Jeremy

It provides the Nvidia Display Tab in Display Properties where you can modify various settings. NVTweak available at Guru3D works well with it when you decide to tweak it. For example, with ES4 Oblivion, you can significantly increase your FPS on Nvidia cards by changing the "Frames Rendered Ahead" option from the default of 3 to 0.

DVDs > DVDFab Decrypter v3.0.3.5 (Latest)(Freeware) @DigeratiPrime, thanks for those links, been looking for something superior to CDex.

The whole placement thing takes me back to a discussion I had with Zxian some time ago. It concluded a trade-off between workload vs performance. The pro being having all files placed together starting at the beginning of the disk, in sequential order VS the extra time it takes PerfectDisk's SmartPlacement to actually do so (extra workload). I also admit that DK lacks in the "offline" / "boot-time" department. It also doesn't do any special placement of files, other than the I-FAAST 2.0. Another thing, however, I would like to address. If PerfectDisk follows this 'rule', then my screenshot shows something contradictory. I've done dozens of boot-time defrags on dozens of machines with PD in the past. This screenshot shows that PD has placed the MFT zone near the middle of the disk, 50.82561 GBs (51 GBs) through the disk. This is a long way from 3GBs. Actually, if that remains true, then the MFT was already in the proper spot before I did the boot-time defrag. Who believes anything Microsoft says, anyway? What about older harddrives that are 2 GBs or less? Even now that my MFT has been moved, I don't notice any absolute 10-15% performance increase, either. Maybe Diskeeper disregarded that because those claims are not true, or that they were previously believed to be, and no longer are?

If I were to go with an ISS, I'd go with Kaspersky, because the anti-virus happens to rock. Norton, garbage, for obvious reasons. ZA, dunno, seems like a very popular one but I've never tried it out. Trend Micro, same.

Copying won't do any good if you make a copy of a file on the same harddrive/partition and it happens to go bad. But other than that, yeah, burn your backups to CD/DVD, store on anexternal harddrive or flash drive, online storage, whatever... and keep the original copies.

I've just done a comparison between Diskeeper and PerfectDisk so here are the screenshots: Diskeeper 1 Diskeeper 2 Diskeeper 3 PerfectDisk 1 PerfectDisk 2 PerfectDisk 3 The different graphical displays are fine, nothing wrong with those. I personally like PD's better, but I rarely look at the GUI for DK anyway. The stats given to me by DK, some I find irrelevant, others are contradictory. For example, it says there are 15 fragmented files in total on my C: drive, and those fragments amount to 35, yet it says the average fragment(s) per file is 1. 15 goes into 35 2.333 times, so their math is worse than mine and I thought my math was the worst in the world. But besides the stats, let's get down to the reason why defragmenters exist: To defragment our files. Now, how do we define "Thorough", really? Crahak? Zxian? Anyone? What is 'thoroughness'? In 8 versions of PD and 11 versions of DK, haven't they figured out how to "defragment" a file? Are there various extents for how well a file can be defragmented? If a file is in one piece, there is no problem, correct? But then doesn't any defragmenter do that? If thoroughness lies in where and by what manner the program places the file, then that's another story. But, IMHO, not a very important one.

According to AV-Comparatives, AntiVir detects more viruses than Symantec. I've tried it, I don't like it's update feature, but the rest looks good.

Flash Drives.

Mo-Mo-Mo-Mo-MONSTER KILL KILL KILL KILL....

NetLimiter

Well it did feel like a bootable OS to you, so I guess their strategy was successful for you, but we weren't so easily fooled My misunderstanding was within the topic, not something I read on their website. Actually, I haven't read anything on their website. I read info on GRC.com. I wasn't fooled by anyone. And just for the record, I am not the kind of person to fall victim to false advertising or mass media influence. I don't listen to the radio or watch TV (too many utterly stupid... *curses and swears*... commercials). I did my part in apolozing, there's no need for you to insult my intelligence.

That's easy when comparing programs like cleanup utilities or audio editing software, sure. Defragmenters I've come to find are more difficult to compare to one-another. I didn't say that I sit and watch. But not everyone has the same schedule. On top of that I want to point out something very important: PerfectDisk doesn't defrag on the fly (as we know), and many users do a lot is disk-intensive operations (video editing for example) and someone who spends 8 hours a day rendering will fragment their harddrive very quickly. With PerfectDisk they would have to leave the PC on overnight (that is if another person wasn't to use that PC for 8 hours throughout the night to do rendering as well) to defragment it. With Diskeeper, on a machine that likely has 1 or 2 GBs of RAM (if the PC is mainly used as video editing, it would need that much RAM), it would all be defragmented on-the-fly in the background, invisibly, and at no expense of the PC's performance. I have 2GBs of RAM as do many users out there and I can actually hear my harddrive writing data when dealing with several GBs at a time. I hear when Diskeeper defrags my files and I can do as much on my system as I want to and since the time I began using DK2007, I have not observed any decrease in my PCs performance at all, whatsoever. Huh? What are you talking about? All of the above-mentioned are things that happen on an extremely fragmented machine, something which would never exist on a machine being defragmented by any software. I don't mean to be insulting but I think you are just hearing yourself talk on that one. I've never known a movie (typical 700MB AVI) to open instantly on a PC unless previously opened or defragmented. I used to use PerfectDisk and most movies either downloaded or copied to the harddrive would be in hundreds, even thousands of fragments. I realize your first thought is "Drive failing", but I assure you this wasn't the case. Regardless, I will attempt to reenforce that claim by analyzing my files with PerfectDisk again. And where does MFT 'truly' belong? I've been using it for a while now and as I've been saying throughout this topic, I have noticed a difference in speed as DK2007 has been taking care of my movies and all other files. In the past, they've opened in a second or so. Now they open in 250ms or so. As for free space, I have plenty of that, but nonetheless, a valid point. Perhaps things will change in the future in this respect.

@Crahak Yeah, 13 pages of people saying "<Insert name here> rules!" is not really informative. I always like the try software before I go on a huge long rant claiming whether or not it sucks. Especially when most people are still probably using v10, when v11 is a lot different. Software should be given second chances. Having said that, and us not being the people who coded the program anyway, who are we to say how good it really, least of all users who haven't used it (or newer versions)? I've been using DK for a few months now, and if I have to choose to manually defrag my drives, sit around and wait for MB upon MB to be moved before I do use my PC again, or have intelligent software do all that in the background for me, without impacting my performance at all, then I think the choice is painfully obvious. Downloaded movies open instantly, rather than seconds later. This is because DK defragged them before I decided to open. PerfectDisk or any other program wouldn't have done that and I would have had to schedule a defrag overnight after I went to bed. You claim it sucks because you claim it isn't thorough. Well, have fun with other ones, then.

Sorry about that, jaclaz and LLXX. Misundestanding there. My apologies.

@Crahak, still waiting for your response here.

Diskeeper 2007. Completely automatic, no need for schedules. It runs invisibly in the background (you can see the one process in Task Manager) but no system tray icon ever appears. I mean, after using it for one month you realize, "Why do I ever manually try and defrag?" It just makes life a bit easier. Many people who disagree with its methods for whatever reasons will just say "No, it's not good for your system, use <whatever>". But screw it, it works terrifically.

Uh, yes it is. I've tried it. Maybe you should try something before stating it is something it isn't. It installs directly to USB, uses it's own registry.

Have you tried it? Do you know that version 2007 is out now and it has eliminated the need for scheduling entirely? Do you know that it's automatic and runs in the background when it sees fragmentation and waits for idle resources before performing its tasks? You know the guys at Diskeeper wrote the original defrag API for Windows which is what all the other defrag programs are based off of? Why is any of this not good? Please let me know why this defragmenter is not good. I'm very curious.

Either disabling some Services or simply setting them from Automatic to Manual, you will notice rebooting takes less time and on older PCs performance increase is noticable. For the typical home user, a little time to get to know your Services is actually something I recommend. There are lots of good guides out there for Services, and then there is trial-and-error, which isn't bad at all. A few reboots later and you've already accomplished something, and that takes what, 10 minutes? Computer Browser, Server and Workstation, Network Location Awareness are needed for networking, but if you run only a single PC, then you can disable these and you will notice a difference after you reboot. Windows Image Acquisition Service, when enabled, allows you to view your webcam within Windows Explorer. It is needed for webcams and digital cameras, but even when disabled, they function normally. I've tested it and am letting you know. Defragmenting, yeah, you're certainly correct about that, but Diskeeper is still very healthy for your system to have it installed. Visual Effects, ok performance wise they don't do much when turned off, but they use a lot fo animations which in the grand scheme of things take several seconds overall to display, I don't need to see a window minimize, when I click Minimize, I expect it to jump down there instantly.

Use nLite to slipstream SP2 and make a bootable ISO to burn to CD.

Sounds like a rare hardware/driver incompatibility with the software. For future reference, this is an excellent resource for troubleshooting all kinds of Windows STOP/BSOD messages. No reference of 'tcpip.sys' is mentioned there. I'd suggest using another known-good NIC card.

I did not know that worked! Wow! Will make things easier to troubleshoot in the future, thanks!

Would you mind explaining/clarifying that, please?

Not it isn't. There is always a solution, you just need to find it. Okay, so here is Ultimate Boot CD 3.4 which is freeware. Download it from here. Just for the sake of it, use it to test your harddrive, and memory. Just to know they are okay, which they probably are. There are dozens of utilities that would be useful. Do you have any files that you need backed up? If not, you could just reformat, but since you don't have an XP CD, that may be difficult. You'll need to get one somehow, possibly a friend?

http://www.grc.com/SecurityNow.htm#63 MojoPac, XP and all your programs on USB. Register on the homepage for a trial version good for 200 boots.