There are over 100 background servies running in Vista. Most of them do nothing but slow you down!

Any frequent reader of my Hubs knows that I am far from Windows Vista's greatest fan. I may actually be one of the loudest and most persistent critics of this misbegotten excuse for an operating system (OS).

I am currently receiving a measure of vindication as more and more people are finding stubborn and often insurmountable problems with drivers, applications, and worst of all, the sheer sluggishness of this monstrous OS which requires a jaw-dropping 15GB of free hard drive space just to install. And if you ever want to uninstall it, you're better off just reformatting the disk or you'll be weeks just trying to put all the pieces back together.

There are well over a hundred services inside Vista's innards, and most of them do absolutely nothing for the common, average user other than slow down his PC to a crawl and require outrageous amounts of hard drive space, RAM and CPU cycles. If you are even remotely considering using Vista, you had better have an uncle in the PC business as you're going to require a system with some truly massive power. All the people who think that just because their Centrino 512MB RAM laptop has a sticker that says it's "Vista Ready" that you'll actually be able to do something with it. Lots of luck!

There is so much sheer unadulterated trash gumming up the works on Vista that the average, normal user is truly well off by just turning the vast majority of it off. The readers of my Hubs are not generally the top multinational enterprise administrator types, but regular men and women who just use their computers for everyday common uses. I can assure you that well over 99% of these readers do not have any need whatsoever for the following Windows Vista services running all the time and turning your speedy computer into a mud bog slogger:

• Infrared Monitor Service
• KTMRM for Distributed Transaction Coordinator
• Network Access Protection Agent
• Peer Name Resolution Protocol
• Pen Service
• PnP-X IP Bus Enumerator Service
• Remote Access Connection Manager
• Remote Registry
• Secondary Logon
• SL UI Notification Service
• SSDP Discover Service
• Tablet PC Input Service
• TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
• UPnP Device Host
• Virtual Disk
• WebClient
• Windows Management Instrumentation
• Windows Media Center Extender Service
• WinHTTP WebProxy AutoDiscovery Service
• and let's not even mention Aero! (Gag!)

These are the ones that can be easily terminated in common, everyday scenarios and you'd never miss them for an instant. However, there is a really great resource over at Black viper. It lists every single service that runs on every flavor of Vista and which ones can be terminated and under what situations. It also gives you specific and easy to follow instructions on how to do that! Turning many of these off will make your system fast and responsive again. If you were stupid enough to buy Vista, do something smart for a change! Go check out that website and start turning off all that useless OS junk!