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

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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!
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

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