PC tune-up

[|iR|Focalor]

The system I'm running on right now is pretty new, only a little over a year and a half old. I'm not really having any emergency panic situations or anything. Everything seems to be working just fine. I've been having a problem with a higher than normal ping lately. My normal ping is around 33, recently it ranges from the mid-70's up to 120 and everywhere in between, never steady, which is why I don't play much anymore. Not really a problem I'm trying to address here though. I don't think its anything that running a PC tune-up program will fix, I'm sure it's all my ISP screwing me like usual. But even though shit seems to be running okay, I'd still like to run one of these just to help keep things cleaned up and running as smooth as possible. Last time I ran one, it was the AVG one that supposedly only allows you to run it only ONCE unless you buy a 1yr subscription for it... which I ain't gonna do. But I ran it, and it seemed to make things start faster. It found a whole slew of useless junk files from random things I installed and blew it off, clearing out a little disk space.

So can anyone recommend a good free PC tune-up program that'll run more than once?

[Golgo13]

I downloaded some freeware called CCleaner from http://download.cnet.com/windows/ seemed to work pretty good. i tend to think when my modem gets super hot in the summer from being on 24/7/365, the connection quality gets messed up. JMO

[VaeVictis]

ccleaner, avast, the built in microsoft AV, and malwarebytes

all you'll ever need

ccleaner is on demand, avast and the microsoft AV have low memory footprint and run in the background, and malwarebytes is on demand

if you want to clean up the registry you can use this equation to see what kind of performance boost you will get, X being the number of entries being removed and y being performance increase:

0(256(x*128)^x)=y



cleaning up temp files and doing shit like wiping old pre-fetch data also won't help out much, but can free up just a little space... don't forget to do shit like defrag which CAN actually improve performance if you are terribly fragmented

ccleaner also allows you to more easily edit start up programs, which is one feature i quite like about it

< warning tangent ahead >

and securely delete files, so if you visit sites that might get you in trouble for legal reasons if a police agency gets a hold of your computer, even the nsa 7 right over pass (not the gutman 35 overwrites) can assist greatly in them not finding anything cause police are stupid... but if that is a concern you can encrypt the entire volume and then there is a case in the works right now that will prob get forced up to supreme court eventually about the bill of rights stating you can never be forced to stand as a witness against yourself and a password is something you know to unencrypt the volume so it is unconstitutional... really only worth it if you use some really solid encryption that might eat your computer alive and something like a 64 character passphrase, BUT worth considering if you care greatly about it lol

[yahoo]

what OS u running?

I always used cleanmgr then defrag. really would free up and speed up mine.

[Muerte]

My normal ping is around 33, recently it ranges from the mid-70's up to 120 and everywhere in between, never steady, which is why I don't play much anymore. Not really a problem I'm trying to address here though. I don't think its anything that running a PC tune-up program will fix, I'm sure it's all my ISP screwing me like usual.
So can anyone recommend a good free PC tune-up program that'll run more than once?

If u want to check who 'screwing' your ping 1st download PingPloter to check where is real ping problem

http://www.pingplotter.com/download.html
im using this pro version with in trial http://www.pingplotter.com/downloads/pngplt_pro.exe

when u get info like this u will find your ping problem



pic showing  traceroute Belgrade.Serbia 2 PacketFinger.NY (via wifi2fiber)

if is ping problem at your place 1st check what is connected 2 internet from your pc with Moo0 Connection Watcher 1.55 (Free)

http://www.moo0.com/?top=http://www.moo0.com/software/ConnectionWatcher/

http://www.moo0.com/software/ConnectionWatcher/download/free2/

if is not software problem then is hardware

- your parrots 'eating' your cables 
- your router/spliter/adsl*cable modem

PS my experience with  CCleaner = know to 'kill' registry very badly

[ex]

if you want to clean up the registry you can use this equation to see what kind of performance boost you will get, X being the number of entries being removed and y being performance increase:

0(256(x*128)^x)=y

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't y in that equation always equal zero since it's being multiplied by zero no matter what?  So the performance increase would be zero?  Or is there something I'm missing?

[ex]

BTW, system restore is the best way to make your PC run better by far.   Only thing better is a total format & reinstall.

[|iR|Focalor]

I'm aware that making changes to the registry doesn't exactly increase speed/performance. But it's still nice to cut out all the shit that is just sitting there useless. And I don't really have the option of restoring any broken files from the Win7 CD or formatting because the assholes at Tiger Direct seem to have left that out of the box, and at this point it's been too long to do anything about it. Like I said, nothings broken at the moment, I just wanna maintain this thing properly. Lately it seems to take a little longer for things to become completely available and functional when starting it up. For example, when it starts, I can open my music library folder and play an album with Windows Media Player, but if I try to skip through songs right away, it sometimes takes as long as 30 seconds for it skip to the next song... but if I start it up and leave it sitting for 2 or 3 minutes once the desktop appears, it won't have any pauses between skipping songs. Maybe that has something to do with defragging, which I haven't done in a while. I'm starting to fill up the disk with media files, so maybe all that extra data is taking longer to get indexed or whatever it does. It's a 1.33T disk with 449Gb free at the moment, so it's 2/3rds full.

Exactly what does ccleaner do? What I'm hoping to find is an all-in-one program that will handle registry errors, junk files and useless temp files, fragmentation, and broken shortcuts.

And as far the ping program, I don't really need anything like that. If I wanna check on that, I can always do a traceroute on my own. Not that it will solve anything. It'll show me where the problem is, but it won't make my asshole ISP do anything about it. If you know how to make my ISP do anything about it short of me going down there with a suicide vest, I'm all ears.

[ex]

I'm aware that making changes to the registry don't exactly increase speed/performance. But it's still nice to cut out all the shit that is just sitting there useless. And I don't really have the option of restoring any broken files from the Win7 CD or formatting because the assholes at Tiger Direct seem to have left that out of the box, and at this point it's been too long to do anything about it. Like I said, nothings broken at the moment, I just wanna maintain this thing properly. Lately it seems to take a little longer for things to become completely available and functional when starting it up. For example, when it starts, I can open my music library folder and play an album with Windows Media Player, but if I try to skip through songs right away, it sometimes takes as long as 30 seconds for it skip to the next song... but if I start it up and leave it sitting for 2 or 3 minutes once the desktop appears, it won't have any pauses between skipping songs. Maybe that has something to do with defragging, which I haven't done in a while. I'm starting to fill up the disk with media files, so maybe all that extra data is taking longer to get indexed or whatever it does. It's a 1.33T disk with 449Gb free at the moment, so it's 2/3rds full.

Exactly what does ccleaner do? What I'm hoping to find is an all-in-one program that will handle registry errors, junk files and useless temp files, fragmentation, and broken shortcuts.

Usually, any computer will have problems if you try to load up something RIGHT AWAY the minute the desktop shows up.  Computers need at least a minute to load everything under "msconfig"...  A defrag will help somewhat with that, but I've never had a computer that is ready to go the VERY MOMENT the desktop pops up.  At least give it 30 seconds... lol.

BTW, Windows Media Player is also part of the problem on that slow loading issue.  It's a crappy slow program.  Use Winamp instead, it's far faster and a better music playing program, with a full equalizer and all sorts of cool shit to go with it (like higher speed).

CCleaner is a good all around program for cleaning up a junky computer, but it won't do everything.  I would highly advise to use Vae's combo of programs, that's actually a good list and not really too much trouble to run all of it.  Not sure on the antivirus though, never tried it.  I always use AVG free and it seems to work quite well, but it is a little resource-heavy I think (takes a bit to load at startup).

[ImperiusDamian]

And I don't really have the option of restoring any broken files from the Win7 CD or formatting because the assholes at Tiger Direct seem to have left that out of the box, and at this point it's been too long to do anything about it.

OEMs never include Win7 disks these days, sadly. Fortunately you can DL the Win7 ISOs direct from Microsoft (both 32- and 64-bit, all editions) and write them to either a DVD or USB flash drive, and then just use the CD key printed on your case to reinstall Windows. That way you avoid all the OEM bloatware, and you can grab some extra disk space by wiping out the OEM system restore partition too

I always use AVG free and it seems to work quite well, but it is a little resource-heavy I think (takes a bit to load at startup).

Yeah, I dumped AVG for Panda recently precisely because AVG was slowing me down something rotten.

[|iR|Focalor]

BTW, Windows Media Player is also part of the problem on that slow loading issue.  It's a crappy slow program.  Use Winamp instead, it's far faster and a better music playing program, with a full equalizer and all sorts of cool shit to go with it (like higher speed).

I've used it in the past. I like all the custom skins and shit, but it proved to be very tedious for organizing everything. Right now, I just have everything piled in my music library folder with a folder for every album. I have the folders labeled like:

Alice In Chains - 1990 - Facelift
Hank Williams III - 2010 - Rebel Within
Mountain - 1970 - Climbing!
ZZ Top - 1996 - Rhythmeen

Artist, year of release, album name. View in the music folder set to list. Makes everything easy to find. I just find the folder, right click it, scroll down to "Play with Windows Media", and it plays. With Winamp, I was having to sit there and go through all the downloaded files and change metadata in order to get all the songs in albums list in proper order, etc. It was too much of a pain in the ass, so I just junked it. Windows Media has built in EQ too, by the way, so no advantage there.

[VaeVictis]

if it is a mostly after startup kind of issue, you can definitely take a look at WHAT is starting when windows kicks up

some times you would be quite surprised at how much junk actually starts

some trial and error and google-fu can help you narrow it down to only what you need/want...

you can do this manually, but i would suggest ccleaner since you can delete/disable/re-enable startup services a lot easier that way than doing it through the windows tools, and ccleaner is just great to have on every computer anyway...

if you do use a more resource heavy AV like AVG then you should shop around, i like avast due to it's great reputation at catching viruses and EXTREMELY low memory footprint (especially if you are switching from avg haha). However there is other options

there are tools out there that handle defragging your drive as well... BUT I DO NOT SUGGEST THEM AT ALL, they can create major problems in the file system and conflict heavily with the built in windows defrag


all else fails... you can always do a "free pc upgrade" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overclocking

[|iR|Focalor]

Well thats kinda why I don't feel it "should" be necessary to PAY for a program to do all this stuff like the AVG PC Tune-up thing. Defragging and deleting junk files and broken shortcuts are all things I can do separately without having some fancy program. It's just that it's nice to have an all-in-one kinda deal so it'll be more convenient.

At some point down the road when I get bored enough I might try Avast to see if there's any difference in performance. I doubt I'll notice any difference though. I don't play many games anymore, and the ones I do play are a little older.

Overclocking is out of the question. A while back I overclocked one of my USB ports to increase the mouse polling rate. I didn't notice much of a difference so I tried to undo it. I forget what I used to do it, but in addition to increasing the polling rate on that port, it also left this watermark on the corner of the desktop indicating some kinda Windows developer mode being on or something and I wasn't able to make it go away, another reason for wanting to undo the changes. But I didn't make a backup copy of the file it modified, so once I undid it, that port wouldn't recognize the mouse anymore and I had to plug it through a neighboring USB port.

Anyway, none of that specifically relates to overclocking the CPU, but I'd rather not attempt something like that unless it was absolutely necessary, and it's not. Don't fix what ain't broke until it is.

[Whirlingdervish]

I use ccleaner around the office for a couple of purposes.

The registry errors removal feature works, but doesn't make a huge performance change in most systems. In case of something not working after you run it, always make the registry backup when it asks you, and you can just re-apply those values by double clicking the .reg file it makes if anything is screwy. (other option is system restore point, but meh)

The file cleanup deal works well to get rid of the gigs of temporary internet files that invariably end up on your system no matter how many "delete temp files" settings you check in most browsers. It also takes out a huge HD hog on most windows systems if you check the "hotfix uninstallers" box when it's doing the file cleanup. This will wipe out the shit tons of useless files that windows update leaves hidden on your computer to roll back any update that it installs. This can add up to many gigs of hidden crap.

as Vae said the startup list is also easily configured in ccleaner. You can just disable entries if you don't know what they are and why they're running at start time, and in most cases, it was stuff that would start up its service when you wanted to use it anyway. If you use mostly the disable feature instead of the delete one, you can't really go wrong.

I also use this startup list tab to check for stupid malware. A lot of the time when you get some malware you can easily spot the odd entry in the startup list that is executing from a user folder or temporary internet files folder. It helps a lot to manually track down the bad files if your AV has not picked up the malware yet. (in case of 0 day shit)

[|iR|Focalor]

That's my biggest complaint about each successive Windows OS. With every new version, they add more and more shit to the list of programs that run in the background on startup. When I went from Win98 to WinXP, I was highly annoyed by the increased number of "things" running in the background, especially at the time when I was having problems with stubborn rootkits that wouldn't die on that WinXP machine. I go from having like 6 or 7 things running on Win98 to maybe 15 or 16 things running in WinXP. I could see some weirdly named thing (a virus) running in the Task Manager list and I could shut it down before trying to scan for it and delete it, but there were so many other things there, I wasn't sure if any of the rest of them were legit services or something else nasty masquerading as a legit service. Now I have about 25 fuckin' things running in Win7. Luckily I haven't had to deal with viruses that much. I might've had something at one point which was causing my hard disk to make odd clicking noises that sounded similar to a hard disk on the verge of failing, but that was 9 to 12 months or more ago. If the hard disk was failing, it would've died by now. No more noises anymore after running several virus scans and doing some cleanup.