As you all well know, Vista is a Hog with over 80 processes on a vanilla installation. And this means that it robs you of RAM and CPU time. Unfortunately it is difficult to weed-whack many of these because they do serve a useful role and stuff stops working if you stop them. That being said, you don't need all of them, all of the time, especially when you are gaming. For instance, when is the last time you needed to print something in-game? You could take the time everytime you game to manually shutdown dozens of services, but that would be a drag. So, I am pleased to announce that we (I) here at Bragr's Dorm Room Productions have just the solution for you. We call it Bragr's Vista Lighten-Me-Up. It shuts down several Apple (iTunes/iPod) and HP (printer related) services as well as several dozen uneeded windows services. How well does it work? Just ask Taskmanager, but keep in mind that my system is performance tuned to begin with so the results may be greater on your PC:
Before:

After:


To reverse the affects, simply reboot your computer and all will be back to normal. Download today!

Disclaimer: I have tested this and so far found no problems, but I cannot guarantee that this will not screw something up. Use at your own risk. It comes with no warranty.

EDIT: You will also need to right click on this file and click "Run as administrator" in order for it to work. It will just tell you access denied a bunch of time if you don't.

It will work on XP (and I assume Win7) but not as well does on XP. If you run it on XP, it will end some services, but many of them wont exist in XP. Dito in Win7.

As far as a script to go the other direction: the problem is that it would be much more complicated to go the other direction because I would have to know which ones were running the first place. Some of the services I shut down are running on some computers, but not on others. And its not as simple as here is the undo for Home, Professional, or Ultimate either, since it really depends on the configuration.

Its a list of all the services that COULD be running, but don't need to. As a result some of the services that this tries to shutdown will not be running on your computer, but may be on others. I could write a script that would simple start all of the services listed in the first one but that is a bad solution since it would tend to degrade the experience afterward. If I just started the services that I know should be running, like the print spooler and themes, then there are still people who are going to have a degraded experience until they reboot.

Therefore its just easier say reboot. And honestly, starting a bunch of processes takes a while, though not as long as to reboot, but it does take a dent out of the opportunity cost of rebooting.

I might make more advanced version of this, buts its not going to be in a batch script. I'd probably do it up in c++, but I don't really want to, since by the time I finish projects for my CS classes, I no longer feel the desire to program.