WINDOW MANAGER: Services with a smile - Windows 2000 and XP have processes galore, but most can be turned off if you know the secret.(Column)

WINDOWS 2000 and XP do a lot of things. Fortunately, if you don't like the things they do, you can turn some of them off.

I wrote last week that one Windows user -- a devoted PC games player -- has done a remarkable job of picking apart the two versions of Windows and identifying dozens of their "services." These are processes that run automatically or when started by you or an application. (See "Turn off auto-update")

Black Viper, a gamer who asked that I not give his real name, has found 89 services that ship in Windows XP alone. Only eight of these are truly necessary, he says. In the worst case, the other routines can consume up to 70MB of RAM.

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