[SOLVED] Windows services do what they want?

[GotaQuestion88]

I am checking the windows services/ services.msc once a month, i have turned some services off that i dont need, for example windows image capture WIC.

Today i checkd them again and i found that windows image capture WIC was an active service currently running in services.msc.

The WIC service started itself even when i (the administrator account) had it disabled, do i have to ask microsoft, why is that?
Also, how is this service being triggered?
Id like to find out more why a service that was previously disabled by the administrator account can just set its start type from disabled to automatic without permissions from the administrator?

This is not the only service that is changing its start type to another status than the administrator account has choosen for it.
I have not updated my windows since multiple months so it is impossible that any windows update took action to change the WICservices start type

 

[hotaru.hino]

A user account with administrator privileges actually doesn't have the maximum security privilege available. There's a few built-in accounts in Windows that manages the OS and the one that has the maximum privilege is SYSTEM (see https://security.stackexchange.com/a/66747 )

There may be a service or some other thing running in the background that hooks into SYSTEM or one of the other built-in accounts. If anything, the Event Viewer may be able to tell you what happened and who did it.

 

[Colif]

As above, you aren't the only user. Windows needs these others like SYSTEM, and Trustedinstaller to carry out operations to allow PC to keep running.

WIC is part of DISM. I guessed before i searched, its Disk Image Servicing & Management. Its used to look after the image files windows uses to install itself. So yeah, I can see why its turned back on. If you run System File Checker, it uses the image files to compare to currently running system files, to make sure you okay.

Why do you need to micro manage it all?

Why ever look in services?
why need to? do you have low amount of ram and it impacts your usage of actual PC? is there any noticeable impact letting it run? I totally understand how we used to remove services we didn't need (or thought we didn't) but PC are so much more capable than they were 10 years ago and there is no need to do any of it now. You probably won't tell any difference.

 

[hotaru.hino]

To also support the above, there's really no point in trying to min-max Windows' performance if you're running on sufficiently powerful hardware. The only time I've seen such tweaking actually produce appreciable differences in performance is if the computer was pretty destitute anyway. Like running on an Atom levels of destitute.

I also did my own testing where I disabled and removed as much stuff as I could on Windows 10. I was able to get it down to less than 1GB of RAM usage after rebooting and reduced the list of processes to <100. Except in one game where it was CPU intensive (one of the F1 games), every benchmark I threw at it was within a margin of error with regards to performance. And the outlier only had something like 10%-15% better minimums.

There's also the idea that software developers for Windows expect as-default-as-possible system configuration. Mucking around with services can result in software breaking because said software was expecting something that isn't running anymore. Often times, they don't say anything obvious about why they broke.