If you need to catch up, go read Part 1 (the pros and cons of a clean install), Part 2 (UAC tips and tweaks), and Part 3 (troubleshooting tools and techniques).

Today’s installment in this series is a little different. Mostly, it’s about not wasting your time following bad advice. Dozens of websites purport to offer tips on how to speed up Vista. In most cases, I’ve found the advice to be fairly obvious, but I’ve also seen plenty of popular tips that are just plain bogus.

The single most common bogus tip I read is the one that advises Vista users to disable “unnecessary” services. This tip starts with the reasonable argument that Windows Vista just has too damn many services running, and each service you shut down will free up memory and CPU cycles and put the zip, zing, and zoom back in your desktop. One popular website even lists several levels of recommended service configurations. (It doesn’t have one entitled “OK, punk, do you feel lucky?”)

The one thing I have found every time I run across this tip is the complete absence of any evidence to establish what it’s supposed to do for you. Instead, this tip is usually delivered as a vague recommendation that reads something like this snippet, taken from a very large, popular publication that shall remain nameless to spare them embarrassment:

But be careful! Click the Services tab, and uncheck only the services you’re certain you don’t need. To be safe, [open Msconfig and] uncheck one, reboot, and see if everything still works fine before moving on to another. Do your homework via online help or a web search before experimenting!

That is breathtakingly bad advice. It is as if the automotive columnist in your local newspaper told you to open the hood of your car and start disconnecting wires and hoses one at a time to see which ones made your car run faster or quieter or smoother. It might be hours or days or even weeks before you run a program that requires the service you disabled, at which point you might have no clue that the disabled service is the cause of the nonfunctional program.

Here’s the reality: On an otherwise healthy PC running Windows Vista, disabling most built-in Windows services is extremely unlikely to have any noticeable effect on memory usage, startup or shutdown time, or system performance. On the contrary, you are more likely to create problems by disabling services. Not to mention the amount of time you will surely waste and the productivity you will lose with all that starting and stopping and rebooting and web searching.