What's in your Laptop?...Pwrtoys?

Dear All,
No one could remark on the debugging issue I had earlier posted. That is okay, for maybe it is not important. The message never appeared again. Anyway, now that I am enjoying my Dell 700m it is time to get into the tweaks. I would like to know what you have as far as ultlities which are easy to implement to make your laptop run at its optimum performance.

Anyone use Powertoys? Or Spysweeper? Should I get something to complement my Panda anti-virus? Should a beginner like me get into these items? Am hearing conversations about cleaning up the registry?? ANY opinions are more than welcome!
Thanks.
Sincerely, macmac

 

I know for me, the first thing that goes on any of my machines, right after the AV software, is Spybot Search & Destroy (current version is 1.3). Very, very valuable, not only in finding all sorts of things you wouldn't want to have on your computer, but also for giving you additional understanding of things on there you WOULDN'T WANT to remove and what they're for. They have a great little sidebar on the right, where appropriate, that gives you info on things you have selected to view. Other than that, one of my first 'tweaks' in XP is to go turn off all the unecessary eye candy dribble that just saps valuable resources that I could be using for things like Sorenson Sueeze, Dreamweaver & Flash, and Doom 3.
I do like to keep an eye out for any neat tweaking utils that'll help me sueeze some extra performance out of my rig. I'm curious to know what tweaks other people use to boost their performance.


Cheers,

Stevo

zv5000z: Ath64_3200+ (2.0GHz) - 1GB DDR - 80GB 5400rpm - 64MB GeForce4 440 - 15.0" XGA (1024x768)

 

I agree that Spybot seems to be the first (next to Ad-ware) that my associates recommend. I guess the pop-ups and cookie awareness are on the minds of even non-tech users of the internet.

On Spybot, I did see a unusual occurence. When it ran, it seem to go on and on...Then after 15 minutes, the user stopped the program (after much trying to) and he asked for Help. The info was that the program went into a "C2 loop" and that you could turn off something in order to free it and stop the looping action. We could not find out where to access such and my friend just eliminated Spybot from his laptop. We are awaiting some feedback from Spybot themselves.

Thanks Col. Stevo and others.
Macmac

 

Hi Macmac,
Check out my article that I wrote and is in the hardware forum.
http://www.notebookreview.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=5787

It should help to speed things up some. There really isn't anything in microsoft's powertoys to speed thigs up. I listed a couple of utilites in the artilce that will help you though. As far as spysweeper/adaware and other stuff like that, they are good to run once in awhile, I do them once a week or two, but don't let them run in the background all the time. It's these utilities that are running in the background continuously that really slow things down. In fact with my Panda software, even though it has much less CPU usage than the other AV packages, I still don't let it run in the background for all things; I just let it scan incoming email. Then I will run it manually once a week just like the adaware and spysweeeper software.

Hope theis helps out
Jack

 

Dear bootleg2go,

I thought I had already posted a reply but do not see it. Anyway, much thanks. The information is overwhelming. I also saved to Favorites the sites mentioned. Man, I did not know how much extras that windows contain. To be fair, OS10 must also have excess baggage too.

Thanks to all who helped and put up with my posts, windows is not as bad as it was made out to be.

Thanks again bootleg2go. I must read on.
Sincerely,
macmac