You wouldn’t believe the systems I have sped up by disabling the startup of “Driver Helper” apps that get loaded on startup. Most of the crap that gets installed During driver isntall besides the driver just sits there and consumes system resources.
All those “Driver Helper” apps do nothing to add any needed functionality and a lot of them are sloppily coded and do nothing but slow down systems to the point that clueless consumers end up buying new computers when their old ones “start running slow”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSConfig
msconfig is your friend!
Removing all the extra driverware crap can really help a system run a lot faster.
Uhm - Microsoft doesn’t care whether the drivers are proprietary or not. This is really about Linux being a second class citizen AND being zealous about proprietary code being BAD!(TM - GNU.org)