Edited to change “WEBM” to “WBEM”. Oops!
My goals are to prevent my Windows 10 laptop from ever
accessing the Internet or the hard drive except when I tell
it to. After having disabled all manner of things, such as
nearly all the services Black Viper says are safe to disable
— plus a couple he doesn’t say are safe — Process Monitor
still shows that Windows components in the WBEM folder
are accessed by the hard drive quite a bit. A *LOT* of other
things, too, but at the moment I’m just asking about WBEM.
Do I need it, or can I turn it off? Pretty obviously you need
to know more about what I’m doing with the computer in
order to determine whether I require WBEM, but I don’t know
what you need to know, so I’ll just wait for you to ask.
— Jeff, in Minneapolis
Windows Firewall if managed will stop traffic through to the internet by programs but managing everything could be a real pain and get annoying real fast.
If you unplug the router momentarily, the router gets a new IP address from your ISP, this if done periodically will increase your security without having to keep it turned off most of the time. Your router also has a remote access from your computer’s browser (internally only) which will allow you some increased firewall and other security settings if you like. Remember to reset the default log in and password for access as well as any Wifi network name and Wifi access key. Some routers actually have a manual Wifi off switch to increase security of your network when you feel you need it. Of course hard wired is more secure than Wifi.
Please note that the lowest CPU activity and hard drive access can be achieved if your Windows operating system is installed from scratch from non-branded media (not from Dell, HP, etc.) because there is much less junk installed from the beginning. Windows 7 Pro is probably better at this then Windows 10 is simply because MS was not yet planning on controlling your entire computing experience back then. The problem is that Windows 7 is less supported on the newest hardware then previous generations so you may have to go back a generation or so for some components or deal with issues. An example I had to deal with was a PCIe SSD drive as a bootable drive with Windows 7 and the Z97 chipset (explained elsewhere, if you are interested, see link).
https://www.computing.net/howtos/sh…
You have to be a little bit crazy to keep you from going insane.
You’re not going to find out much about WBEM, at least not dealing with Windows, unless you’re looking into WMI. You could always disable the Windows Management Instrumentation service, and see what happens.
Seriously though, Windows has always had heavy disk access. If you want absolute control over everything the OS does, pick up one of the BSDs or Linux distros out there.
The video format? No, it’s not required to run your system. Not sure why you have an entire folder dedicated to it.
Unless you’re talking about WBEM, in which case, do you need WMI? *shrug* Group policy might fail if it’s missing. Security Center is listed as a service dependency, but otherwise I don’t think anything in Windows itself relies on it. Some programs use it; mostly when they’re gathering info about your system. You really shouldn’t delete it unless you know how to rebuild it. In your case, something’s probably using it if there’s that much activity.