Disable Action Center notifications

Windows Firewall and Defender are optimized for near-zero impact on performance.

Having used Black Viper as my bible to tame Vista, I also tried turning off all of the services you mention when I was beta testing Win7 on some old 528mb RAM low CPU machines. I also vLited it down to bare bones to compare.

What i found is that Win7 runs better when everything is turned on, and only starts bumping up against low resources when using multiple gadgets in multi-tasking.

It just runs. And if it needs to trim its sails, it does it from whatever version you install (Ultimate included), mainly by stopping Aero but also with Super-prefetch and indexing optimizations that are beyond genius.

Completely disable action center:
1. Take Ownership of its dll files - Go to C:\Windows\System32, right-click the file "actioncenter.dll" and click Properties > Security > Advanced > Owner > Edit > Select your name and click OK/Yes/OK. Do the same thing for the file "actioncenterCPL.dll".
2. Need to Restart the dll for the change in ownership to take effect. CTRL+ALT+DEL and Start Task Manager. Go to Processes, select "explorer.exe" and End Process (because the actioncenter.dll file runs under explorer.exe). Go to Applications and click New Task, type explorer.exe and click OK.
3. Make a new folder on your C drive to which you'll move the two DLL files for safe keeping. This will prevent them from being started by explorer. I used C:\ACDLL.
4. Need to close explorer.exe again so that the two dll files are no longer in use. Again go to Processes, select "explorer.exe" and End Process.
5. Move the two dll files to a different location using Command Prompt - in Task Manager, go to Applications and click New Task. Type cmd and click OK. In command prompt, type the following without the quotes (substitute ACDLL for whatever folder you're using): "move C:\windows\system32\actioncenter.dll C:\ACDLL\" and hit Enter. It should say "1 file moved". Then do the same for the actioncenterCPL.dll file.
6. Start explorer again. Go to Task Manager, Applications, New Task, "explorer" and click OK. You will notice Action Center is no longer running.

thanks

could not see the attachments after i posted.
found a method to disable the action center through gpedit.msc.