Running windows as simple as possible

Hey comp, So I have vista as my OS, obviously my games don't run as nice as they would on xp. Is there a way to only run a single program and nothing else but the most necessary applications? I would even be willing to have only a command prompt and just run my games that way. My goal is to be able to run grand theft auto 4 at a decent frame rate on medium settings.

try going to task manager and kill explorer.exe and then file ther run or something like that.

re-install XP run BBLean

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