Does it really pay to buy a utility program like norton system works or somthing? Or would it be better to just buy individual programs like registry mechanic and diskkeeper to keep my computer optimized? If it pays to buy a bundle pack like the system works, i know there is many different kinds, what one do you recommend, which have u have the best performance with.
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Utility programs?
- Thread starter Paraclete
- Start date
I'm just gonna be honest here, so forgive me if it comes off as condescending to the casual Windows user or typical consumer, but the truth hurts...
Norton Utilities stopped being good at version 8, which was way back in the Win95 days, believe it or not. Once Symantec picked them up, they've never been the same since.
I've been working in or around computers for over 30 years, and I gotta admit this:
I was walking through a Worst Buy store the other day with my Wife, doing last minute gift purchases, and I decided to walk up and down the software aisles. One entire aisle, about 50 feet in length, was nothing but software like "Registry Mechanic" "Spy Sweeper" etc etc...
And I cringed at it, every single fuckin' product on the shelves because I, having the experience I do and the knowledge I do that comes from 3 decades of working with computers and 200,000 installs and innumerable amounts of fixes, repairs, optimizations, tweaks, reinstalls, etc etc - I know all that stuff is basically garbage software that more often than not will do more harm to your computer than the stuff it's designed to protect it from.
If you must do such things, then yes, individual applications would be my suggestion. Diskeeper, in my own extensive defrag testing, is a slow product compared to PerfectDisk from Raxco. O&O is a nice defragger as well, but in my testing it pales next to PerfectDisk also.
While Diskeeper consistently requires several passes to defrag a specially "fragmented" partition I have imaged just for defrag testing purposes (4,000 files, fragmented into 140,000+ fragments), PerfectDisk does it all back to 0% fragmentation with one single pass - and it's 22 minutes faster than Diskeeper is. But those are my results, and they've held up over the past two years so far. PerfectDisk is faster, defrags better, and takes less resources to do it.
Norton SystemWorks and Norton Antivirus - avoid them like the plague (how ironic). While there are many people around here and across the world that will say "It works for me, I don't have issues with it," those are the same people that buy the $9.95 greeting card software at the register when they're leaving CompUSSR or Worst Buy or wherever. They are also the same people that most like have had an XP machine for a few years now, pre-built OEM machine like a Dell or a Gateway or HP, and they're still running the default installation from the factory "because it just works."
Their PCs are so slow now, and it slowed down over such a gradual period of time they simply don't notice how bad their machines are actually operating and they consider it "normal" so... there isn't much that can be done for those people until something seriously goes wrong.
CrapCleaner is a fantastic free product for Registry cleaning, and again, in my own testing on an image I created for such purposes (I do a lot of software testing because that's what I do for a living) Registry Mechanic - a commercial product - and CrapCleaner ended up doing exactly the same things to the Registry when executed on that installed image. So why pay for something when you can get it for free? That's up to you to decide...
AV software is a given these days. No matter how much I might say "You don't need AV software running, you can hit HouseCall[/i] two or three times a week and do free online scans and be just as safe" people will believe the media, the press, the doomsayers and everyone in between that don't know half as much as I know about computers and they'll scurry out and get Norton AV, McAfee AV, SpySweeper, Spybot, Ad-aware, etc etc...
Then they get home, install 500MB to 1GB worth of useless absolutely ridiculous software on their computers and suddenly they feel "safe" because everything they bought said it would protect them from "harm."
Well, I look at it this way:
Cops aren't supposed to "protect me;" they're law enforcement officers, and nothing more. It's my job to protect myself, and to contact them for assistance once something happens if necessary.
Same principle with computers: It's my job to protect myself, and I do that by learning what I can and can't do, what websites I can and can't go to, what stuff I should be looking out for, etc. Computers aren't that hard to learn, people are just ignorant and lazy all too often and rely on such crappy software as I've mentioned to "protect them."
And that's why there's 50 feet of aisle space devoted to software to "protect people" - it's practically a pure profit aisle no matter how you look at it... geez.
I made a joke back in 1999 just before the millennium turned that I could have made thousands if not millions of dollars really easy, and here's how:
I could have made two floppy disks, and printed up really cool looking labels for each of them. One would say "Y2K Millennium Bug Confirmation Disk" and the other would say "Y2K Millennium Bug Repair Disk."
On the Confirmation Disk I could have put some PowerPoint presentation with a lot of fancy graphics, charts, scrolling data, etc... sorta like the crap computer displays you see in most movies nowadays. After the presentation would run, it would alert the user that "YOU HAVE THE Y2K MILLENNIUM BUG."
Obviously. And then charge them $29.95 for the test/confirmation.
Then I'd put in the Repair Disk which would have a similar PowerPoint presentation, similar graphics, a lot of stuff showing the same data and then "RESOLVED" in a big popup box. Do that for a few minutes, watch the customer's face as they believe everything they see going on, and then "MILLENNIUM BUG HAS BEEN REPAIRED. PLEASE REBOOT YOUR PC FOR THE CHANGES TO TAKE EFFECT."
Obviously. And then charge them $49.95 for the repair.
It would have been so easy to do that, and I had two floppies sitting around for a long long time considering it. But I don't cheat people like that, and money isn't my driving motivation for helping people. But man that money would have flowed like I was pushing drugs...
It would have been the equivalent of "Y2K CRACK" in terms of how much money I could have made in a short period of time, seriously.
I don't mean to offend anyone with this stuff, and if I do, that's actually great if it forces you to rethink why you believe you need protection in the first place. If you've got more than 3 icons in your System Tray after you boot your computer, then that's probably a sign of something.
Those icons are programs and they each require not only time to load (slowing down your boot process), they also require memory and CPU time (memory is the bigger issue; CPU time isn't as bad since most of those Tray programs aren't doing much most of the time).
Case in point: I just got a new Gateway Core 2 Duo laptop back in November. First boot to the Desktop with the factory install had 9 icons in the Tray, 55 processes and 339MB of RAM in usage (of 2GB). The second reboot took almost 1.5 minutes. That's just ridiculous, and I blame Gateway and every other OEM for loading up computers they sell with nearly useless software - aka "bloatware" - just because they believe that most people might find one part of it useful.
After I wiped it clean and reinstalled XP Pro on it, at the Desktop I have 17 processes, 95MB or RAM in usage, and 1 icon in the Tray which is my NIC icon for network activity. After installing the sound drivers I then had the Volume icon also. The third boot (had to reboot once to get the sound drivers working) took 35 seconds, had the same 17 processes, and 98MB of RAM in usage - 3MB more probably because of the sound drivers.
After hitting it with Bootvis one time it booted in 14 seconds flat, 93MB of RAM usage, the same two icons in the Tray.
Yeah, I spend too much time tweaking computers...
My suggestion: Do what you think is best for yourself. You can ask anyone here for suggestions, and most likely you'll get a simple one or two line response from a great many people "Yeah, use this" or "I use that" etc... obviously I don't like to help people with one or two lines.
I'd avoid any "package" or "suite" of utilities and go the individual application route myself - if I used that stuff, of course.
Hope this helps, and feel free to ask more questions... I'll tone it down, promise...
Norton Utilities stopped being good at version 8, which was way back in the Win95 days, believe it or not. Once Symantec picked them up, they've never been the same since.
I've been working in or around computers for over 30 years, and I gotta admit this:
I was walking through a Worst Buy store the other day with my Wife, doing last minute gift purchases, and I decided to walk up and down the software aisles. One entire aisle, about 50 feet in length, was nothing but software like "Registry Mechanic" "Spy Sweeper" etc etc...
And I cringed at it, every single fuckin' product on the shelves because I, having the experience I do and the knowledge I do that comes from 3 decades of working with computers and 200,000 installs and innumerable amounts of fixes, repairs, optimizations, tweaks, reinstalls, etc etc - I know all that stuff is basically garbage software that more often than not will do more harm to your computer than the stuff it's designed to protect it from.
If you must do such things, then yes, individual applications would be my suggestion. Diskeeper, in my own extensive defrag testing, is a slow product compared to PerfectDisk from Raxco. O&O is a nice defragger as well, but in my testing it pales next to PerfectDisk also.
While Diskeeper consistently requires several passes to defrag a specially "fragmented" partition I have imaged just for defrag testing purposes (4,000 files, fragmented into 140,000+ fragments), PerfectDisk does it all back to 0% fragmentation with one single pass - and it's 22 minutes faster than Diskeeper is. But those are my results, and they've held up over the past two years so far. PerfectDisk is faster, defrags better, and takes less resources to do it.
Norton SystemWorks and Norton Antivirus - avoid them like the plague (how ironic). While there are many people around here and across the world that will say "It works for me, I don't have issues with it," those are the same people that buy the $9.95 greeting card software at the register when they're leaving CompUSSR or Worst Buy or wherever. They are also the same people that most like have had an XP machine for a few years now, pre-built OEM machine like a Dell or a Gateway or HP, and they're still running the default installation from the factory "because it just works."
Their PCs are so slow now, and it slowed down over such a gradual period of time they simply don't notice how bad their machines are actually operating and they consider it "normal" so... there isn't much that can be done for those people until something seriously goes wrong.
CrapCleaner is a fantastic free product for Registry cleaning, and again, in my own testing on an image I created for such purposes (I do a lot of software testing because that's what I do for a living) Registry Mechanic - a commercial product - and CrapCleaner ended up doing exactly the same things to the Registry when executed on that installed image. So why pay for something when you can get it for free? That's up to you to decide...
AV software is a given these days. No matter how much I might say "You don't need AV software running, you can hit HouseCall[/i] two or three times a week and do free online scans and be just as safe" people will believe the media, the press, the doomsayers and everyone in between that don't know half as much as I know about computers and they'll scurry out and get Norton AV, McAfee AV, SpySweeper, Spybot, Ad-aware, etc etc...
Then they get home, install 500MB to 1GB worth of useless absolutely ridiculous software on their computers and suddenly they feel "safe" because everything they bought said it would protect them from "harm."
Well, I look at it this way:
Cops aren't supposed to "protect me;" they're law enforcement officers, and nothing more. It's my job to protect myself, and to contact them for assistance once something happens if necessary.
Same principle with computers: It's my job to protect myself, and I do that by learning what I can and can't do, what websites I can and can't go to, what stuff I should be looking out for, etc. Computers aren't that hard to learn, people are just ignorant and lazy all too often and rely on such crappy software as I've mentioned to "protect them."
And that's why there's 50 feet of aisle space devoted to software to "protect people" - it's practically a pure profit aisle no matter how you look at it... geez.
I made a joke back in 1999 just before the millennium turned that I could have made thousands if not millions of dollars really easy, and here's how:
I could have made two floppy disks, and printed up really cool looking labels for each of them. One would say "Y2K Millennium Bug Confirmation Disk" and the other would say "Y2K Millennium Bug Repair Disk."
On the Confirmation Disk I could have put some PowerPoint presentation with a lot of fancy graphics, charts, scrolling data, etc... sorta like the crap computer displays you see in most movies nowadays. After the presentation would run, it would alert the user that "YOU HAVE THE Y2K MILLENNIUM BUG."
Obviously. And then charge them $29.95 for the test/confirmation.
Then I'd put in the Repair Disk which would have a similar PowerPoint presentation, similar graphics, a lot of stuff showing the same data and then "RESOLVED" in a big popup box. Do that for a few minutes, watch the customer's face as they believe everything they see going on, and then "MILLENNIUM BUG HAS BEEN REPAIRED. PLEASE REBOOT YOUR PC FOR THE CHANGES TO TAKE EFFECT."
Obviously. And then charge them $49.95 for the repair.
It would have been so easy to do that, and I had two floppies sitting around for a long long time considering it. But I don't cheat people like that, and money isn't my driving motivation for helping people. But man that money would have flowed like I was pushing drugs...
It would have been the equivalent of "Y2K CRACK" in terms of how much money I could have made in a short period of time, seriously.
I don't mean to offend anyone with this stuff, and if I do, that's actually great if it forces you to rethink why you believe you need protection in the first place. If you've got more than 3 icons in your System Tray after you boot your computer, then that's probably a sign of something.
Those icons are programs and they each require not only time to load (slowing down your boot process), they also require memory and CPU time (memory is the bigger issue; CPU time isn't as bad since most of those Tray programs aren't doing much most of the time).
Case in point: I just got a new Gateway Core 2 Duo laptop back in November. First boot to the Desktop with the factory install had 9 icons in the Tray, 55 processes and 339MB of RAM in usage (of 2GB). The second reboot took almost 1.5 minutes. That's just ridiculous, and I blame Gateway and every other OEM for loading up computers they sell with nearly useless software - aka "bloatware" - just because they believe that most people might find one part of it useful.
After I wiped it clean and reinstalled XP Pro on it, at the Desktop I have 17 processes, 95MB or RAM in usage, and 1 icon in the Tray which is my NIC icon for network activity. After installing the sound drivers I then had the Volume icon also. The third boot (had to reboot once to get the sound drivers working) took 35 seconds, had the same 17 processes, and 98MB of RAM in usage - 3MB more probably because of the sound drivers.
After hitting it with Bootvis one time it booted in 14 seconds flat, 93MB of RAM usage, the same two icons in the Tray.
Yeah, I spend too much time tweaking computers...
My suggestion: Do what you think is best for yourself. You can ask anyone here for suggestions, and most likely you'll get a simple one or two line response from a great many people "Yeah, use this" or "I use that" etc... obviously I don't like to help people with one or two lines.
I'd avoid any "package" or "suite" of utilities and go the individual application route myself - if I used that stuff, of course.
Hope this helps, and feel free to ask more questions... I'll tone it down, promise...
lol wow i cant believe you typed all that out, well theres some really good info in there thanks, im gona take all that under advisment, ive already removed most of the software i thought was good, i was using norton anti virus that came with the free google pack but no more, quite frankly i feel alot more comfortable with a good virus program running, but thats just me, if you could suggest somthing that would be good that be great. Right now i switched to Avira AntiVir. I just feel safer knowing that somthing is monitoring stuff that goes in and out for viruses, i have been known to pick up a few here and there and usually the anti virus programs catch them before theres a problem. As far as my memory usage at the moment, physical memory usage is showing 355mb, which is huge, how would you reccomend i tone that down? Where should i start?
digital_exhaust
[H]ard|DCer of the Month - May 2008
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2006
- Messages
- 6,903
That's alot of good advice, and I agree with an awful lot of it. As said, you need to do what is right for you. CCleaner is a great program, and you should definately give it a shot. As far a/v goes, you'll get a bunch of different opinions. As far as free solutions go, AntiVir is good, and so is AVG. However, I personally recommend you sped a few dollars and go with NOD32. It's light and works really, really well. Just my advice.
digital_exhaust said:
QFT so [H]ard it's not even funny... there simply is no better AV software out there overall for what NOD32 can and does do. It's worth the cost, every damned penny of it.
With that 355MB, what applications did you have running besides your browser, etc? That's what matters. If you want to really see what's going on, run Task Manager, then choose click the Processes tab. Click View at the top, then Select Columns. Check off Peak Memory Usage and Virtual Memory usage; that will add two more columns with the real scoop on what's using up the RAM and pagefile on the machine.
Again, if this is an OEM machine and it's never been wiped clean, obviously that's my first, foremost, and strongest recommendation if you care about the performance of your machine. Sure it's nice to have everything all installed and ready to go when you buy it and get it home, but you pay the price with reduced performance and a lot of crap that just slowwwwwwws iitttttt dooooowwwwwwnnnn...
the biggest thing on there is explorer.exe next biggest is nvsvc32.exe which i think is somthing to do with nvidia display or somthing. I built the comp myself and its been reformatted a couple times, in fact i gotta do it again when all these new parts finally get here and i put it together, i just wanna get my bearings straight on what im gona be doing after the next reformat.
I use Avast for AV software (free, I haven't had any virus slip through in the past 5 months, has on access scan), SpyBot Search and Destroy for spyware (free works great IMO) and CC Cleaner to clean up unwanted files (free and from what I can tell it works), I would suggest checking out CNET downloads, they have reviews on a lot of software and tell you what is free and what is not, the funny thing (has already been explained) is that the free software almost always has higher reviews than the crap you pay for. CNET also breaks the software down into categories so it is really easy to find what you need.
Sounds like a plan. That nvsvc32.exe is related to the Nvidia drivers, yep, and as for Explorer, if it gets to be too big of a pain you can just close it and restart it with Task Manager - New Task - type explorer and press Enter.
As for a reinstall with the new hardware, most definitely recommended, and to take it a step further, consider getting something like Acronis True Image or (dare I say it) Norton Ghost.
I'm not a fan of Ghost, I never was, and I don't hide that fact. I think True Image is a better product in many ways, and is easier for most people to use that are new to imaging software and with no previous experience doing such things. It looks like a Windows app, even when running off the restore media you create after installing it. Ghost has this funky GUI look to it that a lot of people just can't quite get the hang of at first but if they stick with it they end up using it as their imaging app of choice.
In my experience, that's true until I show them True Image, then they typically drop Ghost like the proverbial hot potato. I won't get into the Ghost vs True Image debate; that's a long drawn out battle that comes down to personal preference I'd say, as most software debates do. There rarely is a "best" in any situation (except for NOD32, of course) so it's just asking for trouble to go that far.
But, regardless of which you choose if you do choose some imaging software, it'll make your life much easier to spend time setting up the "new" machine entirely the way you want, with all your software, games, applications, utilities, etc installed the way you want, with the OS tweaked to your particular needs, and then image it for safe keeping either on another hard drive or preferably DVD media.
Good luck...
As for a reinstall with the new hardware, most definitely recommended, and to take it a step further, consider getting something like Acronis True Image or (dare I say it) Norton Ghost.
I'm not a fan of Ghost, I never was, and I don't hide that fact. I think True Image is a better product in many ways, and is easier for most people to use that are new to imaging software and with no previous experience doing such things. It looks like a Windows app, even when running off the restore media you create after installing it. Ghost has this funky GUI look to it that a lot of people just can't quite get the hang of at first but if they stick with it they end up using it as their imaging app of choice.
In my experience, that's true until I show them True Image, then they typically drop Ghost like the proverbial hot potato. I won't get into the Ghost vs True Image debate; that's a long drawn out battle that comes down to personal preference I'd say, as most software debates do. There rarely is a "best" in any situation (except for NOD32, of course) so it's just asking for trouble to go that far.
But, regardless of which you choose if you do choose some imaging software, it'll make your life much easier to spend time setting up the "new" machine entirely the way you want, with all your software, games, applications, utilities, etc installed the way you want, with the OS tweaked to your particular needs, and then image it for safe keeping either on another hard drive or preferably DVD media.
Good luck...
Well i havent yet purchased my new cd drive yet, right now i have two, a cdrw and a dvd player, i gotta get a new combo drive with all of that in one, been lookin at either a plextor or a lite on. Once i have that ill be able to start burnin dvd's. As far as the imaging software, i dont have any and i havent the money to go out and buy one, but i will definatly now that you mention it, so this next format ill have to start all over again and redo my settings, ive been memorizing what i have to do for days now so i dont forget anything tho lol i got to make up a list of software that i need to buy, and ill just do it one at a time according to whats nessecary. Thanks for all the wonderful info.
I prefer Plextor myself, but I don't care about the premium price either. It's a one time purchase that usually lasts several years, so I bought their PX-760A 18x burner a few months ago and it does burn at 18x max. Also burns nearly a gig onto some 700MB CDRs I have also, pretty cool stuff.
LiteOn makes great drives for low cost. www.cdfreaks.com has a forum that is the place on the Internet for CD/DVD optical drive information, reviews, etc. No place better...
Have fun, always...
LiteOn makes great drives for low cost. www.cdfreaks.com has a forum that is the place on the Internet for CD/DVD optical drive information, reviews, etc. No place better...
Have fun, always...