Hello all, Just ran into a bit of an odd discovery with my unit here, which seems to contradict everything otherwise out there. I have been suffering some rather poor performance with my recent Asus P5B-Deluxe build. Thing would run roughly akin to a smooth running box equipped with a Celeron 433 and 256mb RAM and XP - i.e., stable, but by no means smooth. This problem seemed to have creeped up on me right after I had tweaked up services.msc, but also seemed to be affected by the ASUS supplied drivers. I quickly learned with a bit of Googling that the ASUS supplied drivers for the P5B Deluxe (JMicron SATA controller, & onboard SoundMax) were culprits of some pretty poor performance, so I booted them and replaced with the generic M$ drivers. A tiny bit of performance was gained, if any - nothing to speak of, really. Obviously, I figured it had to do with one of the Services settings, but I never was able to figure out which. Quite foolishly, I never kept a list of the defaults, and although I did not remember the entirety of the default settings, I do fainly recall a few differences between my default settings on a clean install, and the list given on Blackviper.com for the XP x64 defaults. This said, while butting my head against networking this beast with another XP machine in the room today, I found myself faced with the 6118 server list error when running the "net view" command in DOS (I couldn't get the "View Workgroup Computers" list to show up without a "...list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available" error). Thanks to one site, I traced the problem down to the "Computer Browser Service" - I had it disabled. Apparently, if I wanted this list to show, it had to be enabled. Fine with me, I enabled it. What shocked me is that almost instantly after enabling and starting the service, the old "punch" of performance was back - it was running MOST noticeably better - almost comparable to the day I installed XP x64 on the unit. Now I come to my question: This service, by its description on Blackviper and most other sites seems harmless, yet, they all recommend disabling it FOR performance. May I ask what is the point in disabling this device, if it, for one, conflicts with the proper operation of the main unit of a home network; and secondly, appears to negatively affect performance if disabled? Is this an x64 quirk? What am I missing? And for that matter - are there any security drawbacks to allowing this service to manual or automatic? Wouldn't expect there to be any, but I thought I'd ask anyway. Thanks in advance for the far more intelligent information you fellows can provide on the matter then I'll ever know... Take care, -Kurt

Blackviper tries to explain that this is not required on a single stand alone computer and can be disabled for power users... In a domain though there needs to be at least one "browser service" running. but there is questions concerning whether or not they need to be running on all computers in the domain...in which Blackviper believes that there is no need for this to happen. It just may be that you have found a reason to suggest there is a need for it as there seems to be a lag of performance with it disabled. Why not contact BV and see what he now has to say on the subject? http://www.blackviper.com/Admin/con... In The Matters Of Style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, Stand Like A Rock "People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."

Indeed, I can understand his reasoning as to turning it off on a non-networked computer, or on a unit not running as primary host to the network/network hardware (printers, etc). It isn't BV's suggestion that confuses me - it is the sheer number of additional suggestions to turn it off that are not obvious ripoffs from his site - enough users have suggested it that it has to have been tried at least once. I'll send him a buzz though - can't hurt. -Kurt

there will all ways be ripoff artists out there. another respected sites as VP is http://theeldergeek.com/ who has been around for as long as VP. TEG also suggests disabling for single computer but to leave as automatic for networking.... http://theeldergeek.com/computer_br... I actually followed TEG's advice long before I found out about BV. I don't know who was first...but TEG usually has some input from others concerning some disabling services and he tries to inform one a bit better on what the options are! In The Matters Of Style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, Stand Like A Rock "People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."