HOW TO: Squeeze every last bit of memory you need, temporarily

Sometimes you have a situation (heavy duty graphics program or some other memory-hungry task) where you need to really "lean down" your machine to provide every last bit of available memory to your task. Here's an easy way to do that:

1) From a command prompt run: NET START >netstop.txt This will pipe the list of running service names to the text file.
2) Load the netstop.txt file into your favorite text editor and massage it till it looks like this:

NET STOP "ASP.NET Admin Service"
NET STOP "COM+ Event System"
NET STOP "Computer Browser"
NET STOP "Cryptographic Services"
NET STOP "DefWatch"
NET STOP "DHCP Client"
NET STOP "DNS Client"
NET STOP "Event Log"
NET STOP "HTTP SSL"
NET STOP "IIS Admin Service"
NET STOP "Machine Debug Manager"
NET STOP "Network Connections"
NET STOP "Network Location Awareness (NLA)"
NET STOP "Plug and Play"
NET STOP "Print Spooler"
NET STOP "Protected Storage"
NET STOP "Remote Access Connection Manager"
NET STOP "Remote Procedure Call (RPC)"
NET STOP "Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Locator"
NET STOP "Security Accounts Manager"
NET STOP "Shell Hardware Detection"
NET STOP "Symantec AntiVirus Client"
NET STOP "System Event Notification"
NET STOP "Task Scheduler"
NET STOP "TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper"
NET STOP "Telephony"
NET STOP "Themes"
NET STOP "Windows Audio"
NET STOP "Windows Management Instrumentation"
NET STOP "World Wide Web Publishing Service"

Note: you will need to edit the list to remove any services that you know should not be stopped. Now save the file with a .BAT extension.

Also, you can replace all the words "STOP" with "START" and save a new file as "netstart.bat" - this enables you to restart all the services you stopped.

Try it!