Does changing your desktop to 16 bit save cpu usage or memory in any way?

It does result in a performance boost.
It uses less resources then 32bit. This one uses more processor power then 16bit.
Altough it diminishes the gaphics quality in games.

Its fine for running word , email stuff , checking the www.

Only older or weaker systems will see a real performance benefit from this, but you'll see noticeable results on any system by disabling unnecessary background services and startup items (Google Update, Java Quick Starter, etc.)

you can do some stuff in msconfig too, but you need to know what you are doing.

Yes, but where is the fun in that.. ;)

Seriously, That is a good tip, but be careful whit waht you disable. ;)

i have a windows 7 quad core machine (hp machine so came installed with alot of unneeded programs), but physical memory usage became kind of high with the added programs i did myself. so i turned off unneeded schedulers and programs i dont want/need at startup. after that it dropped to a somewhat acceptable level. so yeah even if you have a decent machine it's still worth it. but those two types are somewhat safe to disable.

What i usually do as well is disable all unneeded stuff like.
Seethrough menu's , shadows under icons.
Basically i disable everything except styles.

All things considered: no.

+1

Thanks for all the useful tips. I was just wondering if this would help because I do run a few games on my netbook. Alot of them do use up my cpu usage so anything to free up stuff would be great.

Yes, those HPs come loaded whit crap, we got some new ones at the office, I spent teh better part of a day uninstalling that crap, (good thing ghost makes it easier (and faster) to get that done to the rest of em).
Those are safe, its just not so good to disable the important system ones. ;)

This site is handy for finding out which processes to disable. Just be careful and double-check before you commit to anything.

Links to tweak guides spanning Win2K to Windows 8