Mark’s Sysinternals Blog – Windows XP comes with around four dozen services enabled by default, including ones that many people consider superfluous like Remote Registry, Alerter, and SSDP Discovery (Universal Plug and Play). A question many Windows administrators commonly have is therefore, which services can I safely disable? What if I told you that for at least basic functionality like Web surfing and application execution, Windows doesn’t need any services?

That’s classic. I wouldn’t have believed them if they’d told me that, either. Sometimes it’s hilarious to see the results of these guys messing around with things in ways nobody was ever meant. I’m sure a handful of the core system developers over at MS got a good chuckle out of reading this one.