YU thoroughly removes installed applications via the applications uninstaller and THEN scans the registry and file system for known changes based on the type of installer/uninstaller used. Works really well.

-Darwin (May 22, 2010, 10:21 AM)

It depends on your level of demand.
If you are curious about what has been added to your computer or you want an absolute clean uninstallation later, using uninstaller like Ashampoo Uninstaller or Total Uninstall is always a better choice.

Ashampoo I use very rarely

-Darwin (May 22, 2010, 10:21 AM)

Me too! It is too slow.
Instead I always use Total Uninstall which is much faster and can work in both ways that you have described.

I NEVER use it to actually perform an uninstall, though... Doing so is asking for trouble because any background process that is running while creating the uninstallation snapshot that makes changes to the registry during that time is going to be corrupted...

-Darwin (May 22, 2010, 10:21 AM)

I think your 'believe' above is very misleading if not totally wrong.

1) Generally speaking, if there are background programs that need to write crucial info to registry while you are doing program installation - that implies you are not installing under recommanded mode... didn't you be informed/advised to turn OFF unneccesary applications prior to installation?

2) Even if there is exception, say you are unable to turn off some background programs/services that write to file or registry, those writting, normally are non-crucial records of temporary info. Throughout my life of installing so many applications (with proper monitoring of the process) I have never come across a case where I can't easily stop a software (prior to installation) that really write crucial' info at the background.

3) Any uninstaller like Ashampoo (or Total Uninstall) will normally offer feature to exclude background disturbances. I mean what you need to do is to simply create a snapshot of your system while you are not installing anything and do something you normally will while installing application, say open notepad, run window explorer and then just create another snapshot to find out those background I/O either to registry or files, the process is rather simple, what you need to do is just add those found items to the uninstaller's exclude list.

IMO, if one doesn't find uninstaller like Ashampoo Uninstaller or Total Uninstall good (or find them very troublesome to use), he/she generally has very low expectation on how much he/she can monitor a program installation, i.e. I think Windows's ordinary install and uninstall procedure from the control panel is good enough for him/her.

Well, I do remember when I was a student, I have all the time and interest to play many computer games... but I can't afford to buy them.
Now, I have no problem, be it upgrade my PC or buying a computer game, but I don't have that much time... sigh! :(
What worries me the most is, in the future when I retire, I might have both time and money for computer games... but I might not have interest in playing them any more. :P

To me your list of speedup software seems overly excessive. I suspect a lot of overlapping functionality within this set.

When you start a gaming session, would it not be smarter to disable (MS Windows and 3rth party) services and other background tasks (indexing for example) that are not essential for the game? Throwing in the famous car analogy...'nothing beats cubic inches'.

Go and look at sites like www.blackviper.com to see which services can be disabled. Besides spending some time this solution is free, unlike all those more or less 'snakeoil' type of software you mentioned.

-Shades (April 17, 2010, 11:32 AM)

IMO, those programs are good to cleanup a PC and make sure unnecessary utilities are not running when you don't need them... but they won't really boost PC performance that much until one can feel the difference (normally you will need a benchmark program to see the difference).

Your suggestion of disabling services too has no big effect on overall PC performance... the crucial point is, if one really need to squeeze very bit of extra memory or every bit of other PC components's performance (e.g. hardisk I/O or display), it seems to me that PC is not suitable for gaming.

i.e. if one has a PC which is good enough for average gaming requirements, those efforts of tunning is not worth the small performance gain.