Windows XP: The Journey to Turning Off Unnecessary Services of my PC

Well, I have reformatted my PC recently (I hear Mac users says 'again!'), because it's getting fat and not fabolous. What I mean is, it's getting bulky of programs, past documents, hidden trojans and worms and even untraced backdoor from spywares. And because, I need a PC that's 500% much faster (literally, when you format your PC, it gets faster at that rate), I backed up right away.

After a handful hours of formatting, the cleansed and virginal PC has born again. Cheers! Well, I said not now, I still hate it when there are so many services automatically opened when I boot it, menus that are not even used like forever and even icons that are better unseen. I don't hate Windows XP, I just happened to love minimal (physical resources used in this sense). To turn off the unnecessary annoyances that almost ate the paging file of the memory, here are the steps:

1. Click Start button.
2. Choose Setting -> Control Panel.
3. Double click Administrative Tools.
4. Double click Services.

So, you will see a list of services that are either disabled, automatic or manual. The 'Started' is the status that a service is running. If you can't understand what you are seeing, click here to see detailed description about those services and what should be disabled as soon as possible. But, you should take a note, that disabling services could affect some programs that depends on it, so if you are unsure about this, you should think twice, but if you really want to get your PC faster, without losing internet connection, they you should set manual or disable these services. Please refer to this link for further details.

1. Alerter - Disable it.
2. Automatic Updates - Disable it. Annoyance #1. The icon at the right sode with ballooning message.
3. Error reporting service. Annoyance #2. Well, if you're not too much techie, you can manual it, to see if there's a problem in your PC.
4. Fax Service. Annoyance #3. Okay, are you using your PC sending fax, I don't so disable it.
5. Help and Support. Annoyance #4. It's so slow to load, but if you want to know more about fixing your computer, or other features, then you can turned it Automatic or Manual.
6. Messenger. Annoyance #5. I'm not using it, I'm using Web Yahoo Messenger, no install required or I use the old version of Yahoo Messenger, super fast.
7. Remote Desktop Help Session Manager. It's neither annoyance or service to be called, so I just turned it off, I don't need help from far flung regions of nowhere.
8. Remote Registry. Annoyance #6. Sounds a bad idea for me, because someone can just edit right away your registry, but sounds good for those crackers.
9. Security Center. Annoyance #7. If you don't want to receive critical updates and contended with installed Anti-virus, then shut it down. Firewalls are also shut down.
10. Server. Annoyance #8. I'm not the server, so I disabled it.
11. Terminal Services. If you are not using fast-user switching (the Welcome screen with lots of users at start) and currently using the Log-in format, then turned it off.
12. Themes. Annoyance #9. I don't like themes. I want clean, simple, classy but not old-looking.
13. Windows Firewall. This is very important thing for those who want to prevent intrusion into your PC, but I consider third-party firewalls from AVG or Avast, they're cooler.
14. Wireless Zero Configuration. Annoyance #10. I'm wired, sorry.

Disclaimer: This is for informative purpose only. I have no obligations or liabilites when something happened to your PC. It's either you follow this or not. But if you have some questions strictly about this tweaking series, I would be glad to answer that. Thank you!