Just received new laptop today. This is my first view of vista. It appears to be loaded with a lot of unnecessary items. I would love to get rid of all the Yahoo and AOL stuff, and Norton and...

Is there somewhere that gives good instructions on how to remove these items safely? Also there are so many programs running after start-up. In XP I went into msconfig and disabled all, and only the necessary ones would actually come back.

http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/

Don't confuse the programs that HP load and blame it on Vista, these programs do not come with Vista, but with your laptop.

Yes I am aware that much of the crap is HP. I'm hoping that http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/
will help with that also.

You can go into msconfig the same way in Vista as well as in XP. Do it.

You can also start services.msc and put into Manual the services that you think you do not need.

The best way to do it is, put the services that you think you do not need into Manual. Restart and run your PC that way and at the end of the day, check the services that you put into Manual. If they have started during normal use of your PC, then you should put them back into Automatic.

But be aware that there are some services that you should not touch. RPC is one of them. It should always be on Automatic.

Hope the above helps.

Regards

suatcini