His site is only safe if you understand the risks and don't do anything stupid... in the hands of a fool it'll end in tears.

Registry cleaners and their ilk are asking for trouble, I have never seen one do any noticeable good, I have seen plenty do noticeable damage though.

Defender gets disabled by Security Essentials anyway

Please prove to me a single positive effect (other than making you feel warm and gushy inside) of doing ANYTHING listed on that site.

Show me any of the following:

+1% or more in CPU performance gain.
+1% or more in application speed.
+1% or more in application efficiency.

Any one of the above will do.

Show me the before state, and the after state.

Only then will I concede.

In truth, this is a trick question, because I know that it can't be done. At least, not with any of the "fixes" on that site.

Sorry, but I can see numerous ways that that site can cause you to break your machine, and not a single way, other than a placebo effect, that it can have a positive effect on a machine. Further, a lot of the descriptions of services and what they are for and what they do, and what effect they have on a machine are just flat out wrong. Leading me to believe that the guy just does not really know what he's talking about.

And yet... His site continues to proliferate. Go figure.


-Skater

I use msconfig to turn off things I don't want starting up:

Adobe Reader quick start (I hardly ever open PDFs)
Alternative User Input Text Input Processor for Office (Or ctfmon for short. I don't need these things)
Quick Time quick starter (If I want to update Quicktime, I'll do it myself)
Real Player updater (Again, I will check Realplayer updates myself)
Google Updater Service (See above)
Creative startup programs (For the CD player and other registration reminders)
Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service (I don't share my Media files)
There are others, though I cannot remember them all. By the way, this does improve Windows boot time.

I build all my computers from scratch so there isn't a lot of extraneous stuff in the startup menu to begin with. Right now I only have 2 programs checked. My anti virus program and ATI tray tools. I don't need things like iTunes or Quicktime in that menu. I have a dual boot system and my computer boots up in less then a minute, and that's with choosing which operating system to boot and then entering a password.

I've been turning off unneeded programs that just run in the background for years and don't understand why it would be a bad thing to do that. Never had one problem yet. Unless you are running a deathstar computer, I can't see how it would not speed up the boot and your computers responsiveness in general.

I am always running a Deathstar, but that is besides the point.


-Skater

turning off services only frees up memory (a lil) and boot time... but turning off the wrong ones can cause BSOD and failure to boot.

I have to get one of those Deathstars.

Exactly! And most of us are already running 2GB or more... At the 2GB point, you do not need the memory freed up. There will always be more physical memory available than is used.

Also, the boot time saved is pretty negligible, and if those services need to be started after the fact for whatever reason, you can kiss that savings goodbye, and start heading into the negative.

If you have a half-way decent machine built in the last 2-3 years, with at least 2GB of memory, then none of these "fixes" will have any positive effects on your machine, but the negative affects could potentially be disastrous.

-Skater

Fascinating, as always. Sort of reminds me of the design testing of Old Days when you built what the Engineer said, then unsoldered/clipped away parts, slowly, until it didn't work!

As a purchaser of Factory Job computers, I never have quite the latitude of choice as You True Nerds, but I *have* uninstalled, unchecked, un-used... extensively, from the 'what I'm dealt with'. Truth of the matter, except for learning a few 'cause/effect' things, I have yet to see or 'feel' any change in the way the computer runs. Maybe next time I run my Recovery DVDs I'll just yawn and leave it ALMOST alone. [Do have to un-install the A/V and install my own].

T'anks....

B