I have installed 106 programs, although not all are 3rd-party programs. the 3rd-party programs are installed to a separate partition. Boot up time has slowed to 1 minute 40 seconds. On my initial "clean" install, boot time was 30 seconds before the icons appeared on the desktop.
This is what I refer to as Sand Bagging. Yeah, trucks whatever. Fill a trunk with sand bags and see how fast your car will go.
Obviously I am very disappointed and believe Microsoft specs are just for running Windows with no 3rd-party apps installed.
Yes they are,,,, this is an industry standard. Check all games, every single one of them give recommended and minimum
Min = It will start and run the game. Not well, but hey you get pictures and it didn't crash before it got there.
Recommended = Hey, this is better than Min and more playable, but you should have better specs.
This has been the norm since the day they started putting these specs on the cartons, and I doubt it will never change.
They need to make sure that those with the lowest specs will buy the product. It's the way it is.
However,,, ( i will test later ) I do believe my power off to opening IE/Firefox/Explorer is about 60 sec give or take.
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As for the services thing. (I have not tested this myself) but I have read that the time/framerate/whatever shaved from disabling services is so minimal that it is not worth the effort in Vista/7. And quite honestly, depending on the PC, it wasn't worth the effort in XP either.