Well, I don't have time to go searching, I have renders to deliver to campus and then a bunch of other stuff to worry about. All I have time for is a post. If someone who does have time wants to point me to something that shows any real performance difference between page file sizes, then I'll go check it out, but seems to me my PCs hardly ever access the hard drive except on program load and program termination, and that's with a lot of high memory requirement programs running. I do have 1G of ram, but that's getting to be standard for any system that does more than just games, and I have a ridiculous amount of storage space (810 GB) and have never seen this thrashing slowdown you speak of except when the Indexing service and System Restore are on. (those I turn off on first boot.)
Having "Install on demand" enabled allows many things to install themselves on your PC without your knowledge.
But, my three PCs all have this turned on, and everything asks me if it's alowed to install? Are some plugins allowed to "sneak past" that dialog box that I don't know about? I mean, even the Windows Update plugin asks you for permission.
And what about those piles of services? I've seen tweak guides for shutting down services before - they're usually really extreme, and the services they say to shut off are things that only execute code if you do a specific task in the UI. I checked my own service lists, to see what has been taking CPU time over the last 72 hours that this particular system has been up. The only 'svchost.exe' that got more than zero seconds of CPU time in 72 hours was the one that included the following services:
<i>AudioSrv, BITS, Browser, CryptSvc, Dhcp,
dmserver, ERSvc, EventSystem,
FastUserSwitchingCompatibility, helpsvc,
HidServ, lanmanserver, lanmanworkstation,
Messenger, Netman, Nla, Schedule, seclogon,
SENS, ShellHWDetection, srservice,
TermService, Themes, TrkWks, uploadmgr,
W32Time, winmgmt, wuauserv, WZCSVC</i>
... for a total of 32 seconds of CPU time in 72 hours. And that includes my DHCP client, my audio, and a bunch of stuff that's been heavily used. (this PC used network drives heavily during its uptime.) I notice that since this is a recent install I've forgotten to disable Messenger, but other than that, why should I turn these off? It's not going to give me better performance in games, I know this because I went through that whole schpiel when I was trying to get decent framerates in Deus Ex 2, and it made no difference. Ending task on Windows Explorer made a little difference, maybe about 5-10%.
About college networks... My old university, the U. of Illinois, had nothing much blocked that wasn't a direct legal problem for the administration, such as Kazaa. (and that wasn't even blocked, it was just limited to a very very tiny pipe to make it less of a piracy problem.) If you were plugged in, all ports were visible. In my opinion that's a good thing for those who are technically competent on campus, because they were able to do things like run a game server for a bit if they wanted, or host a TeamSpeak channel, or use their own FTP server to gain easy access to their work from computer labs. Granted it's a bit of a problem for the rest of campus, but I think the only thing that could cause damage to the networks on that system would be if a keylogger got installed on a student's computer, giving a hacker access to a campus account - but that would be partially blocked by a bunch of bidirectional DNS checks and server settings that refuse access to non-campus IP addresses. So, they had heavy protection on their own servers, but the students were on their own. All they did was provide a site-license for some commercial antivirus and firewall programs.
Anyway, the guide has some good points but also some things that I'm inclined to question. The anti-spyware and such I agree with, except maybe for using so many different programs at once for one task... The pagefile thing, you might have a point, but I have not personally ever seen that "huge slowdown / thrashing" that you speak of. The services, no, I think that's nuts. Unfortunately I don't have time to go searching so I'll give it the benefit of doubt, but there is such a culture of tweaking just for the sake of tweaking, and passing tweaks along forever without re-verifying their results on a modern computer, that it will take more than "you're wrong, lots of people agree with the guide" to convince me on those points. But I'm open to a reasonable argument to their effect if anyone wants to jump in.
If 10% overall performance improvement means nothing to you then by all means DO NOT follow any of the recommendations in that sticky. 
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