Free Software

[phill_up]

I have been using these two programs on 32 bit XP & 64 bit Vista for 6 months now and they have been kicking ass

Advanced System Care "clicky"
Smart Defrag "clicky"

when you use the ASC, in the diagnose systems tab uncheck security defense & disk defragment.
You can optimize firefox and TCP in the utilities tab.
It works very good for me but if it jacks up your computer dont blame me, use at your own risk

[OnlineStageGear]

Oh sweet. That is rated just as good as my perfect disk which is about to expire.

[scott.court]

...... It works very good for me but if it jacks up your computer dont blame me, use at your own risk

:ROTF: covered your ass nicely there

I'll deff check it out

[Spivonious]

Well, the Smart Defrag program says it runs continuously in the background, which is a great way to shorten the lifespan of your hard disk(s).

ASC seems like a registry cleaner + disk cleanup + spybot...what makes this one better than the others? I'm also curious how it can optimize both XP and Vista, since Vista is drastically different under-the-hood from XP. MS completely rewrote the networking stack, the sound system, the graphics system, the security system, etc..

I'm not saying they don't do what they advertise; I'm just wondering why I need them, since Vista/Win7 includes all of these things except a registry cleaner, which CCleaner does a great job with.

[LouSiffer]

I have been playing with Windows 7 64. Of course, it really only allows my PC to run at a basic state since there are no drivers for my video cards, sound card, etc.

To me, and I may be wrong as I haven't read up on it a whole lot, seems like Windows Vista lite.

Sure its smoother, but, thats because it doesn't hog all the resources Vista liked. Kinda like they removed all the excess shit running in the background from Vista and just renamed it.

Does have some cool built in features though. -Lou

[Spivonious]

What video card/sound card do you have? I'm running the beta and had no problems finding drivers. Vista drivers should work on 7 since they didn't change the driver model.

7 is built on the Vista core, with some more polish in the interface. There aren't many new features under-the-hood, but they did do some major optimization work. The real improvements are the new taskbar, the libraries feature, IE8, and the new Aero features (Aero Peek, Aero Snap, and Aero Shake).

I think calling it Windows 7 is a mistake, as it is actually version 6.1, but I think MS wants to distance themselves from the bad reputation (which it really doesn't deserve) of Vista.

This website has a great writeup on Windows 7. http://www.winsupersite.com/Default.asp