A handy little application...
 

I just ran across this application and I have to say that I'm loving it so much I want to share it with everyone. It's called Game Booster by IOBit. What it does is it temporarily turns off unnecessary services such as Windows Search, Search Indexer, Print Spooler, IP Helper, etc. while you are gaming. It increase my performance by around 5-10%. I like it mainly because of the obvious performance boost and I don't have to manually go to each service and disable it myself. I actually like Windows Search/Search Indexer, but it interrupts my gaming experience because it uses so many resources. I like how it disables everything for you, then when you're done gaming it re enables all the extra crap.

Using this and ReadyBoost really helps performance on Windows 7 64-bit. At least for me anyways.

Yeah, sometimes disabling a load of those "small" processes leads to decent gains for other stuff :)

This sounds a lot like AMD Fusion -- which would allow you to both tweak/overclock CPU and GPU settings (with AMD Overdrive I think itw as called), but also disable other unnecessary processes at the click of a button.

net start/stop [service name]

to start/stop a service from the command line or your own batch file. Saves you the resources of running that application. ;)

I couldn't get it to work. I kept getting a syntax error on line 1 char 5.

My batch...:

Well syntax error implies they changed the syntax of that command in your operating system, surprising since that's been working since Windows NT days. Or it's UAC again, you'll need to run the batch as admin of course.

I don't have UAC enabled. I know what programs I should run, so UAC in essence does nothing for security for advanced users.

Also the command net stop works in cmd, just not with batch files. Net start seems to work.

I cut and pasted your commands to a batch file, inserted a pause command between each line and it ran ok. Going a step further I downloaded the Windows server 2003 Resource kit (rtools.exe) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en from MickeySoft in order to get the sleep.exe utility which I added to the Windows/System32 folder. Using Win 7 Pro 64 btw.

Replacing the pause in the batch file with [sleep 5](tweakable) gives the system time to gracefully shut down the processes before issuing the next command. Works fine this way. Enjoy!

Oh if that is the issue I have an ever better solution:

start /w net start/stop [ServiceName]

This waits for the command to finish before continuing execution of the batch file and passing on to the next command.

I don't know why it didn't work the first time, but here's my code for Windows 7. I'm still tweaking it to disable the crap I don't want while playing games. I want to keep my security software running. Is there a way to start/stop a process and if so is there a way to toggle the process/service instead of having two separate batch files?
Obviously I disabled Avast Mail Scanner because I don't check mail while gaming. I was also wondering if there are any unnecessary services that I can disable that isn't in my list?

not directly, but you could create your two batch files services1.cmd and services2.cmd and switch them out via another batch file toggle.cmd:

ren services1.cmd services1.bak
ren service2.cmd services1.cmd
ren services1.bak services2.cmd
start services1.cmd

Now each time you run toggle.cmd it alternates between running your start or your stop batch file.

Depends on what you are currently running and what you need. ;) Attached is a .reg file (renamed) that I usually use after initial install to turn some services off which are running by default. Maybe it's helpful.

PS: I feel I may have made it more complicated than simply using the tool you proposed in the OP? ;)