Which services can you safely disable to improve PC gaming?

Windows has many services running in the background that waste resources better spent on games.

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While PC gaming has always been an expensive hobby, it's been extra-crunched for years now. A while ago, the demand for crypto mining hardware started creating GPU shortages. Then AI processing started squeezing the GPU market even further, and more recently, memory prices have shot through the roof because of data center usage. As a result, making any upgrades to your PC or building a whole new one is an increasingly difficult investment.

In the meantime, there are tricks that can stretch performance as much as possible, one being to disable unnecessary background services in Windows 11. Ordinarily, it's fine to leave Windows largely as-is. But some services are redundant or unnecessary while actively consuming the CPU, RAM or network resources that games need, making them an obvious target to remove.

Don't expect miracles here. Graphics are what put the heaviest burden on a gaming PC, and ultimately, a hardware upgrade is needed to see a meaningful improvement in frame rates. But nixing background services could make your setup a little smoother, regardless of what your current specs are. Don't forget to optimize your GPU as well.

The Windows services you should toggle off immediately

Somewhat ironically, one of the first features you should disable is the Xbox Game Bar. Head over to Settings > System > System components, then click on the triple-dot icon next to Game Bar and select Advanced options. Set Background component permissions to Never, then click the Terminate button to make sure it's no longer active.

While Game Bar is nominally meant to make it easier to launch games and control associated tasks like music playback and recording clips, that's unnecessary overhead for most gamers. Steam is far and away the most popular PC gaming platform and it includes its own tools for these jobs. There's no sense doubling up unless you're playing with friends on their Xbox consoles.

Next, make sure Windows Search indexing is reverted to Classic by going to Settings > Privacy & security > Search. The Enhanced mode is functionally superior, since it can find anything on your PC, while Classic is limited to your Documents, Pictures, Music and Desktop folders. To achieve this, Enhanced has to index your entire computer, which Windows says can hurt not just CPU performance, but battery life.

You may also want to pause OneDrive sync (and that of other cloud tools) during gaming sessions. While these have to sync settings and files at some point, the app can cause CPU and network usage to temporarily spike, which is of course not what you want during an online game. Right-click on the OneDrive icon in your system tray, then click Pause syncing. You can pause for two, eight or 24 hours.

Is there anything else worth disabling?

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There's at least one more service that could be worth disabling: SysMain. Its goal is to speed up app launches by predicting what you need, then loading those items into memory before you actually open them. This can backfire in a gaming context, since you might be about to run Cyberpunk 2077 instead of Chrome or Excel. In the Windows taskbar, search for Services, then open the associated tool. In the list that appears, right-click on SysMain and choose Properties. Switch Startup type to Disabled.

In theory, there are other services in this menu you can disable to reroute those resources to games. But in most cases, the impacts are so marginal as to not be worth it. For instance, disabling the print spooler service is OK if you don't print, but doing so will barely impact your games. Avoid getting overzealous; don't kill a service because it sounds irrelevant. It could actually be responsible for a critical app or Windows function, and may temporarily break what you're doing until you reboot or otherwise relaunch software.

Also, don't forget to keep a lid on third-party startup apps. These can have just as much of an impact as Microsoft's software, and sometimes more. Go to Settings > Apps > Startup, then toggle off anything you never use or only need to run periodically. If something is already running in the background, you'll need to close it in your system tray or Task Manager.