So I've decided to abandon homegroups altogether, and having read THIS I've just (effectively) killed them completely from both my laptop and my HTPC (I much prefer the tried, tested & true control and functionality of workgroups you see)

And so I'm wondering, what other wonderfully pointless services can I go hunt down and kill? I'm not exactly short on horsepower on my laptop, but my HTPC needs all the help it can get - and the less stressed it is, the quieter it is...

I used to regularly trim services in XP, but I've never bothered under Windows 7. Most of the services are pretty good and only those that are needed are started, the rest are either disabled or only load when needed. MS did a fairly good job of optimising with W7.

If you aren't using WLAN, you could kill the Automatic WLAN configuration service, same for Bluetooth, RPC (Remote Procedure Call), Search, if you don't need it.

Other than that, I'd not really both these days.

Updaters for Flash, PDF, Java etc. can still clog up the computer, they are probably more useful to kill.

Presumably disabling Homegroups doesn't affected standard folder and ip based sharing across networks?