June 28, 2013

TuneUp Utilities 2013 – System Optimization Series

The barrage of tools available in TuneUp Utilities 2013 reminds me of the grandeur that once was Norton Utilities. Far more than just a simple cleanup utility TuneUp Utilities offers tools to check the heath of your hard drive, monitor which programs you haven’t used so they can be removed, disable startup programs, check where all your hard drive space is going and it even comes with a Turbo Mode that boosts system processes when the system gets bogged down. Of course it does the usual tasks of cleaning up hard drive space, cleaning the registry, defragging hard drives and removing browser traces. What I like about TuneUp Utilities is that it isn’t just using the built in Windows tools. It presents it’s own tool for toggling whether a program should start when Windows boots. It has it’s own Disk Space Explorer that allows you to see where hard drive space is being used and lets you move and delete […]

June 27, 2013

Ashampoo Winoptimizer 10 – System Optimization Series

A program that claims to clean and optimize your system needs to do more than just clear out the Internet cache and empty the recycle bin. It also needs to offer more than registry cleaning and registry defrag. All of those are decent ideas to recover some space and gain a small performance boost. They’re also built into Windows as well as free programs like CCleaner. In order to really boost performance you need to dig deep into the system and remove memory hogging programs, remove apps you don’t use on a regular basis, turn off unneeded services and make sure you’re not suffering from a hard drive failure. Does Ashampoo Winoptimizer 10 fit the bill? Sort of. On the surface it works like every other "optimizer" out there. It deletes the Internet cache for Internet Explorer and Firefox. It empties the Recycle Bin and gets rid of old System Restore points. There is the usual Registry Cleaner, Registry Defrag, […]

June 26, 2013

Norton Utilities 16 – System Optimization Series

For those of you who’ve been around computers for more than a few years remember the good ol’ Norton Utilities for Windows. If you’ve been in the game long enough, you remember the Norton Utilities for DOS. It was an awesome package loaded with a suite of tools for optimizing your system, removing junk files, defragging the disks, secuely erasing files and checking the health of the disks to warn you in the event of hard drive failures. It was a wondrous all in one suite of tools. Jump ahead to 2013 and Norton Utilities is still around and in Version 16 for Windows. I had the need of it services to try and tame the massive glut of files on my drive, defragement the drive, uninstall a series of apps, control the abundance of Windows Services and generally make the system faster. So how does this new version fair after all these years? To put it simply, not well. […]

June 11, 2013

Norton Internet Security 2013–$19.27 from Amazon. Instant Download or Free Shipping

It’s already the middle of the year so it may be time to upgrade your Anti Virus protection. I just renewed mine for the year so I’m already looking to next year. When it comes to Symantec, it’s not the software version that’s important, it’s the key. With that in mind, here’s a copy of Norton Internet Security (NIS) 2013 3PC edition for $19.27. Since it normally lists in the $80 range, that’s 70% for a yearly subscription. What I end up doing is buying these ahead of time when the price drops, then add the new key when the time to renew comes. Norton makes it very easy to change the subscription to a new key. I’ve been running NIS for the past 3 years and have been extremely happy with it. Symantec has done a great job of minimizing the system resources it uses. And the protection seems extremely good. If you look at the reviews from Maximum […]

June 1, 2013

A Quick Look Around SlimBrowser and a Trip on the SlimBoat

I’m not sure what started me on this path or how exactly I landed on the CNET page listing all the browsers, but someone I managed to discover and install SlimBrowser. It has turned out to be a good thing. For the past several years I’ve used Firefox. I jumped on board with version 2, the same time Microsoft decided that IE6 was so good it didn’t need updating. Firefox offered Tabs, plugins and slew of other features that made it truly awesome. I still love Firefox and use it everyday. But something intrigued me about SlimBrowser. It was the fact that so many features were built in, yet it was still so small. SlimBrowser has tabs, there is a SpeedDial like opening screen with the most frequently used pages listed, it has a built in Ad Blocker, it has a built in Pop Up Blocker, there is AutoFill and saving of passwords and there is an improved download manager, […]

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