Vista Services
 

can you guys recommend some services that are pretty safe to disable and speed up vista's startup? thanks for any help.

thanks! great list.

Black Viper's Web Site is great; its got lots of tips and guides for both XP and Vista.

See this is the problem with sites like that: they are almost biased, and they are prone to misinformation.

For example, it calls all Diagnostic related services as "a collection of diagnostic tools that attempts to detect problems in memory, disk and files" when in fact its the service that checks online for potential causes on application crashes. And even if it was completely useless in XP, it is very smart in Vista and actually provided me with a lot of useful links during the half year I used it.
So if you want to save yourself a lot of googling, make sure you have Diagnostic Policy Service on auto start, since even at manual it won't work right (the other related services are not properly "flagged" to rely on this, and fail to wake it up manually should the need arise).

I wouldn't recommend fucking with Vista services, unless you specifically know what you are turning on/off (say Superfetch). You can gimp every actual improvement out of it, and turn a lot of basic functions nonworking. If you want it to be small, use XP, otherwise just buy another gig of memory....

thanks for the suggestion evilboris, i really didn't turn off too many services unless i knew it was pretty safe to do. i don't know if this is service related or not but it takes forever for me to connect to a wirless network on startup. i don't know if it's the network and sharing center that's slow to start or what. is there anything that can be done to speed it up?