As you've suggested, it really pays to find out more about these matters. There are an almost infinite number of XP tweaks that will improve perfomance, e.g., disabling the paging executive, enabling udma-66, tweaking irq handling, increasing the primary app priority, tweaking the usb polling interval, cleaning and defragging the registry, defragging the boot, increasing the IO page lock limit, optimizing the prefetch, tweaking the file allocation size, disabling the messenger, and as you mentioned, themes, the indexing services, and perhaps a few other services many users don't need or use. And Microsoft has nearly all this stuff set up 'out of the box' to degrade performance in exchange for 'features.' Ugh. Anyway, there are various utilities, some of them free, that will improve XP performance quite significantly, and very well worth looking into, IMHO.