Background Services

Services and background processes have tremendous impact on the overall performance of a system. Reducing the total number of running services decreases the total power and CPU consumption. In Windows 7, the Service Control Manager has been extended so that a service can be automatically started and stopped when a specific system event, or trigger, occurs on the system. Trigger-start capabilities remove the need for services to start up automatically at computer startup and then poll or wait for an event to occur.

This unit explains the different options available to developers for configuring and using trigger-start services.

Lessons

• Background Services In this lab you will use Windows 7 trigger-start service mechanism to launch a service only when there is actual work for it to perform. You will also modify the service so it runs with least privileges.
• Windows 7: Service Controller and Background Processing At any given point, Windows is executing a lot of code. Some of this code runs in the background as services. In pre Windows 7 operating systems some services were set to auto run even though the configuration of the system (installed apps, hardware, etc) did not warrant them running. Chittur Subbaraman, Windows kernel developer extraordinaire, and team spent a great deal of time thinking about and rectifying these problems by re-architecting the Windows 7 Service Controller. Watch this video to learn about the details and history of the service controller (and Task Manager).