"You cannot get better performance with more running processes.  Vista may have tweaked it, but this is a fact of computers."

That depends on what those processes are doing for you. For instance, I run a backround task that is indexing information in my email and on my disk drive in spare CPU moment.s While that is nominally hurting my "perfomance" at any moment int ime over the course of a day having my search tools be able to find any one email out of thousands instead of waiting for it to build the index then is a life saver. It saves me hours each and every week.

Sometimes giving up a little "performance" from a purely clock cycle technical view isn't the same thing as giving up "performance" in completing a task.

The same is true for lots and lots of other things. The fraction of a percent slowdown in the render times for a frame pales dramatically in comparison to the hours a wekk I am saved by some of those backround tools.

Just a thought :)