Any truly outstanding utility for Vista?

Is there a super utility suite including defrag, registry cleaner, and a couple other utility apps which are guaranteed Vista compatible, and are not either of the two industry giants (Norton or McAfee)?

 

No, but there are many smaller utilities that aren't built into each other that are "super duper" at what they do. Check out my Best Free Software for Windows sticky to try out some.

 

defrag=jk defrag
registry cleaner+more=ccleaner

 

Try Ashampoo WinOptimizer 5. I think it includes tweaking tools, defrag, plus more. Not sure if it has registry clean-up feature, though.

 

Second this.

 

there are some good utilities in Les' Tweaks Thread

 

Those tweaks have done nothing for me!

 

It really does not matter whether you are running 2000, XP, or Vista, there are good utilities and tools here and there.

 

I really believe some of the free app/utilities mentioned above are worth the time to try. Why spend money when there are plenty of free apps that do the job very well? BTW - I was using Auslogics free De-frag and just plugged in JKDefrag - what a difference JK makes - much better job (and I JUST ran Auslogics yesterday). I use CCleaner too - and would recommend Revo Uninstaller over anything else to uninstall programs - does a much cleaner job than even CCleaner, IMO.

 

Norton and McAffee.. I'll never use any product from either one, even if they are the last two software companies on earth. Stupid McAffee's Corporate edition AV failed to detect a virus on a flash drive plugged into my friend's computer. My AVG free edition AV easily caught it when I connected it to my laptop.

Better to go for individual utilities rather than all-in-one tools. And less is better in this case...don't install too many things....not worth the hassle.

What I use
-------------
AV- AVG Free 8

Disk cleanup - Vista in-built. CCleaner on XP SP3. Ccleaner doesn't play well with my Vista install for some reason.

Disk defrag - Diskeeper 2008 Pro on both. Really like this program! Only paid program on the list.

Firewall - built in Windows.

Registry cleaner - Yuck. Never!

Browser - Opera. ya, I consider it a utility; it's so good.

That's all for the performance 'utilities' part. No other tweaking or unwanted programs that mess with the system. Both my computers run very fine, despite having lots of other programs i.e.games, Engg software etc installed on them.

 

JohnDoe - is Raxco worth $10?

 

You will need to make that call for yourself. I use it primarily for the placement features.

 

Aaaa, winbubble anyone?

 

Yes, a great program.

 

What can this do for me that I can not do for myself, and thereby know what was done?

 

Probably nothing, but others may not be as tech-savvy as you and therefore it probably is helpful for them.