Alice Hill complained that her PC was taking 30 minutes to boot up. So what does she do? She finds one of those “tweak everything under the sun to squeeze out every nanosecond of performance from your PC” sites and gets busy.
Wrong!
If your computer is taking 30 minutes to boot up, something is wrong with it, Alice. You shouldn’t be tweaking, you should be going through basic troubleshooting to find the problem and fix it. In fact, if you find that one thing and fix it, you will probably discover that your system isn’t so slow after all.
After you get that done, maybe, just maybe, you can consider other things you can do to improve performance. But not until that time.
(P.S. Thanks to Alice’s site, I found this excellent and most thorough debunking of the infamous and notoriously inaccurate Black Viper site. All you BV fans should look it over.)
Ed Bott 
“Infamous” “Notoriously” and “Inaccurate”
Sounds like “slam journalism” to me. I’d appreciate a more balanced viewpoint before I consider reading more of your “Alleged” tips on your “Unknown” web pages 🙂 (just kidding!)
-ED
That Anandtech forum post only tested FPS in games, something disabling services would have no effect on. What disabling unneeded services does do is improve startup times and improves security.
Otherwise I agree Ed, however the most common cause for system boot slowdowns is malware infection. Disabling unneeded startup applications, services, defragmenting and running bootvis can all improve startup times.
Plenty of Myths are Debunked here:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html
Some includes links to Ed’s Blog 🙂
I don’t think the reviewing understands “tweaking” Windows.
If you have a crappy car, simply using a more expensive spark-plug doesn’t matter. But once you DO get to the high-performance world THOSE types of small tweaks matter.
For the average Windows user, just get more memory, turn off indexing, reduce the restore size etc.
But for people that want to eek at a little more, SOME tweaking makes sence — and sites like BlackViper (which is offline) do a GREAT service by documenting these small tweaks — but it is NOT for the average user — and not ALL of the tweaks should be used.
The tweaks are NOT recommendations, but simply documenting various possible changes.
No myth debunked here — just someone not reading the fine print.
Hi Ed – I am getting slammed for the 30 minutes part of my rant becuase it was not 30 literal minutes – it just felt like that! I did do a lot of manual work but some of the tweaks helped. But good point on thinking that is a cure-all.