Annalivia Ford

For those of you with Windows machines that stagger along like ancient drunks, taking 5 mins to open a browser and having seizures and so on despite having been scanned 6 ways from Sunday for malware and come up blank...try this.


CCleaner, a free utility that fixed my laptop and Christine's right up. Run the registry analysis/clean up repeatedly until it finds nothing. It may take several. Then go to "cleaner", check off the first item under "advanced" which is "old pre-fetch data", UNCHECK anything else you don't want removed, and run that the same way. Under "tools" go to the startup tab and uncheck everything you don't really need running when Windows boots. Use the Cleaner once a day to keep that pre-fetch data and registry under control. I just set mine to run when Windows starts. It slows the boot time, yeah, but it is one less thing I have to remember to do. I've tried a lot of different programs over time to tidy up the trash Windows makes of itself, and this is the best one I've seen in years.

Defraggler is another nifty item from the same company. It's faster and infinitely better than the on-board Windows de-fragmentation utility. I used the Windows version, and it found 19% fragmentation so I ran it, and it took all night to do it. My laptop worked no better the next day. I used the Defraggler analysis tool and it found nothing had really been fixed. I ran it in two hours, and then rebooted. It was a whole new machine.

Good stuff.