System Utility Tweakers and Such

[marcothy]

I have a self-built computer. It's my second one, and I have rebuilt or modified this machine about 3-4 times. My current specs are this:

Windows XP Home
Giga-Byte GA7n400 Pro 2 (Rev. 1) Mother Board
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
2 GB of PC 3200 Dual-Channel Ram
Nvidia 6800 GT 256 MB AGP
36 GB Raptor 10k RPM SATA (OS and Main Support files)
74 GB Raptor 10k RPM SATA (Program Files)
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum


What my question is-are there any programs out there to help tweak performance. I am more of a hardware junky than I am into OC'ing. Just have no interest, and MHO is I know just enough about OC'ing to do something stupid.

I am mostly looking for any utilities that will in some way increase performance, or make it easier to tweak performance. I have always been a do-it-yourselfer, and I just feel my system is not performing to my liking, performance-wise.

I browsed the downloads section-but that won't tell me necessarily what is good and whats not. Basically, what are some tweak programs and utilities that the people of this forum recommend?

 

[olefarte]

While I'm not into overclocking, here are some programs I have used for general system performance. X-Setup works quite well, it is shareware, but you can get a demo at the link I provided. If you want a free program, try TuneXP. It works very well also. Bear in mind that all these programs bear a certain amount of risk, be sure and back up your registry before you start, in case somthing goes wrong.

And if you are like me and are really feeling brave, you can do a lot of what these programs do manually. A good place to look for manual tweaks is at TweakHound's site. Again if you go this route, remember to back up first, you won't be sorry.

 

[howard_hopkinso]

One programme I would reccomend is Cleanmypc registry cleaner.

Not only does it do a great job of sorting out registry errors but, it also has a very good startup section that allows the user to control which programmes start along side Windows.

You can check out the programme here http://www.registry-cleaner.net/

There is a free trial version for you to download and try but, it will only fix two problems at a time so, you may need to run it many times in order to fix all problems.

Regards Howard :grinthumb