Trimming down a less than reliable XP system

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Yes, a few of the services listed (3?) are "shared" with Vista, or should "only be" for Vista, but are indeed a part of SP3. These were ported back for XP.

I'm sure you will want to fix that.

poolsharkzz

Well, my bad then. I didn't update to SP3 and have no intention of doing so.

[maggotspawn]

It might be unpopular to suggest here, but on a 700mhz celeron 192mb pc133 i810, you'll find Puppy Linux stable, and good against malware. I did however notice you had DirectX 9.0c which might indicate you're using it for gaming.

X2 I'm testing Puppy Linux out now. Worth the 80MB download, and you can run it from CD to check it out.

[GrofLuigi]

I've found that having many unused services set to manual (or if definitely not required - disabled) generally increases boot times. Sometimes dramatically, especially with older machines.

Sometimes. What I do is - tweak them initially according to my ideas, then reboot a couple times (when installing programs etc.) and see if some of the services set to manual have started. Then, either make them automatic or disable them (if undesired). But yeah, generally, most of them are set to manual in the end.

It's true that some of them can't start for themselves, but that's their problem.

GL

[Jeremy]

I used to be an nLite fanatic.

Given today's HDD and memory capacities and well-coded freeware / open-source software, I don't feel the "need" to be so picky.

Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of disabled Services, but that is because I have been doing this for several years so I know what I can disable and set to manual.

I am starting to play with Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9. I'm quite impressed so far.

I am moving to freeware / open-source software as much as possible. I replaced Nero with ImgBurn. I can still burn DVDs that playback in my DVD Player exactly the same as Nero did.

My point is that, with good software and affordable 500GB drives and 2/4GB of RAM... I can let XP take all the memory it wants until I finally start playing COD and Steam games on Linux using Wine and/or Cedega.

Cheers,

Jeremy

[Zxian]

@PoolSharkzz - I have to disagree. Usually, you can be safe by disabling those services, but like I said before - what happens later? What if his aunt (I'm assuming he has an aunt there) wants her own account, and both people want to use the computer. You'd just disabled the Fast User Switching service.

Most people I do "computer cleanup" for are techno-clods (let's be honest here), and if I were to start telling them "Start->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services", they'd get scared and say it was too complicated - not even kidding here. Like Mr. Snurb said, the processes might be up and running, but chances are they're sitting there doing nothing, and chewing up zero resources.

Also - NEVER disable the DNS client service. I can guarantee you that your internet speeds will be slower without it since all your DNS requests are always sent back to the DNS server instead of simply being looked up in memory. Honestly - if you can't afford 2-3MB of RAM for the DNS client service, your computer shouldn't be running XP anyways.

[Poolsharkzz]

You guys just want to keep here at the shop a bit longer today!

Moving ahead -

SP3 - If you are running XP, you should be at SP3+. Why? Because one day, most likely in the near future, (Windows 7 - 2010?) Micro$oft will announce the support cycle for SP2 will end. Most likely, they will "update" the Windows Update Site again and the folks running SP2 will not access.

Like SP1 - you will no longer receive all them wonderful security updates that Micro$oft sends to us on Patch Tuesday. Also, SP3 has a few patches that fix a few outstanding bugs XP has, not to mention a few security enhancements. It always good to keep your system as updated as you can!

Fast User Switching - Okay, MAYBE in "our" world - but again, read the first post - his Uncle asked him for help - meaning that he Uncle has limited knowledge of how XP works - his Uncle most likely knows how to turn it on, open Internet Explorer, check his e-mail, and do a little surfing -

In my experience most OEMs desktops start you off with auto log in as Administrator, set up as the default settings. Most people don't change this because they don't know how to or don't care to.

Is this true with this system? I don't know. Does his Uncle have an iPod? I really doubt it, but you never know. That's why I gave him not one, but two really good, expert level resources for all the information he could ever want or need concerning services - both sites spell it out like if you were a 4 year old, he couldn't go wrong. If he did, all he has to do was ping me a quick e-mail.

Two or more accounts for this system? Might be true, but I really doubt it. Speedemon86????

Remember, we are looking at a fairly under-powered computer - why would anyone set up additional accounts that equates into an additional burden on the hard drive, CPU, Ram, registry, etc.

Manual - I agree with JedMeister - BlackViper's Guide is pretty foolproof - manual or disabled services will speed-up boot times - less for the Hard Drive to put into Ram or page back to file...

Think of it this way: you have a very small car - an older one - from the early 1980's - with a hell alot of miles on it and hell alot of wear and tear - would you try to haul more or less weight?

Given today's HDD and memory capacities - "picky" - I have explained this too many times already - he doesn't have what we have in terms of a modern, desktop PC. Lets be frank here: he has what we all know is nothing more than a oversized paper-weight - but it is all he has - and all he has to work with.

To make this system run a whole lot better - and performance has been the key issue here - it needs to become a lean, mean, secure, tweaked, slimmed down, updated PC - to make it until the hardware finally gives out or XP finally becomes unsupported on April 14, 2014 or Windows 7 SP1 becomes available and then he can finally upgrade his PC - which is what I am telling all my XP SP3 customers - ride that horse until it either drops dead or something much better (hopefully) comes your way.

There is nothing "today" about this system - except a few software updates and a guy who needed a little help.

It been suggested that he should use Ubuntu, Puppy Linux, Fedora - he uses W2K and his Uncle's is XP Home SP2 and he said twice now that he is very happy with what he has - read the posts people!

Hosts File - You guys are going to drive me to drink! (or is that the plan?)

From the website: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Editors Note: in most cases a large HOSTS file (over 135 kb) tends to slow down the machine. This only occurs in W2000/XP/Vista. Windows 98 and ME are not affected.

To resolve this issue (manually) open the "Services Editor"

Start | Run (type) "services.msc" (no quotes)

Scroll down to "DNS Client", Right-click and select: Properties

Click the drop-down arrow for "Startup type"

Select: Manual, or Disabled (recommended) click Apply/Ok and restart.

If he decides to use HostsMan / HostsServer - this is also highly recommended!

Currently, the updated MVPS Hosts File is 565kb with 18,201 entries.

At home, I have DSL and with HostsMan / HostsServer, OpenDNS, Speed Guide's TCP Optimizer, and a few well-documented changed system settings and the standard registry tweaks that appear at this forum: I actually have gained speed versus lost performance in my internet connectivity...

Again, its all about leaving as much resources available (Ram, CPU cycles) for other things to use - he has limited resources - kinda like going to the bar with only $20.00 bucks in your pocket - you can have only a few beers and then you gotta go home.

Here is a thought: Imagine simply setting his system so that the kernel stays put in Ram versus paging back to file - speeding up performance - what if the system couldn't do it because he has 20-30 services running and the 2-3MB needed for DNS Client? He only has 512mb Ram.

"Computer Cleanup" - If your case came into my shop and it was 3 years or older - I would spend the 15 minutes doing it. Besides, it impresses the customer!

I offer it as a part of a computer "tune-up" service - which also includes most of what I have painfully mentioned in all of my posts - all the programs are freeware - it just a matter of downloading them - they all should be included with most systems anyway...

If you take the time to teach your customers a thing or two about a thing or two - just the basics - they will always come back for more which equals billing hours!

I have one huge registry "tune-up tweak file" that merges most of the better known and proven registry tweaks - and removes most of the unnecessary garbage from the registry: like unneeded time zones (who cares what time it is in Korea? or Russia?), unneeded languages (tell me you speak Chinese or Arabic) windows classic color schemes (when the last time you used Rose, Wheat, Teal, Rust, or Pumpkin?) don't ya "love" them tool tips?, and to tighten down system security, especially with Outlook Express and the Windows Media Player.

I remove approx 17% of the registry - Yes, that is how much garbage is really in there - as well as I remove approx 50-70mb from the system itself in terms of deleting unnecessary folders and files, uninstall unneeded Micro$oft programs (Messenger, NetMeeting, Dr. Watson - there is a winner!), of course tweaking background services and changing a few system settings for performance, deleting a few unused cursors and a few unnecessary fonts, wallpapers (Autumn or Bliss?) and screen savers (I download a few cool ones ported back from Vista, like Bubbles!), hotfix uninstall backup files, interactive training files, and uninstall the many 3rd party "trial-wares" which are mostly adware / spyware -

I have achieved performance gains benchmarked by up to 40%! (versus a fresh, default OEM install)

I usually spend a day and a half with a client's computer - 12-14 hours - all this for $450.00 clams - less than half the price to purchase a modern, desktop PC with 2.0+ Gigs of Memory and today's ultra-fast hard drives to run Vista correctly.

Okay, I gotta run, it's almost 5:00pm here in the windy city - time for me to scoot home and see what my wife is up to and kick the dog...

Enjoyable as always, gentlemen.

poolsharkzz

Edited August 21, 2008 by Poolsharkzz

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Agreed 100%, Poolsharkzz. I've ran underpowered computer systems for a long while till i finally saved money to afford a proper rig. And i've learnt a lot this way.

It's funny how the mods of this forum reply to any affirmation not matching their views with "Are you drunk?" or "I agree, but what happens later?" I am a moderator of a forum myself. And when the admin promoted me for helping out people and being nice, i saw that as a huge privilege. And i still enjoy moderating to the day, and actually keep on topic, and when i give warnings or bans it's because they deserved it. Of course, to most of you i may count as "a kid", i'm only 17. But there's one thing you gotta realize - kids these days have so many more ways to learn, and learn faster. And you should never forget that you should never despise those that are, in some way, lower than you, because you can learn a lot from anyone in this world.

Me and Poolsharkzz gave on-topic advice. You come and say something that translates into "he should just get a new computer". What if he doesn't need a new computer??? What if he's happy with his current computer and doesn't want more?

As a matter of fact, i have a 24" flat CRT here on my dual-PIII. But it's a TV, and that means running 1024x768 on a display that can only do 720x576 natively. Just a few hours ago i popped the thing open and was tweaking focus so i could read text better. Because i can't afford a new monitor here at the moment, so i get by with what i can. Yesterday i was running around the house chasing and killing bugs.

Yeah, i do have a pretty high-end rig at home, but it took a while of running crap PCs to save money for that. And what do i get - 3 graphics cards fried in 8 months (warranty ftw), and my current HD3870 suffering from a design flaw which makes the memory overheat and artifact - it needs a new cooler. But why should i buy a new cooler to fix a flaw that shouldn't be there in the first place? Anyway, i realized i'm much more happy with my dual-PIII than my C2D. I tweak at it all day when it needs tweaking, but once i'm done tweaking it runs without a single hitch, for months on end.

So why should the OP's uncle get a new computer with Vista if he can check his email just fine on his current PIII?

Edited August 21, 2008 by Th3_uN1Qu3

[Zxian]

Remember, we are looking at a fairly under-powered computer - why would anyone set up additional accounts that equates into an additional burden on the hard drive, CPU, Ram, registry, etc.

Sorry, but this simply isn't true. The system in question has 512MB of RAM, which is plenty for a basic web-surfing, document-writing system with two or three users. My parents system was an Athlon 1GHz with 512MB of RAM, and they used this for years before changing to a laptop (they live off the grid now, so power consumption is a concern). An idle user in the background doesn't apply any "burden" to the system resources. If the system does need more RAM, idle pages will be written to disk, and then read back when needed. For the tasks that the OP's "limited knowledge" Uncle has, this really shouldn't be a concern.

Think of it this way: you have a very small car - an older one - from the early 1980's - with a hell alot of miles on it and hell alot of wear and tear - would you try to haul more or less weight?

Sure... so you remove the entire A/C system from the car (let's assume it's currently winter time) because you have no need for it. Then the summer comes along... you might be wanting that A/C back again, but the driver has no idea how to do that. Even worse, in cases like with nLited installations, the A/C system has been thrown out altogether!

To make this system run a whole lot better - and performance has been the key issue here - it needs to become a lean, mean, secure, tweaked, slimmed down, updated PC - to make it until the hardware finally gives out or XP finally becomes unsupported on April 14, 2014 or Windows 7 SP1 becomes available and then he can finally upgrade his PC - which is what I am telling all my XP SP3 customers - ride that horse until it either drops dead or something much better (hopefully) comes your way.

The system described in the original post is a very typical 2000/2001 computer. Those specs are exactly what XP was originally designed to run on.

At home, I have DSL and with HostsMan / HostsServer, OpenDNS, Speed Guide's TCP Optimizer, and a few well-documented changed system settings and the standard registry tweaks that appear at this forum: I actually have gained speed versus lost performance in my internet connectivity...

I suggest you check again. You're suggesting that a DNS lookup from a web server is faster than looking up that same entry from cache? Your hosts file might be helping things by blocking ads, but otherwise, the setup that you described will lead to slower page load times.

Again, its all about leaving as much resources available (Ram, CPU cycles) for other things to use - he has limited resources - kinda like going to the bar with only $20.00 bucks in your pocket - you can have only a few beers and then you gotta go home.

Here is a thought: Imagine simply setting his system so that the kernel stays put in Ram versus paging back to file - speeding up performance - what if the system couldn't do it because he has 20-30 services running and the 2-3MB needed for DNS Client? He only has 512mb Ram.

Erm... "only" 512MB of RAM? Look at the recommended system requirements! You're talking about "only" 512MB when that was the equivalent of modern systems with 8 or 16GB. 512MB was a LOT of RAM back then. My mother's system, with 256MB, boots up, and task manager reports 100MB free.

I have one huge registry "tune-up tweak file" that merges most of the better known and proven registry tweaks - and removes most of the unnecessary garbage from the registry: like unneeded time zones (who cares what time it is in Korea? or Russia?), unneeded languages (tell me you speak Chinese or Arabic) windows classic color schemes (when the last time you used Rose, Wheat, Teal, Rust, or Pumpkin?) don't ya "love" them tool tips?, and to tighten down system security, especially with Outlook Express and the Windows Media Player.

I remove approx 17% of the registry - Yes, that is how much garbage is really in there - as well as I remove approx 50-70mb from the system itself in terms of deleting unnecessary folders and files, uninstall unneeded Micro$oft programs (Messenger, NetMeeting, Dr. Watson - there is a winner!), of course tweaking background services and changing a few system settings for performance, deleting a few unused cursors and a few unnecessary fonts, wallpapers (Autumn or Bliss?) and screen savers (I download a few cool ones ported back from Vista, like Bubbles!), hotfix uninstall backup files, interactive training files, and uninstall the many 3rd party "trial-wares" which are mostly adware / spyware -

I have achieved performance gains benchmarked by up to 40%! (versus a fresh, default OEM install)

I'd like to see this "40%" performance gain. Benchmarking tools test raw CPU power, or memory access speeds, or disk access speeds - none of which are going to be affected by additional registry entries. There have been far too many discussions and reviews about this, and they've all been turned down. Read the results for yourself.

I usually spend a day and a half with a client's computer - 12-14 hours - all this for $450.00 clams - less than half the price to purchase a modern, desktop PC with 2.0+ Gigs of Memory and today's ultra-fast hard drives to run Vista correctly.

Wow... you charge people half the cost of a modern computer... to make their old computer slightly faster, if not more broken?

Agreed 100%, Poolsharkzz. I've ran underpowered computer systems for a long while till i finally saved money to afford a proper rig. And i've learnt a lot this way.

It's funny how the mods of this forum reply to any affirmation not matching their views with "Are you drunk?" or "I agree, but what happens later?" I am a moderator of a forum myself. And when the admin promoted me for helping out people and being nice, i saw that as a huge privilege. And i still enjoy moderating to the day, and actually keep on topic, and when i give warnings or bans it's because they deserved it. Of course, to most of you i may count as "a kid", i'm only 17. But there's one thing you gotta realize - kids these days have so many more ways to learn, and learn faster. And you should never forget that you should never despise those that are, in some way, lower than you, because you can learn a lot from anyone in this world.

Please tell me if I've been rude or off-topic in any way here. I've simply been trying to debunk several myths that have been brought up by Poolsharkzz (which have come up time and time again over the past 7 years).

Me and Poolsharkzz gave on-topic advice. You come and say something that translates into "he should just get a new computer". What if he doesn't need a new computer??? What if he's happy with his current computer and doesn't want more?

Again, I never suggested that he simply get a new computer, but rather that a default clean install of XP would probably do a world of good.

Yeah, i do have a pretty high-end rig at home, but it took a while of running crap PCs to save money for that. And what do i get - 3 graphics cards fried in 8 months (warranty ftw), and my current HD3870 suffering from a design flaw which makes the memory overheat and artifact - it needs a new cooler. But why should i buy a new cooler to fix a flaw that shouldn't be there in the first place? Anyway, i realized i'm much more happy with my dual-PIII than my C2D. I tweak at it all day when it needs tweaking, but once i'm done tweaking it runs without a single hitch, for months on end.

So why should the OP's uncle get a new computer with Vista if he can check his email just fine on his current PIII?

Your hardware troubles are the reason why I'm rarely a first adopter of new technology. Up until this past year, I've always worked on older hardware. My main workstation up until last summer was also a dual PIII 1GHz system with 1GB of RAM. My new computers were built, installed, and updated, and the only major problems I've had have been from a couple of sticks of bad RAM (hey - it happens).

[jcarle]

I tend to use this a lot lately... are you guys drunk? (Zxian excluded)

Anyone who writes Microsoft with a $, refers to BlackViper and suggests turning off the DNS Client then replacing it with a hosts file shouldn't be distributing that kind of poor advice. Those are the people that drive systems into a mess that professional technicians such as ourselves end up cleaning up for people. You want a fast and reliable system? Clean install XP with SP3, install the latest drivers and upgrade the RAM and you'll have a wonderful system without the mess caused by those so called "tweaks". Increasing the amount of memory, even in an old system will outway the benefits of any possible "tweak" you can imagine.

Edited August 22, 2008 by jcarle

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

I tend to use this a lot lately... are you guys drunk? (Zxian excluded)

Anyone who writes Microsoft with a $, refers to BlackViper and suggests turning off the DNS Client then replacing it with a hosts file shouldn't be distributing that kind of poor advice. Those are the people that drive systems into a mess that professional technicians such as ourselves end up cleaning up for people. You want a fast and reliable system? Clean install XP with SP3, install the latest drivers and move up to 2GB of RAM and you'll have a wonderful system without the mess caused by those so called "tweaks".

Why do we all need to move up to 2GB RAM? XP's minimum requirement is 64MB btw, and it actually runs with lower than that. And his uncle's mobo doesn't even support more than 512MB.

Do you think everything that Microsoft makes is perfect? If it were, nobody would've been tweaking it as we would've been all happy with it out of the box. I've been a happy TinyXP user for 2 years and continue to be. My retail copy of XP (which i bought only after SP1 came out btw, i ran 98SE till then) has been sitting on the shelf for a lot of time. And my retail Vista Ultimate 64 has been nothing but a waste of money.

And what exactly did BlackViper do wrong? Explain please. And no, i'm not drunk. Why does everybody that tweaks his Windows OS have to be drunk? Oh, and i write Microsoft whatever way i want to. It's called freedom of speech.

Edited August 22, 2008 by Th3_uN1Qu3

[Zxian]

Do you think everything that Microsoft makes is perfect? If it were, nobody would've been tweaking it as we would've been all happy with it out of the box. I've been a happy TinyXP user for 2 years and continue to be. My retail copy of XP (which i bought only after SP1 came out btw, i ran 98SE till then) has been sitting on the shelf for a lot of time. And my retail Vista Ultimate 64 has been nothing but a waste of money.

No, I don't believe that everything MS makes is perfect, but having dealt with several OSes on various hardware, I'd say that it's better than the rest at a lot of things.

And what exactly did BlackViper do wrong?

BV makes it seem as though you can disable those "unnecessary" services at will and not worry about the possible repercussions of doing so. The worst part of it all - if something breaks, you often don't know which service it is that is required without a lot of trial and error.

If you want to disable services on your own computer, go for it. If you're doing work for others, chances are you'll end up disabling something that's going to cause them problems later. While this might end up giving Poolsharkzz more customers in the long run, I think it's just wrong, and isn't worth the "OMG 3 seconds faster boot" that you get.

EVERY time I nlited my system or started tweaking services, something broke in the end. My laptop had a plain vanilla install of XP on it for two years. No tweaks, no services disabled, just plain XP and updates. Number of incompatibilities with software - zero. Number of times I needed to enable a service for something - zero. It worked. Plain and simple.

I'd bet you guys a beer that the OP's uncle would rather have a system that works reliably rather than one that's 10% faster. As you're typing your reply - is your browser that much faster at responding to your typing if you've twaked your system?

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

No, I don't believe that everything MS makes is perfect, but having dealt with several OSes on various hardware, I'd say that it's better than the rest at a lot of things.

Such as? A lot of talk but no hard examples.

BV makes it seem as though you can disable those "unnecessary" services at will and not worry about the possible repercussions of doing so. The worst part of it all - if something breaks, you often don't know which service it is that is required without a lot of trial and error.

That happens if you don't read the service descriptions.

If you want to disable services on your own computer, go for it. If you're doing work for others, chances are you'll end up disabling something that's going to cause them problems later. While this might end up giving Poolsharkzz more customers in the long run, I think it's just wrong, and isn't worth the "OMG 3 seconds faster boot" that you get.

When i disable stuff on other peoples' computers i only disable those that i'm sure they aren't going to need, and ask about it. "Do you need LAN networking" "No, i only use the internet." 2 services less. And i leave a little batch file. "Well, if you're ever going to need it, run this and reboot." No one ever called me back saying stuff doesn't work, and i've done quite a few installs.

EVERY time I nlited my system or started tweaking services, something broke in the end. My laptop had a plain vanilla install of XP on it for two years. No tweaks, no services disabled, just plain XP and updates. Number of incompatibilities with software - zero. Number of times I needed to enable a service for something - zero. It worked. Plain and simple.

I'd bet you guys a beer that the OP's uncle would rather have a system that works reliably rather than one that's 10% faster. As you're typing your reply - is your browser that much faster at responding to your typing if you've twaked your system?

That's bad luck for you. The furtherly tweaked TinyXP Platinum 2 install i have here on my dual-PIII is 2 years old, and survived being moved from an IDE HDD to a SATA one attached to a PCI controller card, 2 CPU upgrades and one mobo swap. It still boots in 20 seconds. 17 processes at idle, that's including the Vista Drive indicator, ATi Tray Tools, and the two processes for my multimedia keyboard and special mouse buttons, so that's 13 Windows processes. It does everything i need it to do, and never had any software which didn't install. Oh, and i still get automatic updates.

And tell me, do you need the wireless monitor always running on a computer that will never have a wireless card? Or the Server/Workstation services on a computer that will never need to share files via LAN? Or even worse, Remote Registry??? Those are only potential security holes. The more you plug from the get go, the less you have to deal with later on.

Edited August 22, 2008 by Th3_uN1Qu3

[jcarle]

You know what's wrong with what you're doing? Everything.

You want proof that there's nothing wrong with XP as it is? Try asking the MILLIONS of users that use XP as is without "tweaking" it. nLite/vLite are the busiest sub-forums of this entire forum, and they're not praise and celebration posts either. Most of the posts in the nLite/vLite section are posts about problems and complaints of broken parts of Windows after "tweaking" the OS. The same goes with complaints about BlackViper's "tweaks". It's funny, you never hear people complain that an up to date install of XP with up to date drivers doesn't work, because guess what, it just does.

Oh and yes, you can spell Microsoft any way you want, spelling it with a $ just proves your lack of education.

Edited August 22, 2008 by jcarle

[CoffeeFiend]

I can only agree with Zxian and jcarle here, on all points. Most of those tweaks do very little in terms of performance, and quite often people get problems from them later on -- just like we see everyday in the *lite sections (I've removed X, now how to add it back? what to keep so app xyz works? etc). Large hosts file can be a problem (and kind of suck, even for ad blocking), it's misusing it at best.

Anyone who actually charges customers large sums of money for doing such things to their PCs are only doing them a disservice. For $450 you'd get quite an upgrade (or an entire new computer even). Any competent tech or shop would sell them an upgrade kit for half that, which would actually give them a real performance boost, instead of charging a LOT of money for almost no difference and potentially breaking things/creating their customers more trouble.

[Mr Snrub]

While the thread is still a "healthy debate" and keeping an eye on the temperature...

If you want to disable services on your own computer, go for it. If you're doing work for others, chances are you'll end up disabling something that's going to cause them problems later. While this might end up giving Poolsharkzz more customers in the long run, I think it's just wrong, and isn't worth the "OMG 3 seconds faster boot" that you get.

I wanted to +1 this.

The focus appears to have been on components being stripping components from the install media, deselected during install or disabled post-install with a view to saving resources with the expectation that this implicitly leads to better performance.

Those "erring on the side of caution" are suggesting that care is taken to measure correctly that there is in fact any difference in performance and also that the end user is aware of and understands what was changed so that future issues that crop up can have their root cause identified more readily.

(In the corporate world this awareness changes more to "security hardening" and "group policies" having strange side effects - the latter at least can be filtered out for troubleshooting.)

Trying to increase performance through tweaks requires a good understanding of what the components do for you or the system, a simple paragraph that describes what a service does with a recommendation that "it should be okay to disable this - try it and see" doesn't cut it IMO.

I feel that Black Viper's list is a collection of such statements that people often follow blindly and acts as a placebo.

Performance needs to be measured accurately, with a baseline and changes being made individually to observe their impact - also as Zxian mentioned "startup times" are nowhere near as important as "operational speed" - with S3 sleep mode boot times become completely irrelevant for workstations and I see this being the future, and for most applications once they are loaded into memory their performance is unlikely to be affected by other consumers of virtual memory (as unneeded ones will already have been paged to disk anyway).

Trying to measure how optimized a system is based on the amount of memory (physical or virtual) is committed, how long it takes to start up or where CPU cycles are being spent (when not at 100% for long periods of time) can turn out to be inaccurate, so a false economy to try to "fix".