Thread: Looking for some freeware

I was just wondering if there were actual free programs out there to help speed up my computer, maybe something to fix registry errors/missing shortcuts/ect.

For the most part, free programs that say they'll speed things up are probably not very useful. Things to consider:

1) If your hard drive is almost full, delete some stuff so that you have at least a few GB free (ideally more than 20-25% of your drive, I'd say).

2) After doing (1), you may want to defrag your hard drive. Last I checked, windows uses a swap file right there on your main partition, which means your virtual memory might get majorly fragmented.

3) Some people are paranoid about this, but my opinion is: Disable System Restore. It's a useless piece of junk that wastes resources. If you mess things up so badly that you'd need to use it, you might as well just re-install and start over. Also, it has a way of backing up viruses.

4) If you have an older system and just made the mistake of installing Vista, then you might get some more life out of it by upgrading your RAM. As far as performance updates go, that's where you can get a HUGE boost.

Otherwise, just make sure you've got a decent firewall going, and instead of using IE, use a browser

Chrome is the best browser for Windows (or all platofmrs, but Google sure is taking their sweet time on getting it out for the rest of us.) It has Firefox's superior networking and Safari's superior rendering. Most of all it's process handling makes spyware nearly impossible to install.

Ad-Aware will get rid of your adware and malware.

If you have Norton Antivirus, get rid of it and use a real virus protector. Most people believe that Norton is worse than most of the viruses it protects against.

I doubt you'll find freeware that's great with the registry and shortcuts. I recommend buying System Mechanic. It's fairly cheap and really does a good job with Windows.

Originally Posted by Replicon

3) Some people are paranoid about this, but my opinion is: Disable System Restore. It's a useless piece of junk that wastes resources. If you mess things up so badly that you'd need to use it, you might as well just re-install and start over. Also, it has a way of backing up viruses.

Really. Hmm I didn't know that... I might do that myself.

Originally Posted by NeoSioType

I was just wondering if there were actual free programs out there to help speed up my computer, maybe something to fix registry errors/missing shortcuts/ect.

Yes! There's something called CCleaner, here's a link.

http://www.ccleaner.com/

I use it every couple of weeks, there's two different scans you can do with it. It'll scan through to find malware, or unneeded/unused icons, files, extensions etc,. Then there's also a scan for the registry, which will go through and delete unused registry keys, and fix any broken ones or something. I'm not too sure of the logistics, but it works great for me.

Every time I do the first scan, it dumps like two gigabytes of information that my computer doesn't need, it's pretty damn handing for a quick clean-up tool, and it's never deleted anything important, plus it creates back-ups everytime anyway.

Most awsome tool ever created (next to spybot)!