caused such issues