Ever since I installed windows desktop search to give me a vista-esque taste on my still perfectly viable windows xp, my laptop has been running slower (and I have a pretty new machine).  Perhaps the background indexing wouldn't bother me if I had a solid-state hard drive, but about once per second my little hard drive light flicker and you can hear that barely audible but hugely annoying hard disk platter rip/flicking noise.  Flick.  Flick.   Flick.   Flick.  Fli-Flick.  Flick.  Flick.  Flick.    So I asked myself...  Do I really need instant access to an email in outlook?  Sure, it's nice, but I can wait a couple minutes for a search for the rare times I need to really search for an email.  Generally I do a decent job filtering and can manually scan folders when looking for something.  I also find the search assistant with lovely animated personality of your choice does just fine for finding a file on my hard disk.  Sure, it's not web 2.0 styled, but it works just fine and it has a little dog wagging its tail at me.   Despite improvements in hard drive speed, I still think its overkill in many cases to have a lot of background processes taking up memory and constantly trolling your disk.  So, to coin an old french expression:  I turned that shit off, honey.  Now, the flickers are much less, my speed is OK, and things are nice and quiet.  

I also turned off automatic windows updates.  It turned an angry shade of yellow from the lovely pleasing green.   "Why?" it begged me, "Why would you do such a thing.  D-d-don't you want your computer to be up to date and SAFE?".   "Do you really think you can do it yourself in a timely manner?"   Well, even if I don't I'm sure not pleased with opening the lid in the morning and find everything I left running over night gone because my security-conscious PC decided to shut down to install stuff.  

All you software vendors take note:  I'm taking back control of my PC.  I'm going to get my torch and my pitchfork and head on up to my task manager.  If you're currently loitering in there, your days are numbered.    If you do have a legitimate reason, that legitimate reason better not be taking up a lot of ram.   Background tasks fly coach on this airline, not first class.