Posted by Xander on 31 August, 2009 – 12:09 pm
In a world where advertising draws in huge sums of money and the correct wording can get you off any comeback I’m beginning to wonder where people’s sense of fairness has gone.
I just read one piece of advertising on a motherboard claiming that it can get 3,000 points on 3DMark06 with it’s on board graphics. Now this isn’t a particularly good score (something they fail to mention incidentally) but worse than that it has a note underneath the graph showing these results that the score is based on overclocking which is nigh on unforgivable.
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Posted by Xander on 31 August, 2009 – 11:11 am
Now this is a strange little app as it’s results are murky, it’s application dubious, it’s price CAN be free or paid for… there’s nothing normal about the 3DMark range.
First of all this program will help you ascertain what kind of graphics capability your system has… in theory. It does run “real world” tests but they are still synthetic and unrepresentative of actual performance in my experience. What they are useful for is that if you got a mark of 100 and then tweaked a few settings and got 103 then your general graphics performance should have improved. I say should because the program puts a lot of weight on frames per second and wants to set any quality settings itself so it marks you down for having your graphics set for quality when you run it even though your eyes would thank you for it.
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Posted by Xander on 31 August, 2009 – 10:37 am
Yes that’s right, a FREE app from Microsoft that is not only FREE but also works! I could end this post right there really.
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Posted by Xander on 31 August, 2009 – 10:24 am
I haven’t used this program since I got shot of XP (and glad I was to be rid of it too, eventually).
Basically ASO, another pay for one unfortunately, is an all in one stop to optimize your system, like PC Pitstop’s Optimizer ( though this one doesn’t optimise other applications, just windows itself) with the added extra that it makes it simple to alter certain parameters the most useful (I found) to be auto log in.
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Posted by Xander on 31 August, 2009 – 10:08 am
Now this is a free app that’s been a part of my toolkit for a good few years now. I’ve never updated it, never seen any need to, and thus far it’s worked on every version of windows except 7.
Nregopt does exactly what it says it does, if you can understand the abbreviation of course. The name means NT (as in windows NT) registry optimiser and it does just that. It takes your oversized, bloated registry (as they always are after a while of installing, uninstalling and other bits of regular use) and compacts it making it a leaner, cleaner and optimised version of itself.
Oh and it’s reliable, trouble free and very non technical. Not bad for nowt!
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Posted by Xander on 31 August, 2009 – 9:58 am
Okay so I’m getting further away from my aim of reviewing free applications which help to keep your PC running properly but this is another program that I would rather not do without again.
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Posted by Xander on 28 August, 2009 – 1:22 pm
Now I know there’s a lot of horror stories around about Vista, it slows down, it’s bloat ware, it’s hugely inefficient, yadda yadda. Well that’s just plain not true.
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Posted by Xander on 28 August, 2009 – 12:36 pm
This program has been on my ‘must run’ list ever since I had a problem with over heating. Such a simple little application, available for free from alcpu. It doesn’t do anything flashy, it simply displays the speed and temperature of your processor, no matter if it’s got four cores or not, it’ll display a temperature for each core.
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Posted by Xander on 28 August, 2009 – 12:01 pm
This single program not only started me as a believer in defragging my computer but also has probably made the most impact on me as a “geek”. Yes this is not a free program, most of the programs I will mention will be free but this is one of a select few programs which I have found to be so useful that I recommend paying out for them. I will be detailing some alternatives in later posts though which achieve similar effects for free.
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Posted by Xander on 28 August, 2009 – 9:46 am
Right well I’ve been a tinkerer ever since I’ve had a computer and over that time I’ve tried more utilities to improve my lot than most seem to try in a lifetime of computing. I’ve lost count now of how many people I’ve advised to get this or run that to get their computer back up to speed. Anyway I figured that this is a little unfair as most of the time my instructions are verbal, require writing down and laboriously copying into a browser to obtain the program. Then people have to obey written instructions verbatim and have no reassurance that it will work other than that I’ve broken more PCs than they have and yet I can get them to work again.
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