| I prefer things pretty minimal myself, but there is such a thing as going *too far*... |
Perhaps. But that's just the cross I have to bear. What you've seen is really just the tip of the iceberg. I disable all non-essential services. Even most essential services I change from automatic to manual. I have less than 20 processes running on my machine at any one time.
Every program that you install treats your PC as it's personal playground and thinks nothing of adding new services that can never be uninstalled and starting 3 or more processes on boot up regardless of whether or not you're actually ever going to use the program. The crap that accumulates in your registry over time can make it impossible to figure out whats going on, plus unistalling a program might clean up the start menu and the install directory, but never the registry. I usually end up hand editing the crap out of my registry.
BTW can anyone recommend a good registry cleaner?
It takes me quite a while to set up a new PC but once done, I've run for years with no issue until the inevitable day someone comes out with a new OS or DirectX 23 or whatever that makes what I have obsolete and I have to do the same thing all over again. I've done this at least 6 times since 1980, I probably have another 3 or 4 more times to go before I'm dead and no longer have to deal with it.
