Don't believe everything you read online. Spend a few minutes searching online and you'll find hundreds of PC speed-ups guides and tweking tools, each promising they have the magic ingredients to bring new life to your system. But can you really trust them? Not neccessarily - many of their tweaks are entirely useless. One common tip claims it forces Windows to automatically unload DLLs used by an application just as soon as it closes, for instance, freeing up RAM. This option appears in many tweking tools, and yet it's not worked since Windows 98. Another tip says you can improve network and internet speeds by allowing your network cards CPU to take over some of the data transfer work. Exellent! Except, well, Windows does this anyway, when appropriate. There's no need for this tweak at all. And a particularly dubious claim says it's good idea to clear out the contents of your Windwos\Prefetch folder occasionally. But this is where Windows stores the data it needs to improve boot times, and deleteing these files only slows you down. Be wary, then, Don't assume that just because a tip is online, or in a tweaking program, that it actually works. By all means try tweaks out, but test the results to make sure they deliver. And if you're changing a registry value, make a note ot its original value, so it's easy to restore later. Say all this, don't believe everything you see on the internet... there are so many "speed-up" tips that actually will harm your system and slow you down.
Yep! totally true.... I have extensive experience testing those tweak tools, the "best one" Ultimate Windows Tweak, but yet have some useless tweaks... and some that messup your system... Use it carefully and if your not 100% percent what a tweak does DO NOT ENABLE IT. and always backup your registry for later restore before enableing any tweak. if something fails or goes wrong, you can restore it.
The only speed up I used is just defrag my OS partition ! and some irritating/ unwanted startup programs.
While many of the tweaks in the Ultimate Windows Tweaker are useless, but to be fair, many of them are useful... I for example....always disable balloon tips, auto play, disable encryption in NTFS, disable Last Accessed time in NTFS, lower the time needed to end non responding applications during shut down....and many others, actually improved my boot time...... So yeah you're right,,,,,some programs do harm your system like the case which happened with me lsat night made me format my system coz I used a new tweaking program called Tweak Me! 1.1.0.6, it messed up my active X installed programs in Internet Explorer....the games I play on MSN Games completeley stopped working and I couldn't even reload them as the OS thinks that the ActiveX components were there, but they werene't My start menu programs list became empty and wouldn't update no matter what..... Sysstem got too mesed up just coz I decided to use some of its cleaning tools :S:S Thank god there is Acronis True Image, I was back to a solid state OS within 7 minutes
Thats the reason Created Speed-Up Myths "After reading what happens to you" to warn users about Tweaking Tools...
The best tweaks are those made manually disable unnecessary services, indexing server. the registry tweaks as unload dll, Close Program, dns cache are not placebos. many programs offer the all in one tweak, that are often a compilation of legends computer, but do not start saying that every tweak is dangerous and inefficient.
I agree with yaluza 100% on that. Personally I would either disable services/startup items that I know about and don't need or use some programs that do it for you. I know System Mechanic Pro 10 and Uniblue Powersuite 2010 are good optimization tools but I would not trust everything on the net either. Some are good but others can cause more issues then they fix. That is just my say on it. Disk defrag tools are the same way. Some are good but others are not. I have found that both Diskeeper and PerfectDisk are good defraggers but PerfectDisk is better. You got to be careful though because some defraggers can cause issues too. I know that OO Defrag is a good one too but some like PCTOOLS, the windows build in one, and IOLO Disk Defrag actually creates more fragments and does not consolidate the files. Perfect Disk is the best one for that aspect honestly. I know this is a lot of info so I hope this helps out lol.