Loko’s Domain You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

System Optimization

Browser Temporary Files: First thing is first, clearing out temporary files and other browsing data will irritate other users. Also, there is little reason to worry about temporary information unless it’s a real security issue. There is little benefit to clearing out temporary files more than once a month. It does not speed up your browsing experience or your computer, but you may actually benefit from a personal temporary retention policy. Keep the history unless it is absolutely necessary to clear.

Registry Cleaners and Optimizers: The system slowdown from your computer is not coming from a bulky registry. On Windows XP and above, you do not have a registry limit. There is no max size. Now true “registry optimizers”, such as TweakUI, truly do their job. Your system is not slowing down from the size of the hives or the amount of keys, but what they are actually telling your machine. Turning a value of 1 to a zero to disable the mouse cursor shadow will boost system performance. Do not bother using registry cleaners as they will do more harm than good.

For more proof that register cleaners do not work, perform a sweep (Note: Don’t.) after a clean Windows installation. What do you get? Now try it with another program, it doesn’t matter if it is shareware or freeware. You will get dramatically different results every time with each program. The only registry cleaner I can recommend is RevoUninstaller. It removes a program from your system completely, including all registry entries, folders, and files. Extremely helpful. Registry cleaners are proven to work as well as colon detoxification.

Fine Tuning Visual Settings: This is a quick tweak native in Windows to increase system performance by a great deal depending on your hardware. If you don’t care for the mouse to have a shadow that sucks up more resources than most people think, then follow these simple steps. First: Start Menu – Control Panel – open the “System” applet. Go to the Advanced tab and now we’re in the Visual Effects tab. Note: Make sure to save your current theme if you want to go back by – Control Panel – Display Properties – Themes tab – Save As…! The best custom selections I can recommend without losing a few features, such as the rectangular selection box, are:

• Uncheck any window animation effects, such as when minimizing and maximizing.
• Uncheck any Fade effects, examples would be how the ToolTips fade in and out.
• Uncheck shadows under menus and shadows under mouse pointer, but leave on “drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop”.
• Uncheck any sliding effects.
• Leave checked “translucent selection rectangle” and “show window contents while dragging”.

Feel free to play with the settings. Save your current theme. You cannot break your system from this tab.

Crucial Maintenance: Many know about Disk Defrag. Well, if you have Vista or soon Windows 7, you don’t have to worry about defragging all that much anymore unless the Task Scheduler service is disabled. By default, Defrag will do it’s job at the default scheduled time for Vista. With XP, you must defrag at least once every two months. If you’re a huge data rat with gigabytes of photos and videos, defrag at least once a month. System instability and data loss can occur in Windows from a heavily fragmented disk and excessive disk trashing! It’s in your Start Menu – Accessories – System Tools – Disk Defragmenter. Do not defrag under Linux.

Startup Queue: The number one biggest complaint I’ve heard always involves a slow booting computer. While it’s not the actual system booting, but the incredible amount of software that steps into the Thunderdome to fight to the death over precious system resources. It can be chaotic, definitely, but there are three ways to take control over what starts up and what is hurled out the window. Many know the MSCONFIG utility, but I do not recommend this because there may be dozens of entries that are not labeled properly. Some Spyware and legitimate software do not give hints to the process, which is why it can be overwhelming to guess which is which.

MSCONFIG: If you do decide to take the MSCONFIG route, I highly recommended checking every entry with the process library database. When you bring up the task manager by right clicking the taskbar and selecting Task Manager, or pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc, or even going through Ctrl+Alt+Del and selecting TM, you can type in the process names from the Process tab to check to see what they belong to as well. A rogue process needs to be brought back into the herd. This can be time consuming and a user may accidentally disable a necessary program.

Startup Delayer: One of my favorite freeware programs that has served me well for a long time. For those that need a lot starting up at once during boot need this software. It’s a lot friendlier than MSCONFIG and allows you to delay any software by what time you specify. Those with bulky anti-virus protection suites like Norton would benefit the most. Anti-virus software needs to start all required services, check for updates, and if configured, might begin to perform a system scan immediately. Startup Delayed can push back a program to startup a full minute before everything else. This will allow it to do what it needs without struggling for space in a crowded pond. Beautiful.

AutoRuns: The third suggestion is the most advanced. It may look like an advanced version of MSCONFIG, but it handles far more than startup programs. A closer look will reveal to seasoned users that AutoRuns can “show other locations, including Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services, and much more.” A very powerful program. Imagine if HijackThis and MSCONFIG produced a baby. Then the baby grew up to become Zeus.