After a lot of personal research, straightforward testing, and lessons learned, I came up with the following freeware solutions for keeping my system up and running.
FIREWALL
– COMODO Firewall Pro
ANTIVIRUS
– AOL Active Virus Shield (based on Kapersky)
– a-squared free
ANTISPYWARE
– SUPERAntiSpyware Free Edition
– Microsoft Windows Defender
– SpywareBlaster
– McAfee SiteAdvisor
REGISTRY CLEANER
– Advanced WindowsCare V2 Personal
– CCleaner
ANTISPAM
– SpamBayes
DEFRAGMENTER
– Speedfrag (a bit akward to use at first, but simply the best one available for free)
MEMORY OPTIMIZER
– Cacheman
All those software are free to everyone for personal use, they are also easy-to-use, non-intrusive (almost no pop-ups windows) and low-memory consuming.
My laptop is now booting up in 55s with 659 Mb of free RAM available (out of 1Gb total), and is decently fast.
I consider it good, but I would like to make it even better.. Any advise?
Tagged with: active virus shield • ccleaner • defragmenter • firewall • free antispyware • free memory optimizer • free ram • freeware solutions • laptop • mcafee siteadvisor • microsoft • microsoft windows defender • no pop ups • personal research • personal use • pro antivirus • registry cleaner • ups
Filed under: Registry Cleaners
For AV: Avast4home and AVGfree are very good (only one AV, though)
For ASW: Multiple ASW programs are recommended. I’d add Spybot S&D and Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE
Seems like you know all the right protection software. I have some of those myself as well. For advice-I would just make McAfee the anti-virus. Not AOL.
i’ve never heard of superantispyware, i recommend lavasoft ad-adaware. other than that, it sounds pretty safe to me!
The /himem /lomem switches are helpful. But that’s too geeky for alot of folks.
Best practice that I know of is a Backup Routine. On install before you go online, backup everything, registry, program sys files. Keep these backups near or in the case with the PC/Laptop. After any install or altering/editing or removal of a program, make another backup. This is called B1 and B2. Use B1 when your system gets a bad virus and use B2 to restore any data that may have changed.
CD-RW’s are great for this, tape is better and now is sold in manageable mediums rather than 10" spools that work on 1 ton machines.
It is good to have a sense of protection, those programs are good for that, yet an AV is only as good as the virus or bad code that the last update can recognize and deal with.
If you have 8 programs that are pinging the servers that maintain well that causes system slowdown.
Fred Langa explains it better than I can:
http://www.langa.com/backups/backups.htm
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20010719S0003;jsessionid=HDN5JY3BUR2OIQSNDBECKH0CJUMEKJVN
Have Fun!
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