I am a self-taught person. From the time I got my first computer to even now. Here's a study you can try. Re-enable all of your services to the proper defaults. Run a ProcessIdleTasks* to rebuild your prefetch (or wait for that happen automatically every three days) and you'll be surprised how your system will perform better with everything as factory defaults. I'm speaking from experience, I've tried it with tweaks, and then without. The defaults really are the optimal settings. This is, after all, friendly advice to help those who are not as educated in the field of computers. Edit: Here's the exact command to enter via Run Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks When called from the command line, the ProcessIdleTasks work is done in the background asynchronously. It can take 10 to 15 minutes for idle tasks to complete. Task Manager will report processes running, and the disk will likely be active during this time.