Jeremy

CCleaner (freeware) JV16 PowerTools (not free but inexpensive) Defragmenter capable of file placement (JKDefrag - freeware) Use light software.

Yeah, after seeing the disk display of UltimateDefrag, all defragmenters should have it. The rectangular boxes with the squares just aren't appealing anymore...

Save on the case and build your own.

I was previously using an AMD Athlon 64 3700+ (2.2 GHz). I have a Scythe Ninja running fanless. When idle, I can touch the Scythe and it will be cold. During load, it is luke warm. It's size puts it close to the rear fan so the warm air is quickly ventilated out. CPUs are supposed to handle approximately, what, 65C? Mine's usually 40C. I say screw the fan. I have recently upgraded to a Dual Core 3800+ that I overclocked from the stock 2.0 to 2.4 GHz. I did this because my friend who previously owned it and gave it to me free for my birthday has the same mobo and RAM as me ran it OCed in Prime95 for 200+ hours with no errors. That says rock solid to me. Anyway, back on topic, look into your options. Research, read what intelligent people have said, monitor your current temps and see what the max temp tolerance is, and decide whether you really need a fan. Some people will only recommend a part if it is able to cool their system the most. "38C, 38C, 38C, 37C! I'll take #4 and the rest are garbage." Give me a break. You want ultimate cooling? Use liquid nitrogen! Let's get practical and sensible here.

I agree.

To "speed up" your OS, you need to put in newer/faster hardware. To maintain the speed you should have, you have to keep your HDD defragmented. If you have a quad-core CPU and 4GBs of RAM, I don't think cleaning your registry and disabling a few start-up entries is going to do much for you, but it's always nice to be organized.

You could just make a .BAT file to use "regsvr32 /<path\file.dll/ocx>" to update the system without reinstalling, couldn't you?

To both use nLite and keep it simple, I suggest removing Accessibility, unneeded Languages and Drivers, integrate your own drivers. I only keep two Multimedia components; OpenGL and DirectX obviously. EVerything else goes. Leave the OS, Network and Services alone unless you know specifically what to remove. Doing this will take your filesize down by over 50-60% and you will lose no functionality at all. It's the people who want to save on every byte who get delete-happy, screw themselves over, whine and cry, then beg for a magical way to undo the problem without having to start from scratch. Keep it simple.

This is caused by a low CMOS Battery. But you've changed that recently. Try resetting your BIOS to the default configuration.

Third party software; firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware, monitoring software, anything. Easiest way is to disable all your start-up entries and re-enable one at a time to determine which one is causing the problem.

Since when does "manager" also mean "accelerator"?

It depends on the registry cleaner you use, honestly and seriously. Each registry cleaner is built upon the same principle, however, some abide by different "rules" or "policies" to determine what a valid and invalid registry entry are. How is this so? The programmer who made the product. Just like anti-virus and anti-spyware, registry cleaners will come up with false positives. It's actually quite difficult for any product of this kind to have 0 false positives. I've used dozens of cleaner, both in my local and virtual environment. In 2005, jv16 was one of the worst registry cleaners you could use, it would break many software installs, such as Device Manager and VMware Workstation. Nowadays, in the beautifully crafted 2007 final, the product is just superb. I've been using it since 2005 and I haven't had it break a single piece of software (and I compare a lot of software) since 2005's version was significantly improved. Your system is constantly processing thousands upon thousands of registry requests/queries. Just use RegMon and monitor your system for 10 seconds when you have a lot of software upon, downloading, writing to the disk, etc... Your registry hives are typically 15-30MBs in size combined. When you do a typical registry scan after not doing one for several months, you could remove anywhere from 10-50KB worth of registry entries. This likely will not yield any performance gain, until you defragment your registry, which jv16 has a built-in feature for this that Zxian has confirmed ages ago works better than the NTRegOpt utility which is freeware. If you defragment your registry (remove all the empty gaps left behind from removed keys/entries), you could notice anywhere from a 3-10% increase of performance because it takes your system less time overall to go through so many requests in such a short amount of time. It's just another step to getting organized and squeezing a bit more out of your potential for performance.

An image, technically speaking, can be considered a backup, IMHO. Acronis True Image Burning files to DVD+/-R doesn't hurt, either.

You're referring to automatic defragmentation, yes? If so, several other defragmenters have this ability. Ashampoo Magical Defrag 2, DirMS, Diskeeper 2007, MST Defrag, IOBit SmartDefrag, and O&O Defrag 8.6 and above. I haven't tested these defragmenters in depth in regards to automatic defragmenting yet, but if I had to recommend 3 of them, I'd say DK, MST and O&O. There's only one way to know for sure, though...

How to: Booting to a CD and renaming or deleting the virtual drivers in system32 IIRC (been a few years and I'm too lazy to Google right now).

Do they taste good?Well, I tried to get a taste of my fiancee but she said I knew better than to do that infront of the family members. @Tarun, LOL nice pic! Thanks guys.

Nah, don't like beer. I don't drink often, either. I'll celebrate in some other way. But thanks, Martin!

Got a card from my fiancee, one of those with something that pops out when you open the card, really cute. She also made me breakfast (eggs, toast and bacon). My aunt sent me a hilarious e-card. Just got back from Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer in the cinema. It was pretty good. I liked it more than Spiderman 3. We are having chinese food at a wicked place later this evening and ice cream cake with some of the family for desert. Got lots of IMs and phone calls today. No presents to unwrap but that's fine. Having a good time with friends and family is more valuable than any gift I can think of, unless its winning the lottery... in which case I would make life easier for myself and many others. Anyway, thanks for the topic Nick! Punto... you Hollandesian Whore. Happy birthday as well to charliefox(57), bktbo(41), [[[sAM]]](30), Jin Kyu Lee(18), alexjitaojun(26), sunnyboymark(29), eleventhcmd(28), abbadon(30), emmi(32), phalacee(24), De@n(23)! *out of breath*

It's called a firewall and a password...

Ditto. I use the Admin account, have never had a problem. I don't bother with Windows Updates. I just use RyanVM's pack when I reformat (doesn't happen too often) but I do keep all my software up-to-date. The software I have installed on my C: is as follows: Clicky the linky

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Hardware firewall for starters. It's not the best, but it's better than nothing. I'm on a wired connection, not wireless, so no wise-a** is going to crack through some "open access point". I have just my OS and Program Files on mY C: drive and everything else on D:. I use Opera and Ad Muncher so no ActiveX, Java, JavaScript or other scripting features are enabled and all the ads and banners are removed, not that I'd click on them if they did show up. I don't open unknown e-mails or attachments. I question file transfers from those on my MSN and if someone adds me and immediately tries to send me something, its kind of obvious what the intention is. I image my HDD and can easily restore if anything bad happened. But if I ever noticed someone who managed to hack through a router, I'd simply pull the ethernet cable out of the router. Give my setup, I'd love to see someone hack through air. The problem is most people feel that if they don't have loads of security suites installed that they will be infected. This is not the case. If you want to get infected, go out and get yourself infected. Accept those transfers, open those downloaded EXEs and ZIPs off LimeWire, open that attachment and click on that bouncing "you're our 999,999th customer, click here for your free laptop!" button. Hell, anyone ever heard of DeepFreeze and a ThawSpace? Reboot and everything's fine!

Never had that happen on any PC I've run CCleaner on. Never had the program not run on any Windows system I've run it on. I've noticed this. I've never received any error message with CCleaner on any system I've used it on. Yeah, I find those annoying as well. Hmm, I've always thought of CCleaner's registry cleaner as rather safe, but I use the superior jv16 PowerTools 2007 now. It's never killed any system I've run it on. nCleaner

Apparently, the kid is just acting.

I should add that the client's HDD capacity was only 30GB and after CCleaner was ran, she had only 1.5GB of consumed space, so her entire HDD was crammed full of junk! *cries* They say 80% of all PCs in the world have malware on them, well what about the percentage of HDDs that are fragmented and full of junk/temp files? There is a serious loss of global performance there... lol