posted at Avira Antivir Support Forum today:

I just upgraded to 3 years of Premium Avira Suite (having done a 30 day eval. with Firewall, so no need for Online Armor) and everything is smooth).

But my old Compaq machine has Free Avira and Online Armor as well as MalwareBytes (free).

I do use Paltalk on this machine, and neither Avira nor MalwareBytes has ever caught anything. But Online Armor reported some very suspicious activity from Paltalk. I allowed Online Armor to block certain things, and I still had a fine long session in Paltalk Tuesday night. But ever since, Online Armour has been doing OAminidumps. I SUBMIT them via the minidump submit. When I go to DELETE, the machine hangs for a long time and then reboots. I booted in safe (F8) mode and the defragger said I needed to do chkdsk /f and that it could not be performed at the moment but would be performed at next reboot. When I rebooted, out of curiosity, I chose the Ubuntu boot, and it did a bit of fixing and then Ubuntu came up fine and stable. But each time I boot into Windows, I get the same Online Armor minidump crash. I am in safe mode right now on that machine after the chkdsk /f successfully ran. It is allowing me to do a defrag right now. As soon as that finishes, I think I shall delete Online Armor, with the assumption that the OAdump business will go away. I do wonder about the Paltalk issues, but I really enjoy Paltalk, and I know so many people around the world who use it, so it cannot be too malicious or destructive. I shall also post this at Online Armor’s forum, but I am curious to get the feedback from people here. Thanks for your great support!

Someone suggested at Avira that it would make more sense to tell Tall Emu, the makers of Online Armor, to which I reply:

[quote='Farger',index.php?page=Thread&postID=875210#post875210]HI WilliamBuell,

I think that more reasonable will be to ask Tallemu about this :S[/quote]

Of course I am going to tell Tallemu about this, but it IS a legitimate Avira issue with regard to the question of whether Paltalk is doing something questionable, and is escaping the attention of Avira AND malwarebytes.

The two strange things that happened with regard to Online Armor and Paltalk are that Paltalk when I first launched it, tried to access my drive directly, and Online Armor said this is a very suspicious activity. The other thing, which I blocked, had something to do with some key.dll. I didnt like the looks of it, so I blocked it, but Paltalk launched fine and I was in it for an hour. But after that, all this crash business started.

I was marveling to myself how a firewall can detect suspicious activity which an AV scanner might miss. So, this in itself is a valid issue to raise on the Avira forum, NAMELY, what can be said about those suspicious activities which only a Firewall can catch? There is one antivirus someone recommended to me which supposedly detects suspicious activity and can catch a virus or malware on DAY ZERO. I am perfectly happy with Avira Premium Suite on my wife’s computer, because I want everything integrated and straight foward, and the Avira fire wall is not “in your face” every other minute with questions.

A side note of interest: I find that I am able to access Paltalk on my Ubuntu machine via Firefox. Initially, I could not get audio or mic to work, but then Firefox installed an Adobe flash update, and suddenly it was working. So, I imagine I would be safe from Paltalk monkey business on an Ubuntu machine in a Firefox browser.

Come detto in un post precedente (questo), il bootloader ADAM2 che trovate su molti modem/router (fra i quali Dlink )  è soggetto ad una frequente “deframmentazione” della env, cioè della partizione (mtd3) contenente le variabili di sistema, e questo problema può portare il modem/router in “stallo”.

Per porre rimedio a questo problema il team routertech ha approntato nell’ultima versione del firmware (2.91.1) lo script “auto_defragenv.sh” che controlla il livello di deframmentazione rispetto ad un valore di soglia (di default 30) e se superiore, deframmenta la env.

Lo script va avviato a mano (usando la schermata “Run Command”), oppure si può settare cron in modo che avvii il controllo ad intervalli regolari.

Nel mio caso ho scelto di far eseguire il controllo ogni domenica alle 23.30, ed ho impostato il tutto eseguendo il comando:

cronjob-env.sh “auto_defragenv.sh&” “30″ “23″ “*” “*” “0″ “RT_cmd_2″

cronjob-env.sh crea un nuovo job nella crontab ed inoltre “associa” una variabile a questo nella env, nel mio caso ho dato il nome “RT_cmd_2″: in questo modo anche in caso di riavvii, l’impostazione rimane memorizzata.

This past week I was in Denver attending Defrag 2009, which is something of the uber-tech geek con and bills itself as:

…focused on the tools and technologies that accelerate the “aha” moment, and is a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, and thinkers that are building the next wave of software innovation.

It was a very unique experience, to say the least.  We actually were unsure of our interest in attending when we first heard about Defrag.  Eric Norlin had contacted me several months ago about us being a sponsor.  Since “big data” is one of the themes at Defrag, he justifiably figured that we would fit right in.  Unfortunately, with DEMO looming, we were unsure of Defrag of being worth taking a chunk out of our budget.  I actually initially declined Eric, but he was persistent and contacted me again after DEMO.  Of course, I was even more cautious about committing now that all the money for DEMO had actually been spent!  But, after Eric offered the opportunity to speak, I decided we’d go for it.

Let me first say that deciding to attend Defrag was definitely the right move.  The quality of level of the audience is definitely the highest of any conference I’ve seen.  Each person that came by the booth was plugged-in, technical and business-savvy.  We actually managed to generate a good number of promising leads, which was impressive considering there were only about 350 people in attendance.  From a pure business perspective, just closing 2 or 3 of these leads would make the conference worth it for us.

We had some great one-on-one conversations with folks there, including talks with the guys at Infochimps, Robert Scoble, and Bill from Factual (previously of Y! BOSS).  We also gave some folks a sneak peak at what we’re working on with Language Computer.  Without providing too much detail, we’re building a service called Extractiv, which will let people turn any part of the web into highly structured, semantic data.

The one down vote I would give for Defrag is that the talks didn’t always live up to “tech” billing I thought they would.  In many cases, on-stage discussion converged onto social media, Twitter, etc.  While those are important new developments, many of the speakers focused on how to create the right UI or visualize social content.  My personal opinion is that UI and visualization are not the hard problems to be solved in these spaces.  Rather, converting that content into meaningful and actionable data is.

Oh, and here’s my little presentation!

I think I ruffled some feathers by actually suggesting something could be better than the cloud in some cases (god forbid!).

Overall it was a great time, and I look forward to attending next year!

If you find any broken Tweets or Links, please report them in the comment section.

If you like what you see, may I recommend you start following me on Twitter to enjoy the benefits of real-time content as it materializes.

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My Thoughts Enclosed…Rb

This video is great isn’t it?  Certainly pumps one up that social media is here to stay and continue to thrive.  But putting aside hype, there is real business value to be captured with social leverage.

I mention this because I’m speaking today at Defrag, a conference out in Denver that delves into a wide variety of social media aspects ranging from consumer to business issues.  The topic of the panel I am on is titled, “Is ‘Social Leverage’ the next big thing for VCs?”  Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Roger Ehrenberg  and Howard Lindzon are on the panel as well, all great investors and innovators in the social category. 

As I thought about the panel topic, the basic conclusion I came to after mapping out Trinity Ventures’ portfolio as it relates to social leverage (see below), is that social leverage is powerful as a business model.   It struck me how universal this model can be as it can apply to both business oriented services as well as the more obvious applications we see clearly on the consumer side.  It can create broad mass market businesses as well as thriving vertical, more private and focused communities (as Roger also pointed in the latter half of his blog post about today’s panel here). 

The business model of Social Leverage enables lower cost of customer acquisition (viral in consumer ala PhotoBucket for photo sharing and botttoms up trial and adoption in enterprise ala CubeTree for a next gen intranet) as well as lower cost of content acquisition and content management (users contribute content, rate content, moderate content ala Care.com in consumer to help find a babysitter and LoopNet in enterprise for commercial real estate listings). 

I’ll have more to say on this during the panel and I look forward to hearing how Fred, Roger, Brad and Howard define Social Leverage and to get your input.

If you find any broken Tweets or Links, please report them in the comment section.

If you like what you see, may I recommend you start following me on Twitter to enjoy the benefits of real-time content as it materializes.

If you choose to follow @rlavigne42, please leave me a comment. I will make sure to check out your Tweets in return.

If you see a Tweet you appreciate, please Pay it Forward by ReTweeting it.

If you find an blogger you like, please Join Me in following Them.

My Thoughts Enclosed…Rb

I didn’t make it to defrag this year…again…but I’m following the memes emanating out of Denver very closely, and there are already some gems.

No big surprise, considering folks like Stowe Boyd, Doc Searls, Chris Locke, and other Web/cluetrain thought leaders are in attendance.

It’s killing me not to hear the “Cluetrain at 10″ convo that will wrap the event tomorrow, but I’ll be keeping an eye on the #defrag hashtag to see what done got said.

And many thanks to those of you in the crowd who have been tweeting and blogging today’s tidings.

I was especially intrigued by Louis Gray’s recap of Stowe Boyd’s talk about search becoming less and less useful in the real-time web.

Boyd’s talk seemed to suggest that social tools are changing the culture, that the information flow is increasingly channeled through people, not algorithms.

Summarizes Gray, “One of the biggest reasons he thinks meaning will replace search is that the initial argument for search engines was trying to find the few documents on the Web that were relevant to your query, and now, practically any search can deliver millions of results.  Search is starting to fail because scarcity has been replaced by infinity.”

Whoa.  Infinity.

Gray continues his synthesis: “We are heading toward a world where all the critical information is available publicly, and breaking news is a few seconds away – at the most. We will switch to instead relying on finding things through our social connections – engines of meaning, and the source of what is important.”

I interpret that to mean that when combining human intelligence with the speed and reaction of human response, there ain’t no algorithm on earth can beat we humans.

Very empowering, and I’m glad to know the machines aren’t completely taking over (including Hal).

So, take Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point fundamentals and unleash the energy of all those mavens and connectors and make them super mavens/connectors via the network?

Because, Gray has Boyd concluding, “We are not sharing space online, we are sharing time.  Our time is increasingly not our own. A shared thread of time will be the norm, and how we will get work done.”

Those moments will replace our static Web pages.  And this new element in today’s social Web could be “the most defining moment of our civilization.”

Hmm.  I thought that defining moment had been when Oprah had Ashton Kutcher on to talk about Twitter.

All joking aside, some interesting memes which may or may not prove to be true are revealing themselves by some of the thought captains of the industry.

I will continue to mull these over as I embark a defrag inspired margarita drinking binge with my friend Syd here shortly.

(Syd will be providing me a show and tell of her new Motorola Droid, won’t you Syd?)

It was arrival day for one of the tech industry’s most brain-straining conferences, Defrag 2009, in Denver. Lots of catching up with old friends like Graeme Thickins and meeting new ones like PostRank CTO/founder Ilya Grigorik. Here’s a quick shot from our table at the John Minnihan/Freepository-sponsored pre-conference dinner hanging with Infectious Greed’s Paul Kedrosky, Foundry Group’s Brad Feld, and the man himself, Robert Scoble.

opis:
Główną i najważniejszą funkcją programu Ashampoo Magical Defrag jest defragmentacja dysków twardych komputera. Aplikacja oczywiście różni się od standardowego narzędzia do defragmentacji, które znajduje się w systemie Windows. Przewaga produktu z serii Ashampoo polega na szybkości działania.
Interfejs jest dziecinnie prosty. Aby rozpocząć proces defragmentacji wystarczy nacisnąć Start. W dowolnym momencie można użyć pauzy aby wstrzymać proces. Dodatkowo aplikacja wyświetla informacje o ilości sprawdzonych czy przeniesionych plików.

http://rapidshare.com/files/292821648/MDEFRAQ_up_by_Lamp5.rar

This is NEW, not-publicized and hidden. Windows 7 has automatic, scheduled System Disk Defragmentation. Depending on what type of user YOU are that can be good or BAD.

But, before we go any further let me just tell you WHEN it is set for. It is set for once a week, at 1:00am every Wednesday. Got that. So whether this happens or not depends on whether your PC happens to be up at 1:00am on a Wednesday night.

I don’t have a problem with this per se. By issue is that Microsoft didn’t notify me that this DEFAULT was set … and worse still HID IT in a place that one would not normally look.

To FIND where the scheduled defrag is set … YOU have to HIT the ‘Defragment Now’ button! That is my real gripe. Those that do NOT want Windows 7 to do their DEFRAG will shy away from hitting this button given its sense of immediacy. I was even talking to a PC expert last night. I wanted to show him WHERE the automatically scheduled Defrag was set. So I told him to hit the ‘Defragment Now’ button. He was reluctant because like many PC pros he doesn’t want Windows to do the defrag.

That is my issue. Automated DEFRAG is set … but people don’t know about it.

They should know about it for multiple, obvious, reasons. For a start, IF they want to avail themselves of this feature they may want to change the time. Then there are those that will shudder at the thought of letting Windows defrag their system disk. Some may not even understand why an old man like me is even bothering to write about this on a Saturday morning.

Disks should be defragmented. No question about that. I used to be a real stickler. Defragmenting weekly, if not more. I am not as obsessive any more. My work pattern has changed. I don’t work with as many documents a day or week as I used to. Instead, given that I have been writing a dense 300 page book on papal history, I work on the same document for weeks at a time. So I don’t really see that much of an hit on performance by not defragmenting.

But here is the history. The original defrag that was available in Windows worked but was kind of lame. It gained a reputation among the cognoscenti as being ineffective. In reality, it could have just been that it did NOT have the compelling graphic, color coded graphic of file sectors being moved around … as the disk was getting defragmented. But, the bottom line was that most ‘pros’ chose to use 3rd party defraggers. Some of these defraggers could automatically usurp the Windows one. So you went through the same process, but now it was a 3rd party tool that did the defrag rather than what came with Windows.

I have a free version of Diskeeper on my production XP machine. That is totally integrated with Windows. But of late I have been using System Mechanic.

I am a BIT leery of System Mechanic 9.0.x on Windows 7. But I have used it to do defrag. It does NOT defrag Windows 7 system files as well as it does XP files. Not an issue right now.

Anyway, my goal here was to give you the facts about Windows 7 defrag so that YOU can do what YOU want to do. Hope this helped.

Anura Guruge
www.guruge.com

Turning Off Windows 7 Automated Defrag

This is NEW, not-publicized and hidden. Windows 7 has automatic, scheduled System Disk Defragmentation. Depending on what type of user YOU are that can be good or BAD.

But, before we go any further let me just tell you WHEN it is set for. It is set for once a week, at 1:00am every Wednesday. Got that. So whether this happens or not depends on whether your PC happens to be up at 1:00am on a Wednesday night.

I don’t have a problem with this per se. By issue is that Microsoft didn’t notify me that this DEFAULT was set … and worse still HID IT in a place that one would not normally look.

To FIND where the scheduled defrag is set … YOU have to HIT the ‘Defragment Now’ button! That is my real gripe. Those that do NOT want Windows 7 to do their DEFRAG will shy away from hitting this button given its sense of immediacy. I was even talking to a PC expert last night. I wanted to show him WHERE the automatically scheduled Defrag was set. So I told him to hit the ‘Defragment Now’ button. He was reluctant because like many PC pros he doesn’t want Windows to do the defrag.

That is my issue. Automated DEFRAG is set … but people don’t know about it.

They should know about it for multiple, obvious, reasons. For a start, IF they want to avail themselves of this feature they may want to change the time. Then there are those that will shudder at the thought of letting Windows defrag their system disk. Some may not even understand why an old man like me is even bothering to write about this on a Saturday morning.

Disks should be defragmented. No question about that. I used to be a real stickler. Defragmenting weekly, if not more. I am not as obsessive any more. My work pattern has changed. I don’t work with as many documents a day or week as I used to. Instead, given that I have been writing a dense 300 page book on papal history, I work on the same document for weeks at a time. So I don’t really see that much of an hit on performance by not defragmenting.

But here is the history. The original defrag that was available in Windows worked but was kind of lame. It gained a reputation among the cognoscenti as being ineffective. In reality, it could have just been that it did NOT have the compelling graphic, color coded graphic of file sectors being moved around … as the disk was getting defragmented. But, the bottom line was that most ‘pros’ chose to use 3rd party defraggers. Some of these defraggers could automatically usurp the Windows one. So you went through the same process, but now it was a 3rd party tool that did the defrag rather than what came with Windows.

I have a free version of Diskeeper on my production XP machine. That is totally integrated with Windows. But of late I have been using System Mechanic.

I am a BIT leery of System Mechanic 9.0.x on Windows 7. But I have used it to do defrag. It does NOT defrag Windows 7 system files as well as it does XP files. Not an issue right now.

Anyway, my goal here was to give you the facts about Windows 7 defrag so that YOU can do what YOU want to do. Hope this helped.

Anura Guruge
www.guruge.com

Have you added or thought about adding a SAN solution to your customer’s existing systems? Read the following from a recent white paper:

“SAN defragmenting offers an alternative to costly hardware costs incurred by adding drives. Why? While SANs offer extremely efficient and high-performing data storage, it is not their job to address file system-level fragmentation. No matter how efficient data retrieval can be, and how much physical disk limitations can be mitigated, the added overhead on the operating system retrieving the file is beyond the scope of SAN technology, and is impacted by file fragmentation.

How are companies addressing this? Some simply ignore the issue, believing that because of the inherently high performance of SANs, defragmenting offers little or no benefit.

Others assume that SAN or virtualization vendors address the issue with features within their offerings. However, while some SAN vendors offer tools that work within their proprietary SAN file systems, none of these tools address local disk file fragmentation.

These wrong assumptions cause many to simply ignore the problem – a tactic that is not an option in today’s business environment. Companies need to defragment their SAN to achieve a noticeable improvement in system performance.”

And read the following SAN testimonial:

“Do I consider Diskeeper a vital tool on our network? Without a doubt.

I have been in situations in years past where large SAN arrays failed due to file system corruption. Once at that point, recovering info from the actual units is pointless and all you can do is pray that the Backup Administrators did their job. Since those times I have made it a point to ensure that the file system fragmentation is kept to a minimum, with the added bonus of being able to detect initial corruption earlier.

After running Diskeeper on various servers in multiple configurations, I never had to worry about file system performance degradation. That in itself makes the product worthwhile. It is also why I make sure that we renew our licenses each year.

Sometimes the hallmark of a software is how often you use it. With Diskeeper, its hallmark is that it does a fantastic job after setting it once and letting Diskeeper do what it does best, without further user interaction.”

Shem Boduch
Sr. System & Network Administrator
University of Chicago

Need a copy of the white paper? Additional testimonials? Let me know. I’ll get them to you.

-Anthony

Defrag will be taking place November 11-12, in Denver. The conference is unusual in its focus — “accelerating the ‘aha’ moment”. The event brings together people from a number of technology domains, mixes them well, and incubates interesting ideas about high-level technology trends, patterns, practices, applications, and tools. It is a conference that I have been interested in attending, but have never made it. Thankfully, that is about to change.

I will be at Defrag this year, not only as an attendee, but also as a Discussion Catalyst. A what?! Well, essentially, my job will be to facilitate discussion on four divergent, yet related, points of view regarding a single topic. The session that I am leading is on Sharing, Markets, and People. The table below lists the presenters and their points of view on the topic.

Following this series of ten minute presentations, I will facilitate a discussion with the entire audience that examines commonality and conflict between the ideas expressed by the presenter. Think of it as moderating a panel where the entire audience is on stage and actively participating. Fun!

The session should be great, and I am really looking forward to the entire conference. If you are not yet committed to attending Defrag, you should seriously consider doing so. You can still register here. If you will be attending, please be sure to say hello while we are together in Denver for a couple of intellectually stimulating days!

Are you a VAR, System Integrator with a VL customer that’s on the fence about upgrading their site’s 2008 Diskeeper copies to 2009?

I recommend giving our Sales Managers a call.

They’re experts at working with you and your customers to find solutions that benefit all.

Would a conference call with one of our technical staff help? How about a copy of the latest trialware? Or DPAN (Disk Performance Analyzer for Networkd)? A testimonial or two from our customers?

Let us know. We’ll take care of it.

-Anthony

Defraggler on ilmainen kiintolevyjen eheyttämisohjelmisto. http://www.piriform.com/defraggler

YouTube-kanava: http://www.youtube.com/user/Ohjeet

Since defragging the disk won’t do much to improve Windows XP performance, here are 23 suggestions that will. Each can enhance the performance and reliability of your customers’ PCs. Best of all, most of them will cost you nothing.
1.) To decrease a system’s boot time and increase system performance, use the money you save by not buying defragmentation software — the built-in Windows defragmenter works just fine — and instead equip the computer with an Ultra-133 or Serial ATA hard drive with 8-MB cache buffer.

2.) If a PC has less than 512 MB of RAM, add more memory. This is a relatively inexpensive and easy upgrade that can dramatically improve system performance.

3.) Ensure that Windows XP is utilizing the NTFS file system. If you’re not sure, here’s how to check: First, double-click the My Computer icon, right-click on the C: Drive, then select Properties. Next, examine the File System type; if it says FAT32, then back-up any important data. Next, click Start, click Run, type CMD, and then click OK. At the prompt, type CONVERT C: /FS:NTFS and press the Enter key. This process may take a while; it’s important that the computer be uninterrupted and virus-free. The file system used by the bootable drive will be either FAT32 or NTFS. I highly recommend NTFS for its superior security, reliability, and efficiency with larger disk drives.

4.) Disable file indexing. The indexing service extracts information from documents and other files on the hard drive and creates a “searchable keyword index.” As you can imagine, this process can be quite taxing on any system.

The idea is that the user can search for a word, phrase, or property inside a document, should they have hundreds or thousands of documents and not know the file name of the document they want. Windows XP’s built-in search functionality can still perform these kinds of searches without the Indexing service. It just takes longer. The OS has to open each file at the time of the request to help find what the user is looking for.

Most people never need this feature of search. Those who do are typically in a large corporate environment where thousands of documents are located on at least one server. But if you’re a typical system builder, most of your clients are small and medium businesses. And if your clients have no need for this search feature, I recommend disabling it.

Here’s how: First, double-click the My Computer icon. Next, right-click on the C: Drive, then select Properties. Uncheck “Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching.” Next, apply changes to “C: subfolders and files,” and click OK. If a warning or error message appears (such as “Access is denied”), click the Ignore All button.

5.) Update the PC’s video and motherboard chipset drivers. Also, update and configure the BIOS. For more information on how to configure your BIOS properly, see this article on my site.

6.) Empty the Windows Prefetch folder every three months or so. Windows XP can “prefetch” portions of data and applications that are used frequently. This makes processes appear to load faster when called upon by the user. That’s fine. But over time, the prefetch folder may become overloaded with references to files and applications no longer in use. When that happens, Windows XP is wasting time, and slowing system performance, by pre-loading them. Nothing critical is in this folder, and the entire contents are safe to delete.

7.) Once a month, run a disk cleanup. Here’s how: Double-click the My Computer icon. Then right-click on the C: drive and select Properties. Click the Disk Cleanup button — it’s just to the right of the Capacity pie graph — and delete all temporary files.

8.) In your Device Manager, double-click on the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers device, and ensure that DMA is enabled for each drive you have connected to the Primary and Secondary controller. Do this by double-clicking on Primary IDE Channel. Then click the Advanced Settings tab. Ensure the Transfer Mode is set to “DMA if available” for both Device 0 and Device 1. Then repeat this process with the Secondary IDE Channel.

9.) Upgrade the cabling. As hard-drive technology improves, the cabling requirements to achieve these performance boosts have become more stringent. Be sure to use 80-wire Ultra-133 cables on all of your IDE devices with the connectors properly assigned to the matching Master/Slave/Motherboard sockets. A single device must be at the end of the cable; connecting a single drive to the middle connector on a ribbon cable will cause signaling problems. With Ultra DMA hard drives, these signaling problems will prevent the drive from performing at its maximum potential. Also, because these cables inherently support “cable select,” the location of each drive on the cable is important. For these reasons, the cable is designed so drive positioning is explicitly clear.

10.) Remove all spyware from the computer. Use free programs such as AdAware by Lavasoft or SpyBot Search & Destroy. Once these programs are installed, be sure to check for and download any updates before starting your search. Anything either program finds can be safely removed. Any free software that requires spyware to run will no longer function once the spyware portion has been removed; if your customer really wants the program even though it contains spyware, simply reinstall it. For more information on removing Spyware visit this Web Pro News page.

11.) Remove any unnecessary programs and/or items from Windows Startup routine using the MSCONFIG utility. Here’s how: First, click Start, click Run, type MSCONFIG, and click OK. Click the StartUp tab, then uncheck any items you don’t want to start when Windows starts. Unsure what some items are? Visit the WinTasks Process Library. It contains known system processes, applications, as well as spyware references and explanations. Or quickly identify them by searching for the filenames using Google or another Web search engine.

12.) Remove any unnecessary or unused programs from the Add/Remove Programs section of the Control Panel.

13.) Turn off any and all unnecessary animations, and disable active desktop. In fact, for optimal performance, turn off all animations. Windows XP offers many different settings in this area. Here’s how to do it: First click on the System icon in the Control Panel. Next, click on the Advanced tab. Select the Settings button located under Performance. Feel free to play around with the options offered here, as nothing you can change will alter the reliability of the computer — only its responsiveness.

14.) If your customer is an advanced user who is comfortable editing their registry, try some of the performance registry tweaks offered at Tweak XP.

15.) Visit Microsoft’s Windows update site regularly, and download all updates labeled Critical. Download any optional updates at your discretion.

16.) Update the customer’s anti-virus software on a weekly, even daily, basis. Make sure they have only one anti-virus software package installed. Mixing anti-virus software is a sure way to spell disaster for performance and reliability.

17.) Make sure the customer has fewer than 500 type fonts installed on their computer. The more fonts they have, the slower the system will become. While Windows XP handles fonts much more efficiently than did the previous versions of Windows, too many fonts — that is, anything over 500 — will noticeably tax the system.

18.) Do not partition the hard drive. Windows XP’s NTFS file system runs more efficiently on one large partition. The data is no safer on a separate partition, and a reformat is never necessary to reinstall an operating system. The same excuses people offer for using partitions apply to using a folder instead. For example, instead of putting all your data on the D: drive, put it in a folder called “D drive.” You’ll achieve the same organizational benefits that a separate partition offers, but without the degradation in system performance. Also, your free space won’t be limited by the size of the partition; instead, it will be limited by the size of the entire hard drive. This means you won’t need to resize any partitions, ever. That task can be time-consuming and also can result in lost data.

19.) Check the system’s RAM to ensure it is operating properly. I recommend using a free program called MemTest86. The download will make a bootable CD or diskette (your choice), which will run 10 extensive tests on the PC’s memory automatically after you boot to the disk you created. Allow all tests to run until at least three passes of the 10 tests are completed. If the program encounters any errors, turn off and unplug the computer, remove a stick of memory (assuming you have more than one), and run the test again. Remember, bad memory cannot be repaired, but only replaced.

20.) If the PC has a CD or DVD recorder, check the drive manufacturer’s Web site for updated firmware. In some cases you’ll be able to upgrade the recorder to a faster speed. Best of all, it’s free.

21.) Disable unnecessary services. Windows XP loads a lot of services that your customer most likely does not need. To determine which services you can disable for your client, visit the Black Viper site for Windows XP configurations.

22.) If you’re sick of a single Windows Explorer window crashing and then taking the rest of your OS down with it, then follow this tip: open My Computer, click on Tools, then Folder Options. Now click on the View tab. Scroll down to “Launch folder windows in a separate process,” and enable this option. You’ll have to reboot your machine for this option to take effect.

23.) At least once a year, open the computer’s cases and blow out all the dust and debris. While you’re in there, check that all the fans are turning properly. Also inspect the motherboard capacitors for bulging or leaks. For more information on this leaking-capacitor phenomena, you can read numerous articles on my site.
Following any of these suggestions should result in noticeable improvements to the performance and reliability of your customers’ computers. If you still want to defrag a disk, remember that the main benefit will be to make your data more retrievable in the event of a crashed drive.