In article , "Grunff"
says...
Rob Morley wrote:

Loads of crap is enabled by default - just disable it.

I don't use it, so I don't need to. But that's precisely my point - to
get XP behaving like it should (like 2k), it takes a couple of hours of
changing settings and disabling stuff. Why??

In order to keep their marketing people happy they have to come up
with all sorts of compelling reasons why each Windows version is
better than the previous one, so everything is enabled by default
because most users wouldn't even know what the "improvements" were,
let alone how to activate them.
Do you really think it takes two hours to fix it all?