Quote Originally Posted by fatsheep
Service pack2 is definately a must but I hate those service center pop ups. I always turn that off in services.msc...
The security centre is always first on my hit list, along with themes. I will then go through and disable all other unecessary services as required.

he security centre is basically a program that tells you if the firewall is off, anti-virus is off/not present, or automatic updates are off. Though I hate this service I can see the point in it but it doesn't achieve it's objective by a mile. This because most of your average pc users just don't bother with such things as updating and firewalls, and unless they're made aware of the lack or non operation of these progams they won't take any action.

The problem with programs such as the security centre, or e.g. norton personal firewall, anti virus or zonealarm is that alot of people tend to just ignore those irritating alerts and automatically click the close button, seeing them as a mere annoyance. There is a sales rep that I work with that has the annoying habit of instantly closing any crash error message before I can even read it! Warnings alerts and errors messages just tend to pop up annoy the user and then get closed and forgotten, because MS does not make them obvious or urgent enough. The whole modern approach to warnings, alerts and crash reports is poor.