[gvx]

I killed so many instances of svchost.exe back in the day! Never ran into anything bad that a reboot wouldn't fix. I remember figuring out by trial-and-error which instances were safe to kill by looking at their memory usage.

There was something exciting about stripping Windows XP to its bare essentials, and also it seemed necessary at the time, if you wanted to run it smoothly on an ageing laptop that was basically obsolete when it was new. Especially if you wanted to run such RAM and CPU hogs like The Sims 2! (Not to mention the 40 GiB disk space that just filled up so fast with save games and expansion packs.)

I wonder if Windows 10 still lets you use an alternative to explorer.exe for its desktop shell? I used to write my own little launchers and spotlight-esque programs.