Boost Your Nested Home Lab (Part 2/3)

In the first post, we looked at AlacrityPC, a program that will help us boost the performance of our VMware Workstation-based nested home lab. In this second part of the series, we’ll figure out what to do with Windows services.

Systems Check

So Alacrity’s installed, and it enables us to choose which services and applications we want to change the running state of while our program of choice, in this case VMware Workstation, is running. How do you know which services are essential, and which you can safely shut down for a while?

Back when I was first introduced to AlactricyPC there was a handy website available that listed all the Windows services, their out-of-the-box settings, and recommended service states for varying degrees of performance vs. functionality. As luck would have it that site, Black Viper, is not only still around but has been kept current as new versions of the Windows client OS have been released.

To continue with our example, let’s configure Alacrity using the recommended safe Windows 10 service settings. Anywhere Black Viper recommends we disable a service, we will configure it with an Alacrity action of Stop Then Restart. This means that when we go to run VMware Workstation, any services flagged with that action will be stopped. Once we’re done with VMware Workstation and we close it, those services will be started again.

For convenience, here are a list of the Black Viper safe services that we’ll be configuring with a Stop Then Restart action. The service names displayed are those as you’d see then in AlacrityPC, which may differ a bit from the Black Viper display name.

Windows 10 Services that can be Safely Stopped

Ready for the Danger Zone

Now that we now what services we can safely do without while using our home lab, we need to configure Alacrity and get to boosting! Stay tuned for the third and last post in this series.

Featured image photo by mashleymorgan