Coming back to the original topic, I actually did disable some services after reading the Black Viper's guide, as well as Microsoft Knowledge Base - in fact, this is the most complete reference to all services, I have never seen any public documentation or reference guide that would contain more information than what's available on the Microsoft web site.
Now, there were less services to disable, compared to XP or Vista, but some were still there. I have definitely disabled services that I consider security risk - i.e. NetBios, Remote Registry, etc. Plus, there are services that are supposed to use some particular hardware features - bluetooth, smart cards, etc. - that I simply do not have on my PC, thus there is no reason to have them enabled. I do not have a modem - so the fax service is not needed. I don't "share" - so I don't need the WMP sharing service.
After all these have been disabled - I don't think I have gained much in terms of performance. Still, I don't like running things that are not necessary.
Finally, I also like to control which app accesses the Internet and when, I don't like the fashion of every program accessing the net the moment I run it. However, how do I know that the program accesses internet? My ESET firewall tells me. But, the firewall does not distinguish between accessing local IPs (such as 127.0.0.1) and the actual internet. Some programs use TCP/IP internally, and only use localhost. This, however, is still noticed by ESET as internet connection. So, one has to be careful with disabling internet access. On the other hand, if only someone could have told me how to disable the Adobe updater ....
