Roland redirected

[James_A]

Glary I have never used.

Secunia's PSI is generally pretty good although I haven't used it myself for a little while.

Occasionally, just after an update to a product has been released, PSI will report that the new update is not installed even when it is. That's a problem with its definitions and is usually fixed in a day or two. For example, the last update for Adobe Reader (from 9.3 to 9.3.1) was reported as not installed because Adobe only changed two of the minor files and not the main files. PSI was checking the version of the main files, so missed the update to the two other files.

I will still recommend PSI, because a problem like that is usually quickly fixed and there is an active forum where users report issues.

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[0_0]

I have updated windows and yes it did take a really long time

You might look into AutoPatcher for updating a new install, in fact it is pretty good for updating after every patch Tuesday. I have been using

the tool for quite some time and it can get a fresh install to a fairly safe state before you head out into the wild blue internet.

I thought I saw XP x86 listed in your log, if you use x64 don't bother with AutoPatcher, there are no x64 scripts as of yet, if you are running XP

SP3 x86, you could assemble a nice collection of updates that you will have at your disposal - have a look, if interested, post a question in the

forums - you can find me there from time to time. :jump:

[greenknight]

Yeah, Secunia PSI is fine, I would recommend that.

I'm not at all sold on Glary Utilities, or any other do-everything software suite - they never seem to do everything well, even if they're pretty good at some things. Plus, there are a lot of notions out there about "optimizing" your PC that are really bad ideas. How would you know if one of these half-baked schemes had been incorporated into the software? The answer is, you wouldn't until it had damaged your system.

Looking over Glary's website I see that it includes a "memory optimizer", which is one of those bad ideas - it won't cripple your computer, but it will hurt rather than help performance.

Doing some searching, I found lots of people who said they used Glary without problems - and others who had problems with it, or complained it didn't do a good job. One tester verified that it's registry cleaner had made errors, which is a red flag to me - I wouldn't touch Glary Utilities. By the way, registry cleaning does almost nothing for performance, but can cripple your computer if it goes wrong.

[roland67]

Thanks again for all the great info guys. I try to give back by assisting family and friends with their pc problems. Much of what I do I learned here and other forums.

[greenknight]

Your welcome, but it wasn't all great info; I completely forgot about Tarun's earlier recommendation, which could have saved you some time reinstalling all those Windows updates:

I would recommend that you also look into two options. Burning SP3 to another disc, and to make use of this: http://www.wsusoffline.net/

Oh well it's done now.

Since I trashed Glary Utilities and its ilk, I should mention what I recommend instead. You should defragment regularly; I'd say at least once a week, but no more than once a day. A better defragmenter than the one in Windows is helpful, like Auslogics Disk Defrag (and it's free).

One thing in Glary that is good is a registry defragmenter - probably responsible for most of the performance gains its users see. You won't need to do it very soon, since you just reinstalled, but defragging the registry can really help performance on an older installation.

Auslogics makes a good one of those, too; they want money for the latest version, but the last free version is available here - it still works just fine. There are others around I haven't tried, as well.

Disabling unneeded startup processes is very useful, the best program for managing them is AutoRuns.

Process Explorer is also good to have. It's like the Task Manager on steroids. It will show you exactly what is using your computer's resources, resource usage history, etc. Useful for tracking down malware as well as finding resource hogs that are slowing down your machine.