Overall CPU and RAM gain is insignificant by disabling services, but it increases security exponentially, not mention, that system runs somewhat smoother, but that is a subjective opinion. DHCP is required for Windows Updates as well as Windows Firewall service mentioned above. This idiocy was introduced in Windows 8.1. The topic's name is somewhat funny. You can safely disable pretty much all services, except 5 or 6 (Windows will fail to boot), but disabling each one breaks something. It really depends, if you need it or not. For example, Geolocation service is being disabled via Privacy settings, you can not enable it, once disabled in Privacy and apps like Weather will fail and so on.
but This is a good example of my statements in post #17 that: “2 There are often unexpected inter-dependencies between services” and also: “3 Any problem caused may not manifest itself immediately” since the problem may manifest itself in the next update, up to a month later. Moreover, it will not be evident then what the cause of the problem is. In advice forums I have been, there are always people with odd problems that nobody else has faced. A plausible explanation for this is that they've done too much registry cleaning and system mods, including disabling and uninstalling of system components. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
No its not needed for firewall i have blocked everything with it except firefox and dns servers and it works as should haven't test it with updates but i think ure not right
I meant, that Windows Firewall is required by Windows Updates, you can not update or even install store apps, when it is disabled.
Only indirectly related, but I think there is an analogy with the following actual experience of mine. While still on XP, I thought I’d stop from starting and running unnecessarily in the background the following exact items (not Windows services), using Autoruns: Lbd Ad-aware mini-filter driver snapman Acronis Snapshot API tdrpman Acronis Try&Decide and Restore Points Volume Filter Driver tifsfilter Acronis True Image File System Filter timounter Acronis True Image Backup Archive Explorer relog_ap Acronis Relogon Authentication Package Note that I had uninstalled Ad-aware and wasn’t using the Acronis app, only the bootable ISO on a CD, so I thought disabling the above was safe. Well, the system thought differently. It went on working, but on the following morning it wouldn’t start. It wouldn’t even start in the Safe Mode for me to turn the things back on again. Similarly, it wouldn’t boot from the CD. It locked itself like never before. Unless somebody spots an item in the list that obviously I shouldn’t have disabled, the conclusion must be that disabling can be a mine field.
@Katzenfreund I had something similar happen to me on two different systems after uninstalling Acronis from Windows 7 and disabling hidden autoruns. I don't remember the exact file names I disabled but I had BSOD on both systems after doing so. One would think you could at least get to safe mode to go in and undo the action but that wasn't the case for me.