I have often wondered how many of the processes and that are running on an out-of-the-box Microsoft Windows XP installation are really required for it to function very well. Most of the time, that thought lingered around for about two or three seconds, and then it disappeared again.

Well, it seems that I was not the only one. The most excellent people at sysinternals apparently had the same thought. However, unlike me, they were able to combine it with Knowledge (capitalized and emphasized for a reason!). Mark XXX decided to try and find out and reported on his results in the Sysinternals blog.

Of course, I had to try it (cowardishly as I am, I did it on a VMWare Virtual Machine) and it works just like he describes!

Oh, and I didn't find this blog entry myself; Slashdot has a post on the topic too.