OT Virus Protection

[ransley]

For full protection you need to wear one your head

[evodawg]

Geeeez all these time consuming anti everything programs what a waste of time and productivity. Not to mention $$$$$

[SteveB]

Freeware Comodo.

[Peter]

Han, I am a terrible student of foreign languages and as a teacher of English as a second language to immigrants, I appreciate the frustration when you think you are understanding something correctly. I suspect that the issue here is not the ability to reason, just accurate translation. I'll use different words: with avnotify.exe disabled, you still are notified by AntiVir if it detects suspicious code. The alert screen pops up. The choices to fix, ignore, quarantine, delete etc. still work. However, you lose the convenience of easily finding out details about that code at Avira's web site by clicking on the link that also appears in that pop-up screen. Peter

[Han]

Peter wrote in news:gtkdp3$1h9d$ [e-mail]:

Sorry Peter, I was reading too fast, and not letting my brain catch up. Ask my boss and coworkers how often I do that (don't ask my wife).

That was an attempt at humor. I will consider re-doing what it says at

[Oren]

Correct. See this short Naked Gun Love Scene.

[Rudy]

Thats good..don't mention $$$$ 'cause these programs are free. As far as the waste of time/productivity, since I U/G this 5 y.o Dell to 1 Gig of memory, I can run l those programs in the background while I do the regular stuff. Previously, when I had only a single 256 of memory, you'd have been right..there wasn't sufficient capacity.

[evodawg]

Hmmmm, wasnt aware Norton was free. It should be!

[Anonymous]

I used the AVG free version, was happy, then bought the AVG commercial version.

re apparent speed;

My DELL computer came with WINDOWS XP. Each download upgrade from Microsoft causes my system to run slower and slower.

I use the Windows Task Manager to display activity. ( ) My system regularly runs at 80+% useage.

???

( yeah... I've cleaned the registry, scanned for widgets, etc )

[gfretwell]

Give it a 3 finger salute and see what is running. You can probably eliminate about 3/4 of what is there if you have collected all the tool bars, quick launch boxes and other crap installers default to loading. A quick way to kill most of this is MSCONFIG Once I know I really don't want it, I go kill it in the registry "run" box (a few possible locations).

[aemeijers]

Unless you have something running in background, sounds like you have been zombied. If you can't find it, time to spool off your data, nuke and reload. There is a lot of crap on this machine, and it rarely gets over 20%.

Did you ever have AOL on your machine? Even if you 'deinstall' it, it leaves a ton of crap behind, and slows even a fast PC to a crawl.

-- aem sends...

[gfretwell]

If you ever loaded 9 that is certainly true. I am still running 7 and it is not really that bad. I still went into the registry and blew away some of the AOL crap. You should be able to run without much more than WAOL.EXE when you are actually running AOL. If you ever loaded a full boat load of 9 you got McAfee and a bunch of other things that never really go away unless you go blow them away. That is worse than the viruses it is supposed to prevent

[HeyBub]

1. ALL registry cleaners are snake-oil. They will NEVER improve performance. They will, however, substantially risk incapacitating your machine.
2. Book up in Safe Mode with networking. Is your machine still sluggish? If so, then something else is being loaded at boot time that's the culprit.
3. Download "Process Explorer" from

and discover exactly what is taking up so much CPU time. It could be something as simple as XP's indexing service (turn it off) or as malovelent as a trojan sending out 100,000 penis enlargement emails.

[Oren]

You can visit the website below. The guides for each OS, show what services you can safely turn off.

Features: (left side of page)

Windows Service Configurations!

Includes explanations of each service and advice on which services you can safely disable.

For XP SP3

[Oren]

Open Task Manager > Go to View, Select Columns

Tic mark the Thread Count box

Click the process tab, then the tread column. IT will sort the processes. My AV is running more threads than the system is. And. It eats 54 MB of RAM.

[Oren]

A comment about MSCONFIG

"Do not use "msconfig" to disable services, type "services.msc" in the Run box instead!"

Why?

"Why can't I use msconfig to change my services? The reason is because with msconfig and Hardware Profiles, you can disable services that may be vital to boot your system. With the management console (services.msc) you cannot. Also, msconfig, while unchecking the box, is disabling the service.

The "Disable All" button also scares me. It should not even be there as no reason exists to justify disabling "everything."

Not "allowing" people to use msconfig reduces the flames and technical support questions in my inbox "

[gfretwell]

If your system is broke you can always "enable all".

I suppose you never let your people use regedit ;-)

[Oren]

It is regedt32.exe I worry about (G)

[Stormin Mormon]

I've got Free Window Registry Repair from

and very pleased with it. I can tell a difference in operating speed.

[HeyBub]

You are probably experiencing the "Placebo Effect." Microsoft provides a "registry cleaner" but analysis shows that the one provided by Microsoft doesn't really DO anything other than compact some space. It's use, however, has made millions of people feel better, so I guess that's a benefit...

Many people think that removing detritus from the registry will improve performance. It won't - the registry is not searched sequentially. Whether the registry is 100K or 50MB, is functionally irrelevant.

At least once a week some poor soul ventures in to the microsoft.xp newsgroup with a plaintive plea for assistance in recovering from a registry cleaner that mashed his registry into an unrecognizable and unusable lump.

Usually there's nothing for it but to give up computing and sell earth-shoes for a living.