Jeremy

I switched my in-laws to Picasa2. They were using some crappy software that was included with their camera. I almost vomited on their case when I first saw its GUI.

Unless you've got hardware that monitors both incoming and outgoing packets, it's recommended by Steve Gibson (Windows Security Guru) that you use a software firewall (or other means of monitoring outgoing packets) along with your hardware firewall. This is because even though the incoming packets are being monitored, anything you intentionally download that may potentially contain malware of some sort may send outgoing calls to a "home server" or something, the router will not protect against that, whereas a software firewall would. I use Outpost Firewall and it's the best software firewall I've seen. Not free, but it works!

Hehehehe! They used the CD contents of the old Egyptian City Building game called Pharaoh for the screenshots. I still have that game on the shelf I think.

My Kaspersky (latest version) while Idle (Note: I have only the Virus Scan installed, none of the additional components. Obviously, the memory usage would be higher if all components were installed.) 10% Scanned The memory usage fluctuated between 12 - 18 MBs.

Media Player Classic + FFDShow + CoRoNe's DirectShow FilterPack OR K-Lite Codec Pack.

OCZ PowerStream or an EnerMax.

I'd say the best answer to that is to read Zxian's post above.

Post #76.

Norton/Symantec (nono) The tech shop I did my workterm, there were probably a dozen PCs that had Symantec/Norton. The ones that we didn't end up replacing with AVG, had to have most of the "extra" Services stopped and either set to manul or disabled because they just slowed the computers to a crawl. I rememeber one computer in particular I was working on, it took the PC 2 minutes to do the simplest things. Once I got rid of Norton/Symantec, it was a race horse.

Picasa2 is what I'd recommend, although it installs a MediaDetector Service that monitors any new images of any kind on your system.

Perhaps you should just reformat...

Yeah, I have Spybot and Ad-Aware portable on my USB drive, works like a charm. I only wish there was a user-friendly program out there to "redirect" registry calls to alternative hives (say if I copied my hives onto my USB stick) that way I could install programs which use Services. These being anything from M$ AntiSpyware to Kaspersky...

ZoneAlarm is known better for being a firewall as opposed to an anti-virus. Try Kaspersky and/or NOD32 and do a full system scan.

Which anti-virus software are you using?

I agree with that 100%, hands down. Period.

Well, this is off-topic, but as long as your CD/DVD ROM drive is set as your first boot device in your Boot Priority options in BIOS, then just put your CD in, boot from it, and there you go. I'm assuming you know what to do.

Yeah, just from reading the site, it looks like crap. WHat are the best settings? Dramatically boost my PC operation and my connection speed? The most advanced optimization engine? Reeeaalllyy... In all these years I've used PCs, in the dozens and dozens of cleanup utilities, why I've never heard of this? Surely, it would have been mentioned on one of the dozens of reputable sites I have in my bookmarks, since it's so good? Hmmm... As far as I'm concerned, it's an over-hyped registry cleaner.

Me and my girlfriend and some of my in-laws all use Kaspersky 6 (latest version). For it's performance and features, it uses a very low amount of resources (7 MBs during idle for me, this includes both the Service and the GUI). I've used it on a lot of the PCs during my workterm at a tech shop and it totally cleaned systems out. I used 3 spyware programs on a particular PC and it was still experiencing pop-up ads. I ran Kasp., and they were gone.

Use Ad-Aware SE v1.06, Spybot v1.4 (picks up a LOT more than Ad-Aware) and M$ AntiSpyware or WIndows Defender (assuming you have a legitimate copy of XP). Be warned, Windows Defender will list the common "180Solutions" spyware as "Moderate" as where the AntiSpyware lists it as "Critical". This is because the company cut a deal with M$, paid them money to change their minds about that spyware. Not much worries, though, 180Solutions doesn't get past Spybot. However, I have XP SP2 + software firewall and a router and MSN 7.5 worked fine for me. You need to clean out the malware, then I think it will work for you. Also, do a virusscan. Kaspersky or NOD32 will clean it out for you.

This is because Fraps saves the captured video as Raw AVI. It has to preserve the quality as best it can, given the program settings. The idea is for the visual difference between how you game appears and the captured video to be minimal. If you select "60 FPS" in Fraps, it will do less compression-on-the-fly and thus the quality of your video will be slightly less than that of the original, but at the same time, you'll get higher FPS during a Fraps capture (some people hate Fraps because it lowers their FPS too much). Fraps splits files into 4 GB chunks, I believe, for every 15-20 minutes or so. For people with large HDs, filesize isn't really an issue, because you'll most likely be editing the video and encoding it to DivX/XviD/etc to fit on CDs, or just to get rid of the huge raw AVIs.

Probably because you're the only one using it? hehe, just kidding man. Relative of eDonkey?

Fraps isn't free, but it is the best audio/video + image capture program for games. Usually the screen capture button in games is F5, though. There's a freeware one called GameCam v1.3 (latest). I've never tried it personally, but I'd say Fraps is the best.

I Googled this quickly for you and found a very relevant site (actually another forum). Clicky the linky Apparently, it depends on what software you have installed. If you have any of the programs mentioned on that forum installed, search those programs for any settings pertaining to the hiding of windows after minimizing. I'm suggesting this first because I'm sure you'd rather fix the issue without having to uninstall any software you currently use. If no setting can be found in any of your programs, it seems you may have to uninstall whatever it is that is causing it. A list of your programs would be helpful.

Google it and you'll get a ton of results.

Download RyanVM's Update Pack v1.0.6 and the Integrator.