Christmas Day is the same day it is every year, that being December 25. And the day after is obviously December 26.

There are a few tech-related things you can expect to have issues with those two days.

1. Cell phone traffic will spike.

Everybody is calling everybody. Most wireless carriers can handle the traffic but don’t be surprised if you have to dial a number a few times just to get thru.

Tip: If you encounter problems calling, having a POTS line nearby will usually always go thru without a problem.

2. Video game console online services will crawl.

On Christmas morn’ there will be lots of hyper kids jumping for joy at the fact they received a brand new Microsoft Xbox. And of course they’ll all hook them up and try, repeat, try to get online with them.

Don’t be surprised if the connectivity isn’t exactly stellar in performance.

After Dec 25, all those kids will try again on Dec 26.

It will even out to normal on the 27th.

For those that say "But it didn’t crawl last year.." That’s right, it didn’t. But consider the number of Xbox users now compared to then.

3. General internet slowness

In addition to video game consoles a ton of people will be getting new computers or something that is internet capable.

All this traffic will be sure to bog overall connectivity down somewhat.

Being that all ISPs will have minimal staff in the US that day, don’t bother calling for tech support. Wait until the 26th.

Said honestly, your best option is to simply watch television that day instead of using the computer.

My recommendation: Stuff yourself, get fat and wait it out.

If you run an older computer  there are certain services you can safely disable in Windows XP. This won’t make your computer blazingly faster by any means but it will gain you a "few extra horsepower", so to speak.

To access your running services:

1. Go to Control Panel.
2. Double-click the Administrative Tools icon.
3. Double-click the Services icon.

This will bring up a list of all the services in your Windows XP installation.

It should look similar to this:

To disable a service…

Double-click the one you want, click Stop then choose the Startup Type to be Disabled so it will not start again.

Remember: You can re-enable any service by doing the exact reverse.

Error Reporting Service

I have never found a solid reason to keep this service running. Any error report I’ve ever received has not served to assist me whatsoever. So I disable this.

Help and Support

Do you ever use the built-in Windows XP Help and Support section? I don’t.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Remote Assistance will not work if this service is disabled. But if you never use RA you can disable it safely.

Indexing Service

The description of this service is "Indexes contents and properties of files on local and remote computers; provides rapid access to files".

What I’ve found is that this does nothing but slow down XP. If you’ve ever found that your hard drive seems to "think about stuff" for no reason whatsoever even when your computer is doing (seemingly) nothing, this is why.

In a networking environment this would be bad to disable (as it would make access slower). But if you’re just using one computer it’s 100% okay to disable this.

Themes Service

This is the service that gives XP its themed look, called "Luna". If you disable this service your XP will look almost identical to Windows 2000.

Of all the services you can disable, this will speed up Windows XP the most. Without the graphic overhead, screen draws and redraws occur much faster.

Important note: Some applications (albeit few) assume that you have Luna enabled. Without it running these apps may not look correct. But this does not happen often.

This chapter is a video presentation.

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