Re: WinXP performance, diagnostic and optimization software
You don't know what I have on this PC. I use it for software development
and testing, running a business, and personal use. Like I said elsewhere it
is loaded: two versions of Vis Studio, both full and express, all the MS
Office Pro stuff, all the other MS software for home and business like MS
Publisher, a Linux partition, a Win VM running WinME, tons of accounting
apps, tons of Adobe and media apps, etc. 40 GB for the My Documents and
other data files alone, as well as an external 200 GB HDD. When I do a full
virus scan, it has to check about 750K or more individual files. So it
ain't exactly just for email and surfing.
Keeping all the gears meshing is a formidable task. But so far it has run
well, I just want to keep it that way.
--
Pete B
"3c273" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:fofgh70jrq@enews5.newsguy.com...
> With all of those utilities, do you ever stop to use your computer or just
> tune it to run the utilities faster? ;-)
>
> "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
>>
>>
>
>