Jeremy

I had a chat with a friend of mine about my findings from the registry cleaners experiment, to get far more elaboration of the whole scheme of things, here's a paste of our chat:

When it comes to the registry, you have to use more than one program, and not necessarily freeware, but even payware because some registry cleaners like JV16 PowerTools do a terrific job of cleaning the registry. I don't think it is the registry's fault, but moreso the fault of registry cleaners in general. They all scan for different things and have different definitions of what is safe/unsafe to remove. For example, JV16 used to cripple Device Manager and VMWare Workstation due to excessive removal of OLE/ActiveX/COM entries. JV16 PowerTools also includes dozens of other useful tools. One of my favorite features of a registry cleaner is the ability to manually search for something specific; say you just beat CoD2 and want to see if anything was left behind after you uninstalled it. A freeware solution is found in RegSeeker, which is another favorite of mine. From experience I've seen that a lot of registry cleaners focus on file/folder paths. I've come to the assumption that these particular entries are the most important for any registry cleaner to check. Second in priority are references to uninstalled software which left entries behind. Ace Utilities, TuneUp Utilities, JV16 PowerTools, and RegSeeker are the very best ones to use, in my honest opinion. As for over system cleanup, obviously you would use CCleaner as it is free, updated frequently, has dozens of programs integrated into it, and cleans out everything from MRUs to Hotfix Uninstallers. I've seen it remove 1 GB of garbage on a friend's machine. It is truly an essential tool because there are so many general users out there that can't be bothered to search through the countless directories in Windows XP looking for files to delete. Let CCleaner save you time and hassle. As you may know, the registry becomes full of gaps after you clean it out, so it needs to be "compacted" / "defragmented". There are several programs out there that have this feature, but from experience, NTRegOpt.exe (Windows NT Registry Optimizer) is the best because it is freeware and does the best compacting of the registry. Finally, after all the smoke clears, you'll want to defragment and the best bet is to use PerfectDisk with SmartPlacement. It may take a long time depending on your fragmentation level, but it is the most efficient defragmenter out there. Just for kicks and giggles, I'd like to mention RAM "optimizers". Never use one. They are totally bogus and only give n00b users the illusion of optimization. You want better performance? Clean the junk out, defrag and get more RAM. Simple as that.

@Godan, I didn't list the prices because most of the registry cleaners shouldn't be paid for, plus a lot of them are so poorly made that wasting your money on them would be a sin. @Alsiladka, I understand your particular frustrations with registry cleaners, and it is odd for a program to point to the CD-ROM by default. Registry cleaners see that as temporary links to files being run off the CD/DVD ROM, not actual program references, so they feel free to remove those entries.

Removed.

The only way integrated devices get disabled is if they are configured as such by default in the BIOS or if you do it manually. The Sound Blaster cards are better than onboard sound controllers. My SBl 5.1 is 3 years old and I'd say it's better than the onboard.

Why is there still any question about WinXP or ME? lol...

There is no "free" defragmenter that will do a good enough job to really let you appreciate what a terrific one like PerfectDisk can do for your system.

FileZilla rules.

Well, you sure got a lot of help it seems. Type the names of the processes you think are bad into Google and it will give you info in the first search result if it is bad. I'm worried about the following: Alwil C:\WINDOWS\system32\HPZipm12.exe C:\WINDOWS\System32\MsPMSPSv.exe NetZero is garbage. That's your ISP. Sorry to hear that, they have given you a lot of garbage to store on your HD.

DL, why didn't you give me a shout bro? I just spent the last 10 minutes reading over this entire topic. First of all, this Windows Installer thing, is actually quite common and is not spyware/viruses. You have Microsoft Office installed, right? Well, that's the reason. Do a reinstall of Office and do not delete the source files (C:\MSOCache). This will fix your problem. Second, NOD32 (or McAfee VirusScan 2006 if you have a lot of RAM) is your best bet for anti-virus. I'm not telling you this simply because I use it, but because I have read countless forums, reviews, articles, opinions, and tried out all 5 anti-virus programs I have, and NOD32 is the most regarded. Take it or leave it. Kaspersky, Avast are still great AV products. As long as you don't use Norton. Check out this site. It shows a list of AV programs that caught all 206 variants of the WMF Metafile exploit and a list of the ones that missed some. Regarding the ones that missed some, don't use them. If an AV program can't do the whole job for you, especially with all the crap floating around online these days, it can't be trusted. It's as simple as that. Third, you're not supposed to "fix" everything that shows up in HijackThis, only anything that looks malicious. If you don't recognise a process, Google the filename. The first result will be "name - filename.exe - Process Information" from http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintas...processlibrary/ . Fourth, use a software firewall, I recommend Sygate Personal Firewall or Kerio (if you like to be notified about everything that sends a call to either your Internet connection or a system process. Kerio is also not as user friendly as Sygate. You need to be warned of anything and everything making calls on your PC nowadays my friend, better safe than sorry, eh? Did I miss anything? Cheers bud, Jeremy PS: I just noticed how old this topic is, oh well.

Yeah, FileZilla by default has several timeouts. Just change the values to 0 to disable the timeouts. But yeah, I'd say its the cabling.

Don't know if there's much you can do with a corrupted file recovered off a floppy drive. By a 64MB USB stick and forget about floppies. Hell, I have an OCZ 512MB for $50 from NCIX.com. I love my little gadget. Get your mind out of the gutter on that one. Seriously, I really don't know what to tell you about your bad file... I think it's a lost cause.

The longer it takes, the better defragment you get. Do it overnight.

It's outcome depends on the user. I've heard more people diss Azureus and more people praise BitComet. BitComet doesn't need garbage Java...

Cool stuff. I just filter out forwarded e-mail and e-mails from anyone/anything not on my contact list in MSN to my Junk mail folder. I get 1 or 2 junk mail a month. I also haven't signed up to 20 newsletters, though.

That's absolutely not true at all. But I've been interested in Internet security for years and I've tried out/used pretty much every program that people recommend, i read reviews, I listen to what other people have to say about it, I give my honest opinion. I don't act like a n00b that says "Norton sucks, use Kaspersky!" and leave it at that, I back up what I say with why I say it. I use Sygate Personal Firewall Pro and that's the most highly regarded software firewall according to our guys here at MSFN. For anti-virus, we here at MSFN like McAfee, Kaspersky and NOD32. I have all 3 of these programs on my FTP for people to pick their pleasure. I don't tell you to use one single application, but to try a few out and see what you think of them. I may have been biased in the past, but over time, people mature, smarten up, learn new things, new facts about things they thought they knew all about in the past, and so now I just give out the wisdom and knowledge I have acquired to other people. Doing that is unquestionably a hell of a lot better than running XP SP1 with no protection and going to some porn site, saying YES to all the pop-ups and think your PC will work the same way in the next hour.

Use an actual virus scanner to remove trojans. Don't use Norton, it's garbage. I'm not biased, I'm telling you this from experience, and not only my own. It's a mainstream scanner but the amount of resources it takes up is just ridiculous, and totally unfair to PCs that don't have at least 512 MBs. But let me tell you a story with my experience with Norton, read my first post in this page http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=16682&st=320 So use NOD32, hell take your PC to someone's house so you can get online to update it first. Do a complete system scan. Don't use IE anymore. Use Opera. Firefox is good too but there are so many reports and articles nowadays about the "memory leaks" that others support are not leaks but an actual feature, the result of Firefox caching pages so you can conveniently go back and forth quickly. Anyway, I would use Opera. My girlfriend uses it, her aunt and uncle and my grandparents as well. You will not get pop-ups or spyware through Opera. If you download it through Opera and run it on your own PC, that's still your own fault. Don't open e-mail from anyone/anything you do not 100% recognise as legit, ask friends and family if they did attach the files to the e-mails that appear in the e-mails, if not, do not run them. Even if they are from family do not download EXE files, if you do, scan them before you run them with NOD32. And as I said already, get a router, because it naturally acts as a hardware firewall which monitors incoming packets and discards them if they do not match the outgoing packets. Since they do not monitor outgoing traffic, use a software firewall, Sygate (Kerio does too much notifying and isn't as user-friendly as Sygate), to notify you of anything you deliberately download that tries to send outgoing, even if its a game you install that you only want single player, not multiplayer. As for the actual system corruption at the moment, put in your XPCD and try to repair Windows, which overwrites the infected files with the original ones from the CD. if that does not work, then I think you'll have to reformat. That should always be your last resort.

Someone has infected your PC with a trojan virus in order to take complete control over it. At this point, I would recommend you disconnect the PC from the Internet and run the following applications: McAfee VirusScan 2006 NOD32 Ad-Aware SE Spybot 1.4 Microsoft AntiSpyware Use common sense when downloading files. Scan them with NOD32 (the best AV imho) before you open them. Use a router, use a software firewall (I recommend Sygate Personal Firewall Pro). Anything that appears malicious or suspicious when your firewall notifies you, deny it access.

The fact that people are still maintaining after these years, adding to it and such, let's people appreciate it more. But if you use a browser like Opera, you don't even need to worry about spyware. If you download something via Opera and run it and it contains spyware, that's your own fault.

Does this list work for Opera?

I would also recommend you reformat. Performance Tips 1. Use CCleaner to clean out temp/cache/MRUs and the registry. 2. Use RegSeeker to further clean the registry. 3. Use NT Registry Optimizer to compact the registry. 4. Disable all visual effects (including themes) except for "Show Windows Contents While Dragging". 5. Set the page file's initial and max value the same. Reboot. 6. Remove all files from the Prefetch folder or disable it entirely if you have a lot of RAM (512 MBs or higher). 7. Defrag with PerfectDisk and use the SmartPlacement method and also enable aggressive free space consolidation. Then enable an "offline" defragment of your page file and system files at next boot-up. As for Antivirus, do not use Norton. If you must use a huge mainstream product, go with McAfee Virus Scan 2006. If you want something easier on resources, go with NOD32. Leo Laporte, a good friend the Windows XP Security Guru, Steve Gibson (www.grc.com) also uses it. Other good ones are Avast!, Kaspersky, and BitDefender. Don't use AVG because it doesn't detect as many malicious files as Avast. Click here for proof of that. I'd also suggest getting a router, as it acts naturally as a hardware firewall, which IMHO is essential these days. Essentially, it "labels" all outgoing packets (traffic/bandwidth) from your PC and checks for all incoming packets for these labels. If the incoming labels don't match the outgoing labels, those packets are discarded. However, since a router can only monitor incoming traffic, it is still recommended that you run a software firewall for the purpose of monitoring outgoing traffic. Even though you have a router, something you deliberately allow onto your system from a p2p program or website may contain malware of some sort and it may attempt to immediately "call home". With your software firewall (I highly recommend Sygate Personal Firewall, it was bought by Symantec but v5.6 is still the best IMHO and yes I've tried Kerio) in place, it will notify you of anything that wants to send traffic out. If you see something you don't recognise or are suspicious of, deny it access. For spyware use Ad-Aware SE, Spybot 1.4, CWShredder, HijackThis and M$ AntiSpyware. Wow, I went on quite a speel for just agreeing with what someone else said, lol.

@nmX.Memnoch, as far as I know, gaming is the most intensive when it comes to the page file. Most people prefer to have nothing else running but the game during gameplay to get the most performance (highest framerate) out of the game. Having said that, I have 2 drives, but they are not in a RAID array, and I keep all my game images on my second drive but they are installed on my first drive, so the I/O operations during gameplay obviously take place on the first drive. With my page file on the second drive and defragmented at boot-up with PerfectDisk, I think I can confidentally say that this is the easiest approach for my PC regarding performance. I know this is just in my case, but I think I've made the best choices for my PC. @OuTmAn, yes, Zxian mentioned multiple page files to me before as well. I never tested that "theory" before, though. @DL., regarding performance tweaks for XP, I'm not too certain of them in general to feel confident enough enabling them on every XP system I come across. I tried the "DisablePagingExecutive" on a machine once and got a BSOD. For this reason, I believe firmly that the best to get better performance is simply to get better hardware. It seems PCs nowadays, at least in my area, lack the RAM but not so much the CPU power. People like to put XP on their machines with 128 MBs of RAM, and then install something like Norton, which does a crappy job, and wonder why everything is slow. Most people don't think to defrag, clean/compact the registry, set the pagefile's initial/max values the same, Services, start-up, temp/cache, Prefetch. I'm a serious performance freak when it comes to computers so I know all about that stuff and what programs are best for the job.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of...ting_BitTorrent Hopefully, this will aid torrent lovers in their search for the best torrent client.

Google a program called Dial-A-Fix, it has an option to re-register the Windows Installer Service. Should fix it.