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I have a diet program that will not run on my 64bit Win7 Ultimate system. I installed Virtual XP and now it works fine. You have to have Win7 Pro or Ultimate to have the Virtual XP feature. I cannot tell that my machine has taken a performance hit with that feature installed.

I also have the Virtual XP though I’ve not found much use for it due to it’s 16MB 2-D graphical limitations. I do know that it shouldn’t cause any performance problems when you aren’t using it and once it starts it pretty efficient with memory. When it comes to Media and games I would advise against using Virtual Machines though because such programs tend to use more resources and are more dependent upon a good graphics card.

If I’m understanding you correctly then you have successfully installed both Windows 7 and Windows XP on a single machine. In this case there’s an option in both XP and 7 for showing your operating systems (it ask how much time to show them for). In Windows 7 you can access this by going to computer properties, clicking advanced settings, click the advanced tab, click Startup and Recovery.

If that doesn’t work then you could download FreeDOS and go like you’re going to install it. At the beginning of the installation process there’s a way to partition and format drives, within this system is the ability to install a boot manager. Unfortunately the don’t remember many of the specifics of installing the boot manager but, it’s the best one I’ve found especially considering it doesn’t rely on any regular folders. I’m also assuming you are pretty decent with computers and can figure things out considering you managed to install XP like that.

It’s not perfect but, there is a trick I learned when uninstalling older versions of McAffee (SP?) and Norton. Reboot the computer into safemode (the best method I know of for rebooting into safe to remove the powersource part way through the boot), once in safemode manually delete the folder it’s installed in (sometimes it’s locked so you may need to find an unlocking tool). Once the folders been deleted use a tool like CCleaner to delete the entry (the manager built into windows checks some some of registry key). You then use a tool (again I use CCleaner for this) to erase the now bad registry keys. Finally delete the shortcuts from the start menu and desktop.

Congratulations you have now manually uninstalled the program the way pretty much the same way the uninstaller should have.

When I used PSI I honestly didn’t see an Ignore option (though it’s possible I might have missed it). Even with the ignore option though PSI is still unnecessary it you just keep your programs up to date and since most of the security risk (at least the ones PSI found for me) come from outdated browsers and plugins the program FileHippo Update Checker (I mentioned in an earlier post) will actually work pretty well (I generally noticed no more than a week delay from PSI’s detection).

Ad muncher support is saying “keyboard hot keys can not work for any application if said application doesn’t monitor keystrokes. so monitoring keystrokes in and of itself is not a bad thing.” Me thinks I will go for Adblock plus:cheers:

Thanks Jimmy

True, I honestly didn’t think about hotkeys but, then as I said before I just AdBlock which doesn’t need any hotkeys. I wonder, does the log indicate whether or not the logged keys are sent over the net in any way shape or form. If you can determine without doubt that a keylogger isn’t sending any information over the net then I’d say it wouldn’t be a problem.

I don’t have too much confidence in the whole”ready boost” thing.
I think if you have to use ready boost, Get yourself a memory usb stick that
can handle the transfer speeds needed to make it actually worth using.

Otherwise an upgrade in your system RAM will go a far longer way in speeding up your computer.

Ultimately it really depend on how you plan to use your computer. As far as the best “Ready Boost” device goes I generally go with an SD card because of the way it sits in my computer but, my friend John uses (or at least used) a memory stick. I don’t think there’s much difference overall. Moving on, if you have the RAM the only time you need to use ready boost is if you’re like me and run so many task that even Win 7 has trouble keeping up (I’ve used 95, 2000, ME, XP, Vista, and 7 and 7 is by far the best at memory management). However, it should also be mentioned that while “Ready Boost” is nowhere near as good as actually having more RAM it is much cheaper (I have PC6400 in my laptop which is fairly standard and it would probably cost me at least $70 to switch my 1 Gig card to a 2 Gig thus putting me at my max of 4 GB.)

Edit: I’ve noticed multiple post saying to use NTFS but, I use FAT (Especially since I use to switch the card between my camera and my computer). As far as using a flash drive I personally wouldn’t advise it, especially not with laptops. This is for two reasons: 1.) Flash drives tend to be slower (to my understanding at least) than SD Cards and Memory Sticks. 2.) If you’re carrying you laptop around (like so many of us do) then you may accidentally lose your flash drive mid transfer (usually via wall). Then again, as far as leaving your flash drive in mid-transfer I tend to advise against it anyway.

Finally, I realize that I’m babbling a bit more than usual today, so I ask forgiveness if my post doesn’t make as much sense as I intended it to.

I’m on a home network with 3 Win 7 machines ( 1 – Pro, 1 -HP, 1 – Ult) and an HP Media Server. Total storage accross the network is about 8TB and the computers are connected with an GB switch.

When I go to add a new folder from the time I click “Folder of New|Folder till the folder shows up is about 30 seconds and during this time the title bar displays the “Not Responding” message. After I paste in the new folder name and hit Enter until I am returned control of the Explorer window is about 1 min 30 sec.

I have tested using alternative Explores i.e. Cubic Explorer and the problem is the same.

Never had this problem before upgrading to Win 7.

Help!

I think I may be familiar with this issue. If you changed the name of the folder then pressed enter twice (to save the name of the folder then open the folder) then if will try to open the folder “New Folder” but fail because the folder was renamed. If this is the issue then you just need to wait a second between presses of the Enter Key.

If the issue is just that it’s slow then you may need to defragment or possibly run a cleanup program like CCleaner or Advanced System Care. Or if you’re willing to pay for performance you may consider TuneUp Utilities which includes tons of performance and fix tools as well as some really nice customizes. (I just wish I could afford a copy for myself)

Either way it sounds like a defrag and cleanup would do your computer some good. If that doesn’t work, then try a antivirus scan, I’d recommend Malwarebyte’s or Avast. If the problem persist after that then I’d suggest system file check (not sure where the shortcut is but, I know Advanced System Care has a link-note the disk for the particular version of Windows you installed with be necessary.)

That’s the best I can suggest, I’ve honestly never tried a GB Switch so if the problem’s specific to compatibility I couldn’t say.

My thoughts: Forget Ad-Muncher. Just use Firefox and download Adblock Plus. It’s tried & true…and free!

I use the same (Adblock Plus) and as far as recording keystrokes goes that would automatically be considered a Keylogger which is completely unnecessary for use in anti-ad software. In other words Zone Alarm is probably right and those people that said it was paranoid are probably infected with viruses and are being considered as possible victims for identity theft.

That is one interesting read. If you go to page 7 it is updated to Dec 2009 and seems to work for folks. One user commented that when Version 5.0 comes out (I’m using 4.8) that the scheduling will be included in the free home edition too. Think I’ll wait. Since it runs real time I usually only manually run the drive scans weekly.

Hey Jude

I see, that appears to be a pretty good tutorial for the Vista/7 OSes. I already use a similar method with Malwarebytes except I select the program then add the parameters “/quickscanterminate” and “/fullscanterminate”. If you go to my profile I just posted this with a few more details in another thread. I think I’ll suggest that post to the admins, perhaps they could make a section for tutorials.

I have found that many, if not most, software manufacturers assume you want their software running in the background so they set it to start running when windows starts. As we all know, anything running in the background uses resources, RAM and CPU cycles. If there is not a disable of this feature during the installation there are several places to look for these start ups to disable them. Many of you know of these, but for those that do not, here are the ones I am aware of (always back up you registry before making changes)

Start Button/All Programs/Startup

Registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftCurrentVersionRun
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftCurrentVersionRun
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWow6432NodeMicrosoftCurrentVersionRun

These areas will allow you to shut stuff off that’s running in the background. The only small problem is that it may take a second or two longer to start should you actually want to use a piece of software that you have stopped running in the background. A very tiny price to pay to get your speed back.

I already mentioned in my other post that I just use CCleaner to disable things (although it might miss something so these locations are nice to know) but I believe it should be mentioned that when you start up the program it will often times start it’s background processes as well so after you close the main program it’s prefetch or “quick launch” background process will continue to run.

There are two main solutions for this 1.) You can go into the task manager and manually delete the processes-this works for many programs though some are resistant and will just relaunch themselves. 2.) If you’ve disabled the programs at startup you can just restart your computer. In my personal experience once the computer is running these steps are only necessary if you wish to run a program (such as a game) that requires most of your power.

For example: My computer is far to underpowered to run the game DeadSpace ordinarily but, by disabling those extra startups, restarting my computer, waiting a few minutes for it to warm up, then running gamebooster I was able to run the game at it’s minimal full screen settings.

I remember using PSI when I had Vista but like at least one other person here I disabled it from startup (I used CCleaner for this). I can’t say for sure if PSI is the reason behind your slow startup and honestly with Vista no-one can be sure. I believe PSI was a bit slow when I started it though so it is possible (If a program has a slow start time when your computer is already warmed up (logged in for a while) then it’s usually much worse at start up because it’s competing with other startup programs).

Personally I removed PSI because it failed to analyze my system correctly. It constantly told me I needed to update my Java and Flash installations but, in reality it was detecting intentionally outdated versions of the programs included in developmental programs (Dreamweaver was at least one of these). PSI also had an issue with telling me to update programs that I couldn’t update freely.

So, what I now do instead is use FileHippo’s Update Checker and Software Informer. The Update Checker is only for the freeware that FileHippo host and much of it is included in Software Informers library but, FileHippo’s Servers are much faster. Software informer will also run into the issue of telling you to update programs that can’t be updated freely but, if you use the notifications tab and right click you can tell it to ignore updates for those programs.

I’ve heard of hijack this and many people have suggested it but, an easier solution may be to just install Malwarebytes (be wary of google’s search as it’s sponsered links aren’t always the safest-If you read the newsletter there was mention of this issue). Malwarebytes in my experience has detected more viruses than any other antivirus I’ve tried (paid or not), including the viruses other programs found. It’s also updated daily and completely free. The only problem with it is that the free version lacks active protection but, since I use Comodo Firewall when I’m online and set up an automatic scan with Windows Task Scheduler it’s quite nice (It doesn’t take that as much processing as having both a protection module and a firewall would).

If you wish to set up a scheduled scan look for a tutorial on setting up a scheduled task with windows and use the command line parameter “/quickscanterminate” for a quick scan, “/fullscanterminate” for a Full Scan and “/runupdate” for an update. I’m afraid I can’t offer more specific help at this time as I’m running Windows 7 and don’t remember offhand how to set up XP’s scheduled task (although I think I found it easier for some reason).

I can’t speak to the product you mention, but when I want to do something on the web and leave no traces (nothing illegal or immoral, mind you), I do so in a virtual machine like VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation that support snapshots (I don’t think Virtual PC 2007 does). Not only is it handy for many other uses, but you simply take a snapshot of the current state, do your business, then roll back the snapshot. It’s like nothing ever happened. And the files that may hit your hard drive, including the registry, during the session are done so in the larger file that comprises the virtual machine — they never hit your regular file system. Not sure if this method would elude a forensic analysis, but it would definitely circumvent most discovery attempts.

While a Virtual Machine would probably keep most of your data safe you do still have to perform the normal precautions. Obviously enough if your data is seen by a computer outside of your own such as some proxy’s and phishing sites resetting back to an earlier image won’t protect you. As for me I usually just stick to the normal methods like Upping my Security to the highest level and doing a thorough scan before doing anything sensitive. If you want even more security you could check out PortableApps.com and get firefox portable then I believe Piroforms CCleaner has a portable version as well (on their site).

The Portable Apps from PortableApps.com to my understanding save the settings like normal to the registry but then move them to a special folder when you exit the program and delete any data saved to the computer otherwise. To be extra safe you can use CCleaner or in a portable situation CCleaner Portable to clean up the registry, recycling bin, and temporary files. Something to keep in mind with any data erasure software though is that NTFS has been known to prevent complete erasure because of the way it stores data (something about it’s table keeping snippets of data).

I have Opera, Firefox, and IE8 installed. I primarily use Firefox because of it’s extensions, but because of how many extensions I have in Firefox I’ll sometimes switch to Opera which in my experience has the best built in ad blocking and speed boosters. IE is an absolute last resort as it tends to ignore a few of the safety protocols third party browsers swear by. I’ve honestly never tried Chrome though I’ve heard people swear by it (3 browsers is actually enough for me).

If you do switch to Firefox then I’d suggest the plugins Fasterfox, Adblock Plus, and WOT (I really wish Opera had built in support for this one).

I notice that you mentioned Opera getting slower, when it comes to that I honestly can’t say either way since I started with Opera 10. I do know that you must be careful about it’s Turbo feature. If you read far enough into it, it actually says that the Turbo can have a negative effect in certain situations (I don’t remember the details).

There is another Microsoft web site https://www.dreamspark.com/Products/ProductList.aspx. If you are a student and can provide credentials to prove it (student ID, .edu e-mail address, etc.), you can download various software for free. There are programs such as Visual Studio, SQL Server, Expression Studio 3, and many more. I am a student and signed up for this in November. It really comes in handy for an I.T. student on a low budget.

For Computer Science Students you may also consider acm.org which is the website for Association of Computer Machinery. It’s 20 USD for a year but, you can get professional versions of a lot of programs using the Developer AA (previously MSDNAA) partnership. It also comes with a few other partnerships that give you access for certifications, some text resources, and a couple online magazines (tech magazines of course).

It’s been my experience that they don’t properly check you credentials (although they make you wait while they do) but I plead to those who don’t properly qualify to not join. It was once possible to get Windows 7 with this deal but, because a bunch of people joined that didn’t belong there and Microsoft or ACM or perhaps both of them decided it was better to remove Win7 than to properly verify people, some of us lost a very important resource.