Themes. Telnet. Task Scheduler. Windows File Protection. All gone. And the system boots better without them.
I knew people were replying. That’s why I opened Enafore in the first place. I just wanted to catch up and maybe respond—from here. From the system I’ve spent days tuning and wrestling into shape. From XP. Not my phone. Not anything else.
And at first, it worked.
Serpent opened the page. Enafore loaded. I logged in.
JAWS didn’t say anything, but I wasn’t expecting it to. I could read posts just fine with the keyboard shortcuts—j, k, g, h, g, n. The interface was there. The content was there.
But then the replies started.
And they didn’t stop.
Not old ones. New replies. Boosts. Conversations still in motion.
And every time one landed, Enafore played that soft little ping it uses for new notifications.
Not push. Not a system alert. Just that one, simple sound.
And then again.
And again.
And again.
I was watching it pile up—new replies showing up in real time—and that notification sound just kept going. Ping. Ping. Ping. Not because something was broken, but because everything was working, and I was sitting here watching it slip out of reach.
The browser started slowing down. Typing lag crept in. Focus started to jump.
I could still dig around and read the posts if I tried, but it was getting harder by the second. The system wasn’t crashing—it was just buckling. The weight of real-time activity hitting a browser that was never meant for this. On a system that doesn’t even know what modern JavaScript is. I wanted to respond, and instead I got this slow, frustrating melt.
That was yesterday.
Today, I took the gloves off.
I Opened services.msc and Started Killing
No hesitation. No plan. Just arrow keys, Tab, and hate.
I opened services.msc, got JAWS focused on the list, and went line by line.
Down arrow. Alt+Enter. Tab to Startup Type. Down arrow to Disabled. Tab to Stop if it was running. Spacebar. Enter. Down arrow. Again.
I didn't research anything. I didn't look up dependencies. I didn’t write anything down. I moved on instinct—years of experience and raw contempt. If it sounded like something I didn’t ask for, it was gone.
And I didn’t stop at the usual suspects. Here's what I explicitly disabled:
- Help and Support – The F1 key opens this. I don’t need Microsoft’s outdated advice.
- System Restore Service – Bloated time-travel fantasy. Disabled and wiped.
- Themes – I’m not wasting RAM on rounded corners.
- Telnet – Ancient remote shell. Disabled before I finished reading it.
- Smart Card / Smart Card Helper – Never used smart cards, never will.
- QoS RSVP – Reserves bandwidth for stuff I’m not running.
- WebClient – Mounts WebDAV shares. Breaks things and eats boot time.
- Messenger – Not chat. LAN popup spam. Pointless.
- NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing – Pre-RDP collaboration tool from the caveman era.
- Routing and Remote Access – For turning your machine into a router. Absolutely not.
- Remote Registry – Lets other machines edit your registry. Why is this even real?
- Task Scheduler – If I want a job to run, I’ll run it.
- Indexing Service – Eats CPU and I/O to maybe speed up file search.
- Error Reporting Service – Sends crashes to Microsoft’s now-dead servers.
And then the deep rot:
- Application Layer Gateway – Legacy NAT traversal. UPnP helper. Dead.
- Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) – Used for Windows Update. Slows things down.
- ClipBook – Allows sharing your clipboard over a network. Absolutely not.
- COM+ Event System / COM+ System Application – Legacy enterprise automation garbage.
- Distributed Link Tracking Client – Tracks moved files across network shares. Creepy and useless.
- Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC) – Network database coordination. I’m not an Oracle server.
- Network DDE / DSDM – Obsolete interprocess networking from the 90s.
- Performance Logs and Alerts – Collects performance data I’ll never look at.
- Portable Media Serial Number Service – DRM enabler for music players.
- Security Center – Yells at you when things are "insecure" by Microsoft standards.
- Windows Time – SNTP client. If the clock drifts, I’ll fix it manually.
- Telephony / Remote Access – For dial-up modems. This is not 2002.
- Volume Shadow Copy – Snapshot service for backups I’m not using.
All disabled. All stopped if running.
If they talk to the network, snoop on filesystems, pretend to offer remote access, or log crap I’ll never read—they’re out.
Then I Went Into the Registry and Removed the Brainstem
Core memory management:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] "DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001 "LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000001 "SecondLevelDataCache"=dword:00000400 "ClearPageFileAtShutdown"=dword:00000000
Prefetch cleanup:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters] "EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000002
del /f /s /q C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch\.
Shutdown control:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop] "HungAppTimeout"="2000" "WaitToKillAppTimeout"="2000" "AutoEndTasks"="1" "WaitToKillServiceTimeout"="2000"
UI cleanup:
"MenuShowDelay"="0" "EnableBalloonTips"=dword:00000000 "FolderContentsInfoTip"=dword:00000000 "ShowInfoTip"=dword:00000000
Then I Disabled Windows File Protection
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon] "SFCDisable"=dword:ffffff9d "SFCQuota"=dword:00000000
del /f /s /q %systemroot%\system32\dllcache\. rd /s /q %systemroot%\system32\dllcache
And Somehow, Enafore Worked Today
Same setup. Same browser. Same interface.
Except now, it didn’t melt. Enafore pinged a few times—normally. Responsively. I used the keyboard shortcuts. I caught up on posts. I replied. Nothing collapsed.
JAWS didn’t read new posts live, but I never expected it to. I could navigate. I could respond. That’s what matters.
Discord Didn't Even Open
Not the app—obviously. That was never going to work. But I figured maybe the web version would let me sneak in. Wrong.
Serpent opened the login page. I got to the email field. Typed. Tabbed to password. Typed. Entered.
Then... nothing. Blank space. No channel list. No UI. Just an empty frame.
No fallback. No low-fi version. No textual failover.
So yeah. Discord is off the table. Not because I don't want to use it—but because it's designed not to be used this way.
So Here's the Plan
I’m going to bridge it.
Not through XP. I’m not even pretending that’s viable anymore. But I can pull in what I need into IRC—something XP can run, something my screen reader can navigate, and something that doesn't rely on a DOM tree from hell.
The goal is simple:
Pull in what channels I can using IRC bridging.
Bridge software runs on another box. I talk to it from here.
Text in, text out. No images. No reactions. No typing indicators. Just channel names and messages, stripped down to what matters.
If I can get even a handful of Discord servers speaking in plain text over IRC, then XP stays in the loop. If I can respond, even better.
Because if Discord won’t open its mouth on XP, I’ll pry it open through a side channel and make it speak like it’s 1999.