Hi Cameron--
I'd use a systematic check for any components on your system that use
resources, and I don't think this is related to any specific drivers.
minimize your CPU/resource consumption, defrag regularly and
well, stop services and processes that you do not need because Vista
defaults some that you well may not. Also make sure you run a regular
spyeware scan--Defender comes with Vista and also Add/Aware. Or Win One
Care has its own spy scanner and I recommend it. Run the MSFT Malicious
Software Removal Tool as well from their site or dl it.
Don't judge a book by its cover - why Windows Vista Defrag is cool
http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/ar...s-cover-why-windows-vista-defrag-is-cool.aspx
Perfect Disk
www.raxco.com
Malicious Software Removal Tool
http://www.microsoft.com/security/malwareremove/default.mspx
Below is a general outline for cleaning and speeding your PC:
******Speed PC and Control CPU Tips/Steps******
SPEED AND CPU:
_______________
1) Trim processes you don't need in TM. Google them or "search engine of
your choice them" if you have to.
2) Go to
services.msc in run box and turn off services not needed and there are some.
SERVICE CONFIGURATION REFERENCES*
*Vista Services*
Part One
http://www.tweakvista.com/article38662.aspx
Part Two
http://www.tweakvista.com/article38664.aspx
Windows Vista Services Tweak Guide v1.0
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=87443
3) Run System File Checker.
SFC:
http://www.updatexp.com/scannow-sfc.html
In Vista run it from an elevated command prompt. Right click command on
start and run as administrator.
4) Run 3 or so spyware scans Windows Defender, , Adaware, and Spybot
5) Probably the most important for speed consistently and efficient resource
use DEFRAG with
www.raxco.com or
www.diskeeeper.com with 15% free space on
drive if DK and or >5% if Raxco's Perfect Disk.
http://groups.msn.com/windowsxpcentral/spyware.msnw
Download Adaware and
Spybot from here.
GOOD Overall Review for Defending Your PC:
http://defendingyourmachine.blogspot.com/
MSFT Defense Site MSFT Security:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/default.mspx
Protect Your PC from MSFT Security:
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/protect/default.mspx
MSFT Windows Defender
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx
MSFT MSRT: (Malicious Software Removal Tool)
http://www.microsoft.com/security/malwareremove/default.mspx
MSFT "Windows One Care" in Wings (AV and Spyware Scans)
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/may05/05-13WindowsOneCarePR.mspx
6) Unck items from msconfig start tab you don't need starting and some
won't start--peoiple who think just uncking for many are naive because there
are 12 places things can be started including several reg keys like Run Once
keys and there are serveral.
7) Turn off Messaging service--it's a security vulnerability and it slows
you
8) Defrag very often every other day actually.
9) Turn off indexing.
10) Clear TIF and %temp% files (delete) and go to safe mode to get as many
as u can.
10) Do troubleshooting with msconfig.
11) Do Clean boot with msconfig utility and search for the directions here:
Vista RTM Tweak Guide (Tweaks to Improve Performances)
http://www.google.com/search?source...,GGLJ:2006-47,GGLJ:en&q=vista+rtm+tweak+guide
1) Task Manager lists the services on the services tab in Vista.
2) Type services.msc in run box and using the list of services, click the
service and you'll get a description of services.
3) There is a list here of the default services and a description>>click
"default settings for services" in the left pane.
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Windo...afb8-43ce-b39d-50e6d5b89bf81033.mspx?mfr=true
4) To view service dependencies
1.
Open Services.
2.
In the details pane, right-click the service that you want to view
dependencies for, and then click Properties.
3.
Click the Dependencies tab.
4.
To view services that are associated dependencies of the selected service,
in the list on the Dependencies tab, click the plus sign next to the
service.
Many of the services but not all in Vista are the same as in XP, so in that
context:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/services.htm
Also see the extremely helpful site:
Black Viper's Service List
http://www.dead-eye.net/WinXP Services.htm
Black Viper's Site (Many of the same services in Vista)
http://www.dead-eye.net/WinXP Services.htm
http://www.z123.org/techsupport/xpservices.htm
http://www.geocities.com/ziyadhosein/xpserv1.htm
http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_content.php
This will be helpful
http://web.archive.org/web/20041128084144/www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm
______________________________________________________________________________________________
How to troubleshoot by using the System Configuration utility in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310560/
Resources for troubleshooting startup problems in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308041/
How to perform advanced clean-boot troubleshooting in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;316434
How to perform a clean boot in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310353/
How to Disable a Service or Device that Prevents Windows from Starting
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310602/
Also ck out these references:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,5155,00.asp
http://www.speedupyourcomputer.windowsreinstall.com/index.htm
and
http://www.extremetech.com/search_r...=how+to+speed+windows+xp&filterapp=&site=4P.S.
Defragging with a decent defrag every day will make a huge dent inefficient
resource/CPU use.
Perfect Disk has a 5 month full functionality trial on now for Windows
Vista.
If you run Win One Care, it has its own spyware scanning, so you don't need
Windows Defender which ships with Vista turned on.
Good luck,
CH
A big shout out to Scootie Libby--the world's most gutless probationer.
Scootie is a rich white American whose investment banker daddy left him
millions and Tucker Carlson's rich daddy Richard a former local news anchor,
paid for Scootie's fine and his legal expenses.
Don't be an indifferent American; stop the explosions that slaughter the
children and families of your poorer members in Iraq. Those would be the
explosions you make sure your family doesn't get near.
Welcome to apathetic America (home of Redmond, Washington) where the
indifferent people get the Democracy they deserve:
FRANK RICH: I Did Have Sexual Relations With That Woman
New York 7/22/07
IT'S not just the resurgence of Al Qaeda that is taking us back full circle
to the fateful first summer of the Bush presidency. It's the hot sweat
emanating from Washington. Once again the capital is titillated by a scandal
featuring a member of Congress, a woman who is not his wife and a rumor of
crime. Gary Condit, the former Democratic congressman from California, has
passed the torch of below-the-Beltway sleaziness to David Vitter, an
incumbent (as of Friday) Republican senator from Louisiana.
Mr. Vitter briefly faced the press to explain his "very serious sin,"
accompanied by a wife who might double for the former Mrs. Jim McGreevey. He
had no choice once snoops hired by the avenging pornographer Larry Flynt
unearthed his number in the voluminous phone records of the so-called D.C.
Madam, now the subject of a still-young criminal investigation. Newspapers
back home also linked the senator to a defunct New Orleans brothel, a charge
Mr. Vitter denies. That brothel's former madam, while insisting he had been
a client, was one of his few defenders last week. "Just because people visit
a whorehouse doesn't make them a bad person," she helpfully told the Baton
Rouge paper, The Advocate.
Mr. Vitter is not known for being so forgiving a soul when it comes to
others' transgressions. Even more than Mr. Condit, who once co-sponsored a
bill calling for the display of the Ten Commandments in public buildings,
Mr. Vitter is a holier-than-thou family-values panderer. He recruited his
preteen children for speaking roles in his campaign ads and, terrorism
notwithstanding, declared that there is no "more important" issue facing
America than altering the Constitution to defend marriage.
But hypocrisy is a hardy bipartisan perennial on Capitol Hill, and hardly
news. This scandal may leave a more enduring imprint. It comes with a
momentous pedigree. Mr. Vitter first went to Washington as a young
congressman in 1999, to replace Robert Livingston, the Republican leader who
had been anointed to succeed Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House. Mr.
Livingston's seat had abruptly become vacant after none other than Mr. Flynt
outed him for committing adultery. Since we now know that Mr. Gingrich was
also practicing infidelity back then - while leading the Clinton impeachment
crusade, no less - the Vitter scandal can be seen as the culmination of an
inexorable sea change in his party.
And it is President Bush who will be left holding the bag in history. As the
new National Intelligence Estimate confirms the failure of the war against
Al Qaeda and each day of quagmire signals the failure of the war in Iraq, so
the case of the fallen senator from the Big Easy can stand as an epitaph for
a third lost war in our 43rd president's legacy: the war against sex.
During the 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush and his running mate made a point of
promising to "set an example for our children" and to "uphold the honor and
the dignity of the office." They didn't just mean that there would be no
more extramarital sex in the White House. As a matter of public policy,
abstinence was in; abortion rights, family planning and homosexuality were
out. Mr. Bush's Federal Communications Commission stood ready to punish the
networks for four-letter words and wardrobe malfunctions. The surgeon
general was forbidden to mention condoms or the morning-after pill.
To say that this ambitious program has fared no better than the creation of
an Iraqi unity government is an understatement. The sole lasting benchmark
to be met in the Bush White House's antisex agenda was the elevation of
anti-Roe judges to the federal bench. Otherwise, Sodom and Gomorrah are
thrashing the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition
day and night.
The one federal official caught on the D.C. Madam's phone logs ahead of Mr.
Vitter, Randall Tobias, was a Bush State Department official whose tasks had
included enforcing a prostitution ban on countries receiving AIDS aid. Last
month Rupert Murdoch's Fox network succeeded in getting a federal court to
throw out the F.C.C.'s "indecency" fines. Polls show unchanging majority
support for abortion rights and growing support for legal recognition of
same-sex unions exemplified by Mary Cheney's.
Most amazing is the cultural makeover of Mr. Bush's own party. The G.O.P.
that began the century in the thrall of Rick Santorum, Bill Frist and George
Allen has become the brand of Mark Foley and Mr. Vitter. Not a single
Republican heavyweight showed up at Jerry Falwell's funeral. Younger
evangelical Christians, who may care more about protecting the environment
than policing gay people, are up for political grabs.
Nowhere is this cultural revolution more visible - or more fun to watch -
than in the G.O.P. campaign for the White House. Forty years late, the party
establishment is finally having its own middle-aged version of the summer of
love, and it's a trip. The co-chairman of John McCain's campaign in Florida
has been charged with trying to solicit gay sex from a plainclothes police
officer. Over at YouTube, viewers are flocking to a popular new mock-music
video in which "Obama Girl" taunts her rival: "Giuliani Girl, you stop your
fussin'/ At least Obama didn't marry his cousin."
As Margery Eagan, a columnist at The Boston Herald, has observed, even the
front-runners' wives are getting into the act, trying to one-up one another
with displays of what she described as their "ample and aging" cleavage. The
décolletage primary was kicked off early this year by the irrepressible
Judith Giuliani, who posed for Harper's Bazaar giving her husband a
passionate kiss. "I've always liked strong, macho men," she said. This was
before we learned she had married two such men, not one, before catching the
eye of America's Mayor at Club Macanudo, an Upper East Side cigar bar, while
he was still married to someone else.
Whatever the ultimate fate of Rudy Giuliani's campaign, it is the straw that
stirs the bubbling brew that is the post-Bush Republican Party. The idea
that a thrice-married, pro-abortion rights, pro-gay rights candidate is
holding on as front-runner is understandably driving the G.O.P.'s
increasingly marginalized cultural warriors insane. Not without reason do
they fear that he is in the vanguard of a new Republican age of
Addams-family values and moral relativism. Once a truculent law-and-order
absolutist, Mr. Giuliani has even shrugged off the cocaine charges leveled
against his departed South Carolina campaign chairman, the state treasurer
Thomas Ravenel, as a "highly personal" matter.
The religious right's own favorite sons, Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee,
are no more likely to get the nomination than Ron Paul or, for that matter,
RuPaul. The party's faith-based oligarchs are getting frantic. Disregarding
a warning from James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said in March that
he didn't consider Fred Thompson a Christian, they desperately started
fixating on the former Tennessee senator as their savior. When it was
reported this month that Mr. Thompson had worked as a lobbyist for an
abortion rights organization in the 1990s, they credulously bought his
denials and his spokesman's reassurance that "there's no documents to prove
it, no billing records." Last week The New York Times found the billing
records.
No one is stepping more boldly into this values vacuum than Mitt Romney. In
contrast to Mr. Giuliani, the former Massachusetts governor has not only
disowned his past as a social liberal but is also running as a paragon of
moral rectitude. He is even embracing one of the more costly failed Bush sex
initiatives, abstinence education, just as states are abandoning it for
being ineffective. He never stops reminding voters that he is the only
top-tier candidate still married to his first wife.
In a Web video strikingly reminiscent of the Vitter campaign ads, the entire
multigenerational Romney brood gathers round to enact their wholesome
Christmas festivities. Last week Mr. Romney unveiled a new commercial
decrying American culture as "a cesspool of violence, and sex, and drugs,
and indolence, and perversions." Unlike Mr. Giuliani, you see, he gets along
with his children, and unlike Mr. Thompson, he has never been in bed with
the perverted Hollywood responsible for the likes of "Law & Order."
There are those who argue Mr. Romney's campaign is doomed because he is a
Mormon, a religion some voters regard almost as suspiciously as Scientology,
but two other problems may prove more threatening to his candidacy. The
first is that in American public life piety always goeth before a fall.
There had better not be any skeletons in his closet. Already Senator
Brownback has accused Mr. Romney of pushing hard-core pornography because of
his close association with (and large campaign contributions from) the
Marriott family, whose hotel chain has prospered mightily from its X-rated
video menu.
The other problem is more profound: Mr. Romney is swimming against a swift
tide of history in both culture and politics. Just as the neocons had their
moment in power in the Bush era and squandered it in Iraq, so the values
crowd was handed its moment of ascendancy and imploded in debacles ranging
from Terri Schiavo to Ted Haggard to David Vitter. By this point it's safe
to say that even some Republican primary voters are sick enough of their
party's preacher politicians that they'd consider hitting a cigar bar or two
with Judith Giuliani.
___________________________________
MAUREEN DOWD: A Woman Who's Man Enough
WASHINGTON 7/22/07
Things are getting confusing out there in Genderville.
We have the ordinarily poker-faced secretary of defense crying over young
Americans killed in Iraq.
We have The Washington Post reporting that Hillary Clinton came to the floor
of the Senate in a top that put "cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on
C-SPAN2."
We have Mitt Romney spending $300 for makeup appointments at Hidden Beauty,
a mobile men's grooming spa, before the California debate, even though NBC
would surely have powdered his nose for free.
We have Elizabeth Edwards on a tear of being more assertive than her
husband. She argued that John Edwards is a better advocate for women than
Hillary, explaining that her own experience as a lawyer taught her that
"sometimes you feel you have to behave as a man and not talk about women's
issues."
We have Bill Clinton, who says he'd want to be known as First Laddie,
defending his woman by saying, "I don't think she's trying to be a man."
We have The Times reporting that Hillary's campaign is quizzical about why
so many women who are like Hillary - married, high income, professional
types - don't like her. A Times/CBS News poll shows that women view her more
favorably than men, but she has a problem with her own demographic and some
older women resistant to "a lady president" from the land of women's lib.
In a huge step forward for her, The Times said that "all of those polled -
both women and men - said they thought Mrs. Clinton would be an effective
commander in chief."
So gender isn't Hillary's biggest problem. Those who don't like her said it
was because they don't trust her, or don't like her values, or think she's
too politically expedient or phony.
There is a dread out there about 28 years of Bush-Clinton rule. But most
people are not worried about Hillary's ability to be strong. Anyone who can
cast herself as a feminist icon while leading the attack on her husband's
mistresses, anyone who thinks eight years of presidential pillow talk
qualifies her for the presidential pillow, is plenty tough enough to smack
around dictators, and other Democrats.
John Edwards and Barack Obama often seem more delicate and concerned with
looking pretty than Hillary does. Though the tallest candidate usually has
the advantage, Hillary has easily dominated the debates without even wearing
towering heels.
When she wrote to Bob Gates asking about the Pentagon's plans to get out of
Iraq, it took eight weeks for an under secretary, Eric Edelman, to send a
scalding reply, suggesting that she was abetting enemy propaganda. But Mrs.
Clinton hit back with a tart letter to Secretary Gates on Friday and scored
something of a victory, since he issued a statement that did not back up his
own creep.
Maybe Hillary has had her tear ducts removed. If she acted like a sob sister
on the war the way Mr. Gates did, her critics would have a field day.
Even in an era when male politicians can mist up with impunity, it was
startling to see the defense chief melt down at a Marine Corps dinner
Wednesday night as he talked about writing notes every evening to the
families of dead soldiers like Douglas Zembiec, a heroic Marine commander
known as "the Lion of Falluja," who died in Baghdad in May after giving up a
Pentagon job to go on a fourth tour of Iraq. "They are not names on a press
release or numbers updated on a Web page," he said. "They are our country's
sons and daughters."
The dramatic moment was disconcerting, because Mr. Gates, known as a decent
guy who was leery of the Bushies' black-and-white, bullying worldview, has
clearly been worn down by his effort to sort out the Iraq debacle. He and
Condi, who worked together under Bush I, have been trying to circumvent the
vice president to close Gitmo without much success, while the president
finds ingenious new ways to allow torture.
Mostly, though, it was moving - a relief to see a top official acknowledge
the awful cost of this war. The arrogant Rummy was dismissive. The obtuse W.
seems incapable of understanding how inappropriate his sunny spirits are.
And the callous Cheney's robo-aggression continues unabated. (What could be
more nerve-racking than the thought of President Cheney, slated to happen
for a couple of hours yesterday while Mr. Bush had a colonoscopy? Could it
be - a Medal of Freedom for Scooter?)
Mr. Gates captured the sadness we feel about American kids trapped in a
desert waiting to be blown up, sent there by men who once refused to go to a
warped war themselves.
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