One of my favorite long-time haunts on the Web is http://www.blackviper.com/. It's the work of computer enthusiast Charles M. Sparks of Yreka, California, USA. Its main attractions are a series of detailed Windows Services lists with multiple recommended levels of settings. The draw comes from a simple statement about Windows "Disable unneeded services to reduce resource consumption." Yeah, right! How do you know which ones you need and which ones you don't? To give you an idea of what's up here, my "clean" Vista installation lists 102 local services inside that runtime environment. This site lets you know which ones to keep, and which ones to reset or disable as your needs or wants dictate.

Having installed and reinstalled Windows Vista half a dozen times or so in the last month, it's finally dawned on me that there's a clean-up, post-installation step that Microsoft has not documented as an explicit part of that process. The symptoms of the problem that this step addresses are straightforward: when you run Windows Update, and use its Check for updates left-hand menu option, instead of getting the typical "Windows is Up to date" status window showing in the next screenshot, you get an error message that reads "Windows Update error 87002EE2: Unable to access Windows Update!"