Tag: OPTIMIZE

Auslogics Disk Defrag has been part of my system maintenance toolkit for quite some time. With the release of version 3.2, it's now even better at tidying up and optimizing your system's hard disk drives. In addition to a cleaner, easier-to-use interface, Disk Defrag 3.2 offers improved single file and folder defragging, better processing of multiple disks, a simplified scheduling screen, and ...

If you haven't heard it mentioned before with other disk defragmenters, UltraDefrag is a solid open source alternative to tools like MyDefrag and Auslogics' Disk Defrag. Ultra Defrag is packed with functionality, offering whole disk defragmentation and optimization, file and folder defragging (via your right-click context menu), boot-time defragging, and scheduled jobs. The boot-time job ...

You may not have played with Chromium's (or Google Chrome's) task manager before. It's really more intended for developer use, but it does provide some valuable functionality for the rest of us as well. One which has been added recently is the ability to free up memory. Like other browsers, Chrome and Chromium can get a little RAM-hungry after extended browsing sessions. By adding the ...

I haven't tried it out to see if it works yet, but it looks promising: User Profile Hive Cleanup Service is a free  utility from Microsoft that's supposed to speed up Windows XP shutdown times considerably. The article at IntelliAdmin says the biggest culprit for slow shutdowns "is a problem unloading the current user's profile," and what the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service does is in the ...

As I've mentioned in previous posts, for the number of apps I tend to run concurrently, my system is starved for RAM. Yes, I know this could be easily remedied, but until I get around to it I'm really enjoying Cacheman, a Windows app from Outer Technologies that's "designed to improve the performance of your computer by optimizing the disk cache, memory and a number of other settings." ...

When you get rid of a device, sometimes its drivers stick around to haunt you, taking up memory and doing not much good. Windows doesn't help the situation, because it hides those missing devices in the Device Manager. TechRepublic has a handy how-to on removing those unnecessary device drivers. Definitely worth a shot if you've been swapping devices around lately. [Via Digg] ...

Ah, the registry--can't live with it, can't delete it. There are ways, though, to slim it down, give it a little polish, and give your system a little boost. Most of those ways are distressingly un-free, but Email Battles has a nice post about a trio of free tools that, in concert, will get the job done. First you use CCleaner to scrape out all the accumulated cruft. Then you use RegSeeker to nuke ...