Disabling Hardware In XP Is It Like Doing It In BIOS

I am just wondering when you disable hardware in XP is it like doing it in the BIOS except not a perm solution only if XP is running if you get my meaning I have disabled the following...

Floppy Disk Drive
ECP Printer Port

All my hardware like DVD-ROM/RW and HDD are SATA and I have no IDE ports been used unfortunatly I don't know which devices I can disable under the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers.

I asked on here about disabling hardware and someone said you can sometimes see a performance increase but not much.

disable it in BIOS and windows wont even see it, bypassing its need to be disabled in windows