I'm tired of seeing my laptop sporadically consume 100% disk usage and gigabytes of memory. Most of the time the problem is on "Windows Management Instrumentation" service. Beside disk I/O consumption, it also often take a lot memory.
I just disable that WMI service for 7 hours now. Everything is really going well. I'm curious is there any downside of turning of this service ? All my need for computer are just Emacs, Chrome, Command Console, and Microsoft Office.
PS. I'm using Windows 10
52 Answers
Here's is but a small sampling of what can be done via WMI. This this list was extracted from WMIExplorer 2.00
While you can definitely disable it, a lot can be done remotely with the WMI interface. I can connect to computers remotely, install printers, do inventory, and more.
Windows comes with a bunch of printing scripts here:
C:\Windows\System32\Printing_Admin_Scripts\en-US\
prncnfg.vbs prndrvr.vbs prnjobs.vbs prnmngr.vbs prnport.vbs prnqctl.vbs pubprn.vbs
That will no longer work.
I'd like to point out what you actually lose by disabling WMI. My laptops are not going to be managed remotely, so WMI seems to be unneeded. I have disabled it via Servies -> Winmgmt and my devices seem to run almost fine.
Almost, because there are some functions that you can't use when WMI is disabled, even loacally! The downsides to disabling WMI that I have experienced so far are:
the Dependencies-view in Services which will no longer be populated. Opening this view will instead show the following error message:
Silent Option (an MSI tool to output and configure fan speed) will no longer function, it will show no controls and will not allow you to customize the fan speed.
