How do these compare with CClearner? That's what I've been using? I saw a video for each and it looks like I'd rather download Glary Utilities as opposed to Advanced System Care.

CCleaner is the standard.

quick speedup tips:
use google chrome - i've been using it since it came out
use ccleaner regularly(i use it like once a week)
auslogics disk defrag(free version, will take a long time the first time, after that run it whenever you install something thats huge like a new game or something)
revo uninstaller free(for crapware, stuff you don't need or use)
AVG 2014 free - covers the most basic stuff- which would be about 90% of users


I avoid c-net like the plague. often they use a proprietary installer that you don't really need. you can get just about everything from that site directly from the source company/product.


I do this for a living and hate seeing people get screwed out of their hard earned dollars by companies like geek squad for simple fixes.

well I should say used too, I design and build websites now.

edit:
links
auslogics disk defrag

revo uninstaller

avg 2014 free

Thanks xs0u1x. I run CClearner, if not daily, a few times a week.

I use Chrome on my work computer but still have FireFox on my personal. I like Chrome but I don't like how all of the ads are of old searches I've performed via Google.

What's the difference between Auslogics Disk Defrag and Windows Defrag? (I use Windows)

And I've got Microsoft Security Essentials, Spybot and MalwareBytes on my computer.

I have CCleaner, but only to erase Index.dat files. It's okay, but you have to select what you want cleaned. If you don' tknow what you are doing you can erase things you shouldn't. Glary and ASC do most of the preselection for you and are more thorough. Also, they offer overwrite.

Many products are memory hogs; AVG is one. Also, some won't work if you use other anti-virus applications or they create conflicts. Again, AVG is such.

So you'd say go with Clary over CCleaner?

I'm sold on Glary, so yes. But why not use both?

auslogics uses several passes, IE. going through it more than 2-3 times. In general i've just had better results from it. MSE is good for basic stuff, pretty much the same with AVG. It will cover most home users. Running spyware and Malwarebytes IMO is really redundant and doesn't particularly do anything besides slow your system down. Since its a really common tool used by alot of people, alot of malware is written to bypass it anyways. I've come across so many customers pc's in my time that have sworn by those tools yet their pc's were so infested I would have to wipe them and start over anyways. Most of your tools that are actually worth a damn, the average user wouldn't understand how to use them.

To be honest, 90% of security on the pc is the person sitting in between the keyboard and the chair(the user).
Exercising common sense while browsing just really saves people headaches. There are other little things you can do that are more effective than running 3-4 different programs at once.


On the common sense side of things:
it's a given, but don't click on random links you don't know(I know that's hard when you have little ones around, i'll get to that later) porn sites, and warez sites,and torrents are notorious for injecting malicious apps onto your machine when you really don't know what you are looking for. I've seen people who get popups and only want it to go away, so they click on anything just to get it to go away, always a huge mistake with popups. phishing emails are a big thing too, that is, forged emails that look like they came from someone you know or is in your contacts.




small things you can do that save a whole lot of hassle and headache:
by default everybody is running an administrator account on their windows machine. when you think about it, how often are you actually installing things and uninstalling things on your computer? if like most people its not very often, and the most you do on the computer is check emails, browse the web, do family photos and maybe a spreadsheet every couple months, then the easiest thing you can do is create a guest account with limited access and use that as your primary account, and only log on as the administrator account when you actually do need to install something. if you do get infected this way, its a simple fix 99% of the time, and that's to just delete the limited profile and move on.

browsers: IE is probably the worst you can use. It doesn't matter if it works fast, looks nice, etc..most of the business world is on internet explorer so again, alot of things target internet explorer specifically. Chrome is highly customize-able. there are addons for it like adblock and ghostery that will take care of ads for you. I like firefox, but i just like chrome better lol.

Thanks for the tips xs0u1x! I'll give auslogics a try. I think you may have convinced me to uninstall Spybot. It has an .exe called TeaTimer that eats up a lot of my systems resources. GREAT idea about the guest account too. So simple yet I had never thought about that. I do get popups every once in a while but I didn't listen to some of your common sense tips

What are your thoughts on Macs? I've been debating recently about switching but a little hesitant for a few reasons (not familiar with the operating system/learning a whole new system again and the cost). iMacs are crazy expensive but a coworker of mine suggested I look into getting a mac mini which is cheaper but still a little pricey since you still have to supple the keyboard, mouse and monitor (which I have). Plus, my PC is only about a year and a half old, custom built by a friend of mine. It runs fairly well, I'm happy with it but HATE when I still get Java exploit viruses and I've already uninstalled and no longer use Java.

No problem glad I could help.

my thoughts on macs? Over priced and misleading, nicely designed though. If you have the spare cash, just don't care anymore and don't want to learn anything, go for a mac. forewarning though, as the saying goes you can't fix stupid. A person who is dumb on a windows machine is still going to be dumb on a mac(security/functionality wise, I know that sounds harsh but its the truth lol)

misleading in the sense whenever you hear "mac" and "no viruses for mac" I think.....well...that's because less than 5%(i believe thats the latest figure) of the pc market of the entire world, consists of mac's. If you look at smartphones, a large amount of people have iphones and there are exploits out the ying yang for it in the wild.

Then again, i'm a budget minded person and cost is just too much to justify for what you actually get. really, its more of a status symbol IMO. Thats not trashing all apple products, just their desktops/pc's. My son is autistic and has an IPAD for part of his therapy. I do alot of part swapping and upgrading on my own computer too, because I play alot of games on it, and you just can't do that on macs without it costing an arm and a leg(if you want to upgrade anything beyond memory or the hard drive)

as far as if you do want to make the switch to something else, I put my 65 year old mother-in-law on linux mint(every distribution of linux is free, including linux mint) and she loved it. She was ready to throw out a couple g's for a mac and I had her try it out for a couple days on her old pc and she changed her mind lol.

I appreciate the feedback about Mac's and that was one of my reasons for switching, no viruses! Although, I had heard from a friend that you can't update Mac's like you can Windows. I don't play games but if somewhere down the line, I can add more memory or the hard drive I can? I was told I would need to buy a new unit completely because you couldn't add to Mac's.

As for Linux, I was going to use it. A friend of mine was going to hook me up with Ubunto but he couldn't get it to work. Also, not a lot of programs work with Linux unfortunately I've also heard it's more for people who know coding and stuff like that.

The wife uses Mac's (and guess who paid for them ). I've messed around a little with them but i really don't see why they're so much more expensive. She's a graphics designer but i bet i could do pretty much any of the stuff she does on her Mac on my pc.

Just as xs0u1x said the percentage of people that use Mac's is so small compared to Windows so naturally the hackers target pc's with more viruses. But i've read the amount of viruses on Mac's keeps going up each year.

Just what i read though....i really don't have enough personal time on her Mac's to be any kind of authority on them. I'm happy with my PC's....you get alot more for alot less IMHO.

It used to be true that macs were better for graphics design...about 10 years ago. With hardware today, they are about even.


To reply to irishman about upgrades/updates: apple does update their security and minor stuff that they don't charge for, but they do charge for major OS upgrade versions. I think its somewhere around $30 roughly for that. the big thing they get you with is hardware. mac memory kits are pretty expensive if you want to upgrade. as well as pretty much anything else and if your mac is out of warranty forget about it.

First, thanks for your help on boosting a "slow" computer. I cleaned the disc (Disc scan), deleted cookies/files, emptied a very full trash and it runs better. For now. I'm leaving it there.

HOWEVER, here's another tech question. Long story short. I have some family movies on VHS I want to put a DVD. I am looking for a DVD/VHS player in which I can record from VHS to DVD. From my research it seems an 'external digital tuner' is necessary and some don't come with it. Also, I see some models show it has "in line recording (?). I would prefer to buy everything in one package and not have to ad any equipment. So, I need to know what exactly do I need to ask for?

Thanks



TIS

Do you have a dvd burner on your computer? its easier/cheaper if you have that.


basically you would need
http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605...30125xMPALLx028

one of those, a vhs to hook into that, which would then hook into your computer. and then using the right software you would just record and then burn to dvd.

if you don't thats when it can kind of get expensive.


http://www.bestbuy.com/site/toshiba-mult...=8#tab=overview


would be your best bet.


If you don't have many tapes to do most pharmacies photo centers offer this service anywhere from $9 per tape to $19 per tape.

SsOu1X,

You know I need a new DVD player anyway and a while back I was browsing around trying to find one and wrote down model #s of a couple and guess what? The one you posted is exactly a model I made a note of AND from Best Buy. Now, with that model does it have an external digital tuner? Or is that something I'd need to buy? I'm not even familiar with what this is but in researching some models said they came without.

Thanks though. I am glad someone confirmed that that one was ok to get.

TIS

that particular model has 2-way dubbing built into it so all you would need to do is pop the vhs in, put a blank dvd in and then you're ready to rock.

xs0u1x, I tried out auslogics yesterday. It defraged my C drive but it was taking hours (like 5/6 to defreg my external hard drive and it STILL didn't finish). It took too long and I went to bed as opposed to leaving it on all night. Why was it taking so long to degrag that?

I'm ready for a bigger screen!

Rumor: Apple exploring pressure-sensitive iPhones with curved glass displays up to 5.5"

it always takes a really long time on the first run. yours must have been exceptionally fragmented if it was taking that long. i've had people come in that were so bad it would take 12+ on the first run. after you've done it and cleaned your system out thoroughly itll run almost instantly, by that I mean ~10min run time depending on the specs of your computer.

Thanks xsOu1X, That's just what I wanted to hear. If it's easy to do it's for me. Tho I can't buy it right now, I plan to very soon. I have the model #/description written down. Thanks for you help.

TIS

Btw, about a year ago I bought a new tv. I had planned to buy one with a DVD player included in the tv. Went to several places and was told they aren't making them anymore. Not sure why. Did they not go over big maybe?

Do you think I should give it another crack or no? It's an external hard drive so I'm not sure how much of a difference it'll make? I've tried it before in the past using Windows defrag but I'd always get an error message or something (it would never completely defrag it)

doesn't really matter since its an external. up to you.


TIS: the players they put in the tvs were usually cheap and would break, once they break people realized they had to send their whole tv in to get fixed not just the player lol

Ok, so I uninstalled Spybot but I still have some programs eating up some of my resources. Do you know either of them and if I need them running or not?

dwm.exe - eating up about 15K in resources (described as desktop windows manager)
explorer.exe - eating up about 18K in resources (described as Windows Explorer)

Also, why is my CPU usage so high (usually over 40%) but when I open the Windows Task Manager - just opening it, not turning anything off, it immediately drops back down below 20%?

Explorer.exe is your entire windows interface, your start button, etc...nothin you can do about that one. If you end it, your entire desktop goes blank. 18k is rather low so I wouldn't be concerned about it. On my home computer when windows is loaded, all my programs i regularly use, I'm roughly in the 4gb range of ram usage just sitting idle. then again I have 32gb of ram in my system so it doesn't make a difference to me when I have everything cranked up like that.

dwm.exe is desktop window manager, that means, all the glass effects, window animations when you open/close etc...that will go up and down depending on how much stuff you have open at once. nothing can be done about that one either. well I shouldnt say nothing, 15k (translates to roughly 15mb of ram use)is pretty low for it to use on a given system, but if its eating huge amounts of resources (like 60k plus) you can turn off windows effects like glass or whatever(I don't know what version of windows you are using).


task manager will always spike like that on your cpu usage just because its reading itself opening. so to be clearer, the act of opening up task manager uses processor resources, and thats what you are seeing in that spike, when it goes down that means the computer is done opening task manager. if you open up task manager and then open another program you'll see it spike again and go back down the same way.

xs0u1x, after I analyze my C: before defraging it, under the System Health tab it says I have 122 Registry Errors and 70 Junk Files. When I click on the link "learn more" it takes me to a website to download Boostspeed. What is it and do I really need it? Also, it that the only way to clean up these registry errors and junk files? Thanks!

Whatever app that is, there are those that will fix errors automatically - they're pretty comprehensive PC clean apps. There's a slew of free ones such as Glary Utilities and CCleaner,

I do have CCleaner already. It usually only picks up a couple of Registry Errors at a time (but I've never really messed with any of the settings because honestly I don't know what I'm doing).

Just try downloading Glary Utilites or Advanced System Care from CNET and try them.

Careful with anything to do with your systems registry. You might want to make a backup of it just in case.

Have any Board members had experience with MSOffice 2013?