You're not serious, right? Hahhhaha :D

That's a bit of extremism you got there. ;)

Yes, but that's nothing. Installing a few GB game has pretty much the same effect. ;) If you keep defragmenting regularly, that effect could be even smaller.

Run MSCONFIG and see what's in the startup tab. You don't need anything in there at all to be able to load Windows. But naturally if you have any I/O drivers or third party firewall in there then leave those boxes checked. For instance, all I've got checked is Comodo FW and MS Security Essentials. There's a lot of other crap in there that's unchecked now.

It's pretty much the same story with the Services tab, but you have to make sure you've got "hide all MS services" checked first to hid anything that could be vital for starting XP.

When I've ran MSConfig in the past, every time Windows loads it tends to remind me that I ran MSConfig and Windows almost feels like it is in some mode that is only meant to be in temporarily.

But is there more stuff to disable in MSConfig than what I can disable utilities software that gives you access to start up and GameBooster which closes down a lot of services?

Oh yeah, I forgot XP does that. But you can ignore that. It won't bug you again if you don't make any changes (choose cancel, not OK. Even that can make a difference, seemingly).

MSConfig will let you stop programs you normally use from loading at startup. This will increase the amount of free RAM you have available should you start your chosen game before launching these apps.

No end of programs can think they're worthy of starting with Windows, but you can count on one hand the number that actually are.

If you let me know what's listed in MSConfig then I (or someone else) can let you know what's worth keeping so you can uncheck the rest.

I got it set up.....just one listing that bothered me. The programs's title and location was not listed but it was ticked to on with the command Windows; Run.

I ticked it off.

Also, as suggested above and I set Win XP visuals to 'Let Windows decided' Windows has appaered to turn them all on full blast but there's definitely been no noticeable increase or decrease of performance since.

Of course there won't be. :) This is mostly helpful if you don't have drivers for the GPU and stuff. Like when making some weird virtualization environment.

I've just cranked up some more resource-gobbling settings on my video card and now everything is running very smooth and fast.

I'm starting to think that if I believe strong enough that cramming a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my computer along with some spaghetti will allow it to run Dragon Age, it WILL run Dragon Age.

That will never work... clearly you need a caffinated beverage to achieve this effect...