Best PC maintenance program

[maryusdemetry]

Originally Posted by MR CHILLED

Never have and never will. I think they are largely totally unecessary unless you are installing vast amounts of errr, rubbish.

I love it, I find that my computer works very well
is set to run every time I turn on the computer

[foxmulder881]

Originally Posted by maryusdemetry

I love it, I find that my computer works very well
is set to run every time I turn on the computer

What is set to run at startup?

[t8y]

auslogics disk defrag - its faster than most others.
ccleaner. easy solution for junk, temp files and internet cache clearing etc.
dont use the registry cleaner part of the program as thats kind of useless with modern OS. IMO their usefulness went out when XP came in. win9x/ME etc, it was useful to have a tidy registry though.

edit: AV, i use avast or MSSE. depends on the PC, and on what i happened to have handy on a USB drive at time of OS install

other than that, i use "Common Sense 2012 edition". probably the most effective one..

[limecore]

Best way to keep your pc fast is to follow these tips
1. Don't install crap you don't need
2. Always press custom install and remove all unnecessary options
3. Uninstall stuff you are done with.
4. If you use roaming profiles, save stuff on a hard disk rather than on the desktop or on the profile.

[maryusdemetry]

Originally Posted by foxmulder881

What is set to run at startup?

Option-Configuration

[gcflora]

I really should research this, but I am going to speculate. A lot of the "optimisation" programs out there seem to target the Windows registry... removing unused entries and such. Now this is where I am going to speculate. I would guess that the registry is a key/value store(database) where the key is looked up returning a value (it's a bit more complicated than that because duplicate "key" values in the tree are allowed, however not at the same rank, but I don't this it impacts on my conjecture that will follow). My conjecture is that the registry is essentially a modified hash table and therefore (ignoring collisions, which really shouldn't happen anyway) accessing a key value in the registry is a fixed time operation regardless of the number of entries/size of the registry.

Therefore, I am not sure how much performance can be gained, if any, by "cleaning the registry".

Feel free to correct me, because as I said I have done no actual research on the subject and am basing my conclusion on nothing but hunches

Edit: of course all the entries that launch applications or services obviously would decrease system performance. I use autoruns to turn all the non-essential stuff off

[mareke]

I stopped using PC maintenance programs years ago when I realised they made next to no difference or had a negative impact. If I was to run a registry cleaner on my computer that has been running the same Windows XP install for over 10 years it would find thousands of 'useless' entries. If they were deleted however I'd notice no difference to the way my computer ran and some programs might stop running because some registry entries were not useless after all. As far as defraggers go I used to run Diskeeper Pro which defragged my hard drives when the computer was idling. It meant that my hard disks were constantly thrashing away. When I got rid of it and used the Windows defragger every couple of months if anything the computer worked better. The only maintenance programs I run are privacy ones that clean stuff like temp files and browser history etc and Ashampoo Uninstaller that monitors installs of programs and thoroughly uninstalls them if I no longer want them. I remember once being in a Harvey Norman store and a guy was asking the salesman if a program really sped the computer up the way it claimed on the box. I had already tried the program so I said to the guy 'it's a piece of shit' and the salesmen replied 'well there you go' and the guy put it back on the shelf. The salesman lost a potential sale but I did the guy a favour.

[Creekin]

there are NO decent pc "maintenance" programs
never has been
ESP not ccleaner
it has nfi what it is doing and just randomly changes reg entries.. glwt

have a good quality av scanner installed like kasperky or if ur a cheapskate MSE..
and run a free scanner like super anti spyware if you think you have a problem..
the only way to properly maintain a pc is manually.

[foxmulder881]

I just finishing fixing a computer this week. It come to me in such a terrible state (hence, why it came to me in the first place) that I was almost tempted to send it back and tell the client that it was not worth my time. And what really dreaded me was the fact it was running Windows Vista. But I decided to see what I could do with it.

I now have it back in a healthy state and it's now more than usable. And the only tools I used for the job were Revo Uninstaller, CCleaner, Auslogics Disk Defrag, Avira AntiVirus and a copy of TinyCore Linux for removing some stubborn directories that could not be done within the Windows system. And they're all free tools!

I'm not saying you have to keep all of them installed all the time, but they're all capable little packages of restoring a slow broken PC back to a usable and healthy condition.

[maryusdemetry]

Originally Posted by foxmulder881

I now have it back in a healthy state and it's now more than usable. And the only tools I used for the job were Revo Uninstaller, CCleaner, Auslogics Disk Defrag, Avira AntiVirus and a copy of TinyCore Linux for removing some stubborn directories that could not be done within the Windows system. And they're all free tools!

I´m very happy for you, The world is open source,

A note about how CCleaner's registry cleaner works. CCleaner cleans the registry by using "tunnel down" approach. This means that CC initially examines the more root or higher up keys in the registry for obvious issues. Once those keys are "cleaned" or removed, a subsequent CC registry scan will now tunnel down and find other keys, related to the now removed registry keys, which should be removed. In other words, CC is pretty smart in that it doesn't and won't try to clean everything at once. CC basically throws up a "Stop" sign when it finds invalid higher up registry keys which need to be cleaned first. Once those keys are fixed, then a subsequent scan with CCwill tunnel down further in the registry to find related registry keys which now can be removed.

I always run CCleaner's "Cleaner" button scan in order to remove temporary files and other junk from the computer. Let's say you just installed a program. The installer most likely extracted its contents to temporary files and then these temporary files were executed in order to install the program. Once the new program installation is done and the computer has been rebooted if requested or recommended by the installer, then these temporary files are no longer needed and are just taking up space on your computer's hard drive. Thus, click the "Cleaner button" and get rid of the temporary files first, and then click on CCleaner's "Registry" button and scan the registry. The first thing you should notice will be registry entries which have the word or part of the word "temp" in the path. Those are registry entries which are pointing to those now non-existing temporary files. Obviously those entries are safe to remove since the program installer's temporary files no longer exist on your computer.

Have a close look at the registry entries which CCleaner wants to remove. Are some of those registry entries obviously referring to a program which you no longer have installed on your computer? If so then of course those entries are safe to remove. If you are not sure about the entry listed in CCleaner, simply right-click on the entry to view where it is located in the registry. You likely will find that it is indeed under a registry key with the uninstalled program's name or the program vendor's name. It should be relatively straightforward for you to determine that it is indeed safe to remove those entries.