Cleaning and maintaining your PC tips

Born_2_Kill_83

Born_2_Kill_83

Born_2_Kill_83

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Im always looking for the best software and methods to keeping my rig in tip top condition, enabling it to run at the speeds it should do.
So what Im wanting to see in this thread is all your own top tips to how you do yours.
The software I find best is WINASO, PestPatrol, Ad-ware, CCleaner and keeping background programmes down to minium.
:p
 
Spybot S&D.
Ewido.
Ad-Aware SE.
C-Cleaner.
They all seem to pick something up which the other has missed and C-Clean deletes well quick and easy.
 
God alone knows what you guys get up to, but I've never had a virus or malware in 8 years of PC ownership....

1) Don't use Internet explorer (although I guess the new version is better security wise).

2) Use WinPatrol or good old msconfig to contain and control startup items (sounds obvious but theres no point something sitting in your tray if you aren't gonna use it).

3) Don't use regcleaners or get carried away with so-called tweaking programs.

4) Install Windows on a separate drive or partition - important OS files will default and "stick" to the outer tracks of the HDD giving faster boots and not get muddled up with all your other guff.

5)Controversially, switch off the windows prefetcher. The prefetcher allegedly boosts launch times but with todays fast hard drives the benefits are negligible at best. In fact, the prefetcher is responsible for many of the slow boot issues I see.

I could go on but I'm bored and I bet you are too....

;)
 
You might want to turn off system restore if you use a different backup method as any virus/spyware you have may get filed away in your System Volume Information folder.
 
Ratbag said:
3) Don't use regcleaners or get carried away with so-called tweaking programs.
;)
Click to expand...

What's wrong with ccleaner? I use it a lot as a registry cleaner and it's always worked 100%.
 
What's wrong with ccleaner? I use it a lot as a registry cleaner and it's always worked 100%.
Click to expand...

Theres nothing wrong with it as such, it's just that "cleaning" your registry shaves just a few kilobytes off your multi-megabyte registry hives. It will not give any kind of performance boost, and is more likely to do harm by removing valid keys.
 
I maintain my PC like I maintain my car, observe!

maintenance.jpg


ccleaner is really an intermediate users tool, you need to know what options to leave checked and what to leave not checked otherwise by default it WILL remove valid things.
 
Last edited:
Ratbag said:
Theres nothing wrong with it as such, it's just that "cleaning" your registry shaves just a few kilobytes off your multi-megabyte registry hives. It will not give any kind of performance boost, and is more likely to do harm by removing valid keys.
Click to expand...

You don't clean registries to free up HDD space. It's for removing invalid keys, references to apps/files that no longer exists etc.
 
The best utilities in my opinion are as follows:

TweakUI (interface), TCP Optimizer (net connection), Crap Cleaner (temp files and registry), Tune XP (tweaking), Vopt 8 (defrag) and jv16PowerTools (registry anf file tool). Each is excellent at what it does.

However, if you want an all in one suite use either TuneUp 2006 + a defragger or Ashampoo Winoptimizer 3 + PowerUp Platinum XP 2. :)
 
On my system I use

Firefox
NOD32
CCleaner


I use the above plus Windows Defender and Hitman Pro to clean up spyware/virus etc on other peoples systems.
 
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