The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Ad-Aware - Duh.

Spybot - Weird website, catches some stuff that Ad-aware doesn't, plus a couple other features.

Crap Cleaner - A must-have. Does just what it says. Scan for obsolete registry keys, dead shortcuts, etc. Coolest thing is that you can delete everything off the startup list. Do it. All of it. Windows will automatically start anything that's actually necessary, all that other crap is useless.

CWShredder - Somewhat useful tool to make sure your browsers are healthy.

Delete bullshit - This includes things like Norton/Mcaffee antivirus, that free copy of Quicken that came with your computer, and, in my case, 15 gigs of porn that you saved so you could watch later, but never do.

Defrag and diskclean - defrag while you sleep, your mornings will be brighter.
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Do all of the above at least weekly. I did all of this yesterday (having never done any of it except adaware and defrag) and I have an extra 30 gigs on my hard drive, I cut my running programs down from 92 to 33, my running threads from 600 to 300, I cut my resting ram usage in half, and my boot time is now less than thirty seconds.

Another tip for Firefox users: do downloads take a while to start? Clean up your downloads list. Ctrl+J, then hit the cleanup button. Sounds like a silly thing to have to say, but ex-IE users like me are used to going around clearing temporary folders and shit to fix these kinds of things.

After all that, I was totally in the mood to tweak my lappy further, even though I lack any real knowledge of the Windows architecture. So I found this tutorial on how to change your Start Menu text:



For the hex editing, I used UltraEdit (Note that the tutorial doesn't serve XP. For the .exe-swap part of the job, check out this tutorial, which you might even find more helpful overall).

For those of us who obtain movies of questionable origin whose makers insist on using weird codecs, MPlayer has yet to be stumped in my experience. It's a bit wonky as far as interface goes, but the damn thing will play any video file you throw at it.

So, you can spend less than an hour to make your computer run like new (or better) again. Anyone else have any cool programs I have to have?

Edit: *gasp* 700th post 8)

Here's something that stumped me. I have two desktops. One of them is a newer Dell that is the fastest computer I've ever had to date. The other is a Compaq that's about a year old. On the Compaq I have this problem where in general everything seems to run okay, but if I right-click a file in Windows Explorer, it may take 30 seconds for the context menu to pop open. So far no amounts of registry cleaning or defragging have solved the problem. Neither did a tutorial that walked me through shutting down various programs that add their stuff to the context menu, but that didn't work either. Anyone have other ideas?

kill_me_sarah wrote:but if I right-click a file in Windows Explorer, it may take 30 seconds for the context menu to pop open.

You've got something on the context menu that Windows needs to interact with before it can draw the menu. Look over these tutorials, and you'll probably be able to figure out which is the offending program:

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/context_folders.htm
http://www.technobabble.com.au/technoba ... -menus.htm

Those are cool, Des. I was actually able to clear all erronious crap without regediting.

What I'm interested in is changing what appears in the 'new' submenu when you right-click on the desktop. I really don't need to be able to create new shade, excel, or "microsoft access (wtf?)" documents on the fly. I'd pretty much just like to have new .txt and new folder.

For Windows users, <a href="http://www.annoyances.org/">annoyances.org</a> has always treated me well when it comes to stopping Windows from doing crap you otherwise can't stop Windows from doing.

My friend's laptop has literally NOTHING on the screen when it boots up, not even the recycle bin, nor any startup programs. It's a beautiful thing.

Des,

Any idea what all of the ContextMenuHandlers are that are just massively long alphanumeric digits within brackets {}? I've turned off everything I recognize and it hasn't solved the problem, though I notice there are still lots of context menu things for music files like Add to Now Playing List, Add to Playlist...etc. Also for images things like Rotate Clockwise and Convert to actions.

[Edit] Nevermind, that first article covered the image/music/video question. Still curious about the other question though.

[Edit2]I still actually haven't found the menu items that do all that convert to junk.

Some Symantec stuff will try to take over your context menus, and keep it broken for long after you've uninstalled the applications themselves. I had to manually delete every "Symantec" key from my registry.

The Sober Irishman wrote:Anyone else have any cool programs I have to have?

I've been using the <a href="http://winaso.com/">WinASO Registry Optimizer"</a> lately. It deletes crap from the registry, much like Norton's Win Doctor, but it has no Nortony aftertaste.

The demo will only fix 10 things at a time, but you can have it fix the 10 most "dangerous" things and just run it a few times. The demo also has a fully functional registry defragger which seems to make things a little snappier.

Musicxp.net is the ultimate music computer tweaking guide, but that's not news to anybody, right?

The main thing is to not have all those obnoxious antispyware and antivirus programs running while you are actually doing music. ugh.

-craig

Gotta love that shit.

Try this. Right click on the desktop. Select "New" from the context menu. Select "WinAmp Media File", if you have that option. If not, never mind.

Assuming you are still with me, a new wav or mp3 file will be created on the desk top. Double click on it.

"File is damaged"

Nice, huh?

starfinger wrote:Musicxp.net is the ultimate music computer tweaking guide, but that's not news to anybody, right?

It was news to me. Thanks!

I need to do a complete reinstall/optimisation ASAP.

The Sober Irishman wrote:What I'm interested in is changing what appears in the 'new' submenu when you right-click on the desktop.

Try this: http://windowsxp.mvps.org/shellnew.htm

kill_me_sarah wrote:Any idea what all of the ContextMenuHandlers are that are just massively long alphanumeric digits within brackets {}?

Usually, system stuff. When you click on the CLSID (which is what that long string of numbers is called) in Regedit, you might see something in the right-hand pane that identifies it. If not, hit F2 on the CLSID in the left pane, and copy the entire string to the clipboard. Then hit Edit|Find and paste the CLSID into the search box. Do the search, and you'll find the key somewhere else in the registry (probably under HKCR\CLSID) with some other info that'll help you identify it.

Here's my little tip for immediately speeding up your computer if you have XP. It allows for multiple user accounts, so like each one of my kids has one. It's kind of cool because they can each customize their desktops and all. The issue is if they don't log off, Windows will always consider that to be at least one program running.

That's right, itself.

So in my house, if all 5 of us are "Logged on", there's at least 5 programs running, all of them Windows which eats up an amazing amount of RAM and CPU speed.

I'm constantly logging everyone off before I do anything.

It sucks.

So, like, your advice is to use birth control?

Exactly.


For you I strongly recommend birth control.



Breeding more of you could not be tolerated.

Hahaha, fair enough.

here's my suggestion...though its probably painfully obvious to most, it's fairly new to me. Erase that hard drive you've been running for 2 years (like I was), and reinstall XP on it clean. And once you reinstall all of your necessary drivers and s/w, and you've done all your system tweaks...make image of that thing and keep it safe. Then next time things are stinky slow, load up that nice image in about 1/3 of the time it takes to actually reinstall XP and all your crap.

I'm pretty sure that my registry was longer than all the code in Windows prior to my last clean install.

I can't resist saying that this thread is a great advertisement for Macs. Sure they cost more, but think of the hours you'll save yourself not having to worry about viruses, spyware, reformatting your drive and reinstalling your OS every year, keeping an audio system that's seperate from your main system, etc. etc.

heh..I was waiting for that.

Lunkhead wrote:I can't resist saying that this thread is a great advertisement for Macs.

See, thing is, I like videogames.

http://images2.jokaroo.net/videos/machater.wmv

not everyone is so thrilled.

i don't know.. my pc is immeasurably more capable than my mac for less money. it would be worth it to have to reinstall regularly. on the other hand, i have never had to reinstall XP, since i practice healthy registry maintenance.

on the other other hand, the new intel macs are probably reason enough to go mac.

-craig