A good example how some "Vista Tweaks" available on the Internet cause more harm than good

I bumped into this by accident while reading up on the upcoming Paint 3.5 release, which will have .NET 3.5 SP1 support and a bunch of performance optimizations for low end machines.

Unfortunately, my main desktop machine at home, which now performs a dual role as an Active Directory domain controller for the house, is what is now considered low end for newer applications. I plan on fixing that problem later this year or early next year. My single core Prescott P4 has served me well for many years, but I keep holding out for Nehalem, and other bills paid off first. Of course, my heating bills will probably go up in cost, unrelated to oil prices, because the Prescott is notorious for producing more heat than speed.

Back to my original reason for this post though - why on Earth would someone recommend disabling the Windows Installer service as a performance tweak? I could potentially understand if they never plan on installing any additional programs or updates and really need the couple MBs of RAM and context switches from the process for a starved machine, but it just causes more harm than good. It also has caused the Paint.NET developer grief and bug reports due to strange application errors.

The Windows Installer process only runs when it needs to - any other time, it shuts down gracefully.

Unrelated tangent about my Prescott P4: I have an oddball Prescott - a 3.2Ghz that can be switched in the ASUS P4C800-E BIOS between a 14X and 16X multiplier due to a "bug" in the core - Stepping 3, Revision C0. This means you can crank the CPU up to 3.6Ghz without much trouble, but 99.9% of the time, I run the system at stock speed. At 14X, it will boot up at 2.8Ghz, but you can then send the front side bus sky high, assuming your RAM and Northbridge can keep up. I used to slap together a lot of systems in the past and old habits die hard it seems.