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

Service Name	Default	Action
dmwappuhshsvc	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Enterprise App Management Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Fax	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Geolocation Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V Data Exchange Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V Guest Service Interface	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V Guest Shutdown Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V Heartbeat Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V PowerShell Direct Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V Remote Desktop Virtualization Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V Time Synchronization Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Requester	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Microsoft iSCSI Initiator Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Microsoft Windows SMS Router Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Locator	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Retail Demo Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Sensor Data Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Sensor Monitoring Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Sensor Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Smart Card Device Enumeration Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
SNMP Trap	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Windows Mobile Hotspot Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Windows Remote Management (WS-Management)	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Work Folders	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Xbox Live Auth Manager	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Xbox Live Game Save	Manual	Stop Then Restart
Xbox Live Networking Service	Manual	Stop Then Restart

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

Boost Your Nested Home Lab (Part 2/3)

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Systems Check

Windows 10 Services that can be Safely Stopped

Ready for the Danger Zone

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Comments

More from this blog

Systems Check

Windows 10 Services that can be Safely Stopped

Ready for the Danger Zone