In vista, should most my services be disabled?

Services are usually either disabled or set to run automatically, or manually depending on the service that needs to be run at any particular time. If you run all those services at the same time, it could cause problems in terms of performance, so it stands to reason that only having the appropriate services set to both your laptop's and your requirements are run at an appropriate time - this could be in using particular programs or performing certain functions. This is essentially a normal thing, so you have nothing to worry about.