Pro's and Con's of AdAware

Discussion in 'Software' started by Geek_At_Heart, Sep 13, 2003.

  1. Geek_At_Heart

    Geek_At_Heart Private E-2

    Greetings. I am new to this board, however will probably come here often. I work at a local Staples, in the Buisness Machines Dept, just started working in the Tech Center as well. Got a computer in today running painfully slow, i must confess the constant urge to throw it against a brick wall, might help it go a little faster (Any comments?) Anyway....I installed a little more RAM, seems to have helped a little, as did uninstalling Kazaa and Gator app's. However, the thing is still running slowly. I've already run WINdoc and DISKdoc (of Norton Systemworks '03) and still have to run Nortons big bad defragmentor. Do not think it will make a HUGE difference, in which case I will need to turn to something new, which brings me to the original question I was going to ask. Is AdAware safe? I don't want to run it on a customers computer, to find out it has wiped out some crucial file or registry entry and the OS won't work anymore (have heard stories like this around the campfire, they are the ones that keep me awake at night). Any input would be great, either thoughts/opinions about AdAware or input into how I should make the curssed Compaq w/intel celeron and 384 megs of RAM run faster. I need to go to work tomorrow morning, so the faster the better. Thanks!
    ~Ben
     
  2. Adrynalyne

    Adrynalyne Guest

    Pros:

    It helps performance, stability and privacy.


    Cons:

    Some programs tap into the winsock 2 service in XP.

    Ad Aware doesn't always remove the entries in that particular area. Removing an application and not the winsock2 keys with it=bad news.

    So removing something, such as new.net domains can leave you with a broken winsock, and off the network.

    Easy enough to fix, but annoying nonetheless.
     
  3. Major Attitude

    Major Attitude Co-Owner MajorGeeks.Com Staff Member

    Really, Ad-Aware is excellent, for most people its all Pros. You simply need to look before you delete and thats time consuming for a machine thats never been checked and can have 3-500 items or more. Oh, delete Nortons Systemworks, that will speed it up. What a pile of kaka that program is. Just fixed a friends PC a while back, sped right up once I took that stupid thing off. A good drive cleaner and startup organizer with regularly scheduled defrag and scandisk goes a long way. If you have not cleaned out their startup items, that could do you a lot. RegCleaner has a really good startup tool, or another free program called StartupCPL adds a control panel applet for managing startup items. Using our search on the front page will find those for you. You didnt mention what Operating System, using over 256 megs on Win 98 or older is useless and possibly can make things worse.
     
  4. Geek_At_Heart

    Geek_At_Heart Private E-2

    Thanks for the reply, and sorry about the lack of info.
    The customer is using Windows XP Home.
    Went through MSConfig and got rid of most of the unnecessary startup stuff. About the system works, I just installed it for its defrag and windoc/diskdoc tools, will uninstall it tomorrow when i put norton '04 Antivirus on.Will run Ad-Aware, and look into other programs you mentioned. Any other kind of software configurations to optimize performance i should know of?
    Thanks again
     
  5. Major Attitude

    Major Attitude Co-Owner MajorGeeks.Com Staff Member

    Yes, disable any unneded services. You can browse the services for obvious un-needed items depending on your customer. For example, if they dont use wireless or a printer, those services can be disabled. Theres a few oddball ones too, for example Nvidia video cards loads a service called driver helper, I think. Its not needed. We have covered a good bit of the basic tweaking stuff, though. Obviously driver updates can be helpful as well, including motherboard chipset drivers.
     

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