Speeding Up XP Pro

[Carbo]

Forgive me if it has already been discussed here. But, I'm about to migrate from W2K Pro to XP Pro. I know from past experience that every OS can be tweaked, tuned, customized and slimmed down to become more efficient and faster.
For those of you using XP Pro, what do you recommend I do to speed it up and lighten the load that it carries? For example, can I disable the built in firewall? What about MS Messenger? And I hear there are a mother in law size load of services that can be safely disabled.
Can you recommend a few good sites relating to all this?
If some of you can pass along your experiences with performance improvements I sure would appreciate it! Thank you.

 

[joshInAlaska]

Winguides

Once you connect to this link, you'll see in the left column an link to go directly to OS versions. I've done a few of them. Since you're familiar with Win2k, I'd recommend doing the same changes to speed things up a bit. A big difference is to turn off the visual flair, like text shadowing, window fade in/out. When I first installed XP on a machine with 256MB RAM, I felt as though it was a screamer. However, when I saw it in action on a machine with 128MB RAM, I thought that it was a dog. 256MB is certainly preferred, but I've upped my machine to 512MB, and I think that it's great!

 

[Epyon9283]

http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakxp/
http://www.tweak3d.net/tweak/winxp/
http://www.xp-erience.org/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=14
http://www.winguides.com/registry/tweaks.php/WindowsXP/

 

[btvillarin]

First, can I recommend my site? I hope you find it of some use... I have an article on just this topic. But, I don't think it's too great. I do have a lot of links to offer on the links page, with links to probably the ones listed above and lots more.

For that site that has a page dedicated to services, this is the link: http://www.blkviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm