What about a configuration for someone who does web development and wants to use his system as a server?

Thanks for the post, it’s another source of useful information to take into consideration.

:-)

The description of the Task Scheduler service is hopelessly inaccurate. The service does not run every 8 minutes as claimed. In Windows 2000 and prior this service could be safely disabled. This is not the case with XP and Vista as the system uses it for a number of important functions. A number of system maintenance tasks are scheduled to run every 3 days during idle time. The prefetch system can not function properly without this service. Over time this can lean to seriously impaired boot and application launch times.

The benefits of disabling services is highly overrated. The savings in CPU time and memory are really quite low. Extensive testing has shown that the performance gains are almost unmeasureable. The risks of a crippled system are high. Even Microsoft documentation is far from complete, many services do far more than stated.

Larry Miller
Microsoft MCSA

You have to leave “Network Connections” set to manual

The firewall is dependent upon that service

So is my firewall actually running and if so how do I access it?

Thanks in advance for any help,
Jeff