Services -- too much of a good thing

My computer has been running really slowly lately, so I looked in task manager and saw an ungodly amount of processes running. I tried to remove these using msconfig.exe, but found I was no longer administrator of my own computer! I searched the internet and found that this was a common and apparently unsolvable problem, but instead of using msconfig one should turn off services using the Services snap-in on the administrative tools menu. In Services, I saw that there were several SQL Server services running that I don't need unless I am using an SQL server applicationo. So I reset all SQL services to start manually, and my computer was happier!