Re: WinXP performance, diagnostic and optimization software
You are asking for a piece of software that will scan your system and make
all necessary registry fixes and corrections without your approval. That is
a sure way to end up with a lot of problems. I suggest that you are already
using too many "tools". It is likely your desire to have an all-in-one tool
stems from spending too much time running these "diagnostic" tools. All that
you should need is decent AV, decent anti-spyware, decent defrag and run the
built in XP tools like Disk Cleanup. If space is the issue then upgrade your
hardware to a bigger hard drive.
Xandros
"Pete B" <petescastle@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:uJLFJdaaIHA.1208@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
>I am looking for some really good software applications that are useful for
>maintaining my PC running WinXP Pro SP2. There are literally hundreds of
>programs out there that offer some utility in doing this, and currently I
>am using Acronis True Image 11 for backups, Acronis Disk Director Suite for
>HDD management (a really superb, but scary, util), Uniblue's SpeedUpMyPC
>and RegBooster for performance, maintenance and registry issues, as well as
>my recently acquired RegFix program which does a superb cleanup of registry
>problems, WinPatrol, WinTasks, and AddRemove Pro for other help and info.
>I also run AdAware Pro and AVG Pro, I love those programs and they do their
>thing superbly, no issues there AFA spam or virus/firewall stuff. And
>naturally I have the Windows stuff itself like msconfig.
>
> All of these are the full registered versions versions, so I am not
> looking necessarily for free stuff. But for example on the MS Marketplace
> they are all mostly specialized software, confined to one or two
> particular areas of Windows operation. What I seek is a more general
> all-purpose util of wide versatility for both software and hardware
> maintenance. For example, I have two registry utils that find and repair
> reg references to unused DLLs, but I do not have anything that will
> actually do the obverse, i.e. go out and look at all of the thousands of
> DLLs and tell me which ones are totally wasting space, perhaps leftovers
> from deleted apps and so on. Actually I have one such util but I do not
> trust it; it finds supposed unused DLLs but it always "qualifies" whether
> it can actually be removed or not, and I usually just end up not taking
> the chance; I want something that is unambiguous about it; if I sit
> through an hour or two scan, I don't want it to come back and suggest
> "maybes", I want "do it".
>
> Or for another, something that can really do a good job of recovering lost
> emails, or examining email archives. Then there are all of the PC
> hardware issues that could be helped, such as finding out more about
> devices than Windows provides and so on, optimizing network connections
> etc. The Uniblue optimizer does some of this type of stuff but it is sort
> of vague on what it is doing (or going to do which is even worse) or else
> it just says here is what you have, what should be changed to optimize RAM
> usage and so on (how the hell do I know). I also have several utils that
> display the running devices, applets, and such, and even what order they
> load; I can even activate and deactivate them individually, but nothing
> really says "this works best if it is loaded first, or before this other
> one". Which is the info I really need.
>
> Perhaps what I seek does not exist, or is so expensive that I would not be
> interested (above $50-$100 perhaps). I am not looking for a "burn-in"
> type of util, rather something like a tune-up, maintenance and performance
> optimizer all rolled in to one; the kind of thing a PC repair service
> might use to put a customer's PC back in top notch shape after repair.
> And I would kill for a really good easy-to-use BIOS util, one that really
> works and does backups and is not so scary to use that it ends up as
> simply taking up space.
>
> So do you all have any suggestions, any great apps that you use for stuff
> like this? Or am I just on my own, out of luck, or as good as it gets?
>
> Appreciate your input and recommendations.
>
> --
> Pete B
>