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?

I keep getting pop ups that is telling me it is corrupted.

I recently did a Quick Restore, which put it back to factory settings because of problems I was encountering, but now I keep getting these same Pop ups from Messenger Service advertising all these different registry cleaners & saying if I dowload there product I wont receive anymore pop ups…they are popping up back to back & its getting frustrating!! Can someone tell me how to stop them from popping up…Help!!

I saw these ads for FREE registry cleaners and they all have been phony. THey scan and tell me I have anywhere from 200 to 700 errors depending on which one I used, then they say they fixed a few of them and urge me to buy the real program. I would rather they sy from the beginning that this is what they charge rther than lead one on.
So anyone know of a GOOD, REALL FREEWARE to fix registries?
Thanks for the tips all. DG and Shed – I downloaded the CCleaner – and it really was FREE and pretty fast. I even think my computer is running a bit faster – now if it stops locking up every once in a while I'm a very happy camper.
Cheers All
Did the CCleaner and it took oput a bunch of cookies – but fooled around with it and found a place where it took out lots of files and dlls etc etc etc that went nowhere. After I did that, I ran the MS defragger and now my computer runs about 30% faster and so far…no lock ups. Thanks!

My biggest concern is, I'm wary letting a program dig into my computer, I have no way of knowing if it's going to imbed spyware or virus or something on my system, or steal my information. I see pop-ups for cleaners all the time, but they don't come off as legitimate.