That is actually a very decent guide. I was expecting something far less, and I was going to post much of what is already in that article.
I do have something to add, though. When you go down through your "Services", double click on the ones you want to shut down, go under the "Hardware Profile" tab, and select "Disable". For some services, Microsoft will reset them from "manual" startup to "automatic" startup. By disabling them in the hardware profile, you will override this behavior, and the service really will stay shut off until you enable it.
Defragmenting your page file can also help. There are two ways of doing this. The easiest way is to reduce it to ZERO and reboot. Then *disable* it and reboot. Defrag and reboot. Then set the page file to a set size (i.e. min/max 2048MB). This will create a single massive swap file in a decent area of your hard disk.
No matter what size hard disk you have (unless it's a 6GB jobbie), partitioning your drive will help you significantly. This is because all your data will stay on the outside of the drive, regardless of whatever kind of retarded write algorithm that NTFS uses. For example, I generally use a 30GB partition for Windows. This is enough for people who use quite a few office programs, such as Maya, Office, and AutoCAD. For gamers, 20GB would be far better, with the rest of the drive going to a "d:\games" partition and folder. Having 30,000 fewer files on your system drive will give you a noticable filesystem improvement.
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