It's not worth the hassle, but for the Windows machines in my house I set up Windows Server and have all the machines provisioned to an Active Directory domain

It's not worth the hassle, but for the Windows machines in my house I set up Windows Server and have all the machines provisioned to an Active Directory domain where I turn off all the crap via Group Policy. You can get by with just editing Group Policy for a standalone Windows Pro copy, but for more than one machine I really didn't want to fiddle with having to update each machine's policy whenever Microsoft does something stupid.