CDreier wrote on Oct 13^th, 2008 at 12:53pm:



same thing.. NO difference!

A salutary lesson.


I have had increasing problems with FSX,  no matter what I tried the stutters continued unchanged.  Even with a flat earth - no scenery complexity and no autogen.

I use Acronis to take period images from my active drives and store them on a partitioned fourth drive.  My OS is on the C drive, and FSX is on the E drive.

I rolled back the C drive to a much earlier date and the problem disappeared.  Why?

I believe it was because I foolishly used the registry cleaner on CC cleaner.  This utility does a great job on the usual stuff - getting rid of temp files, emptying the Trash, etc etc. 

But as Nick has warned there is no known safe Registry cleaner for Vista, and I believe I caused irreparable damage - that without the imaging software would have required an OS reinstall.

Live and never learn, that seems to be me!

NickN wrote on Oct 13^th, 2008 at 1:54pm:

I was referring to O&O 10 or 11 trial...

Thanks for taking all this time to make this post and keeping people informed.  I went through everything, boot up is much faster.  I gained about 6-8 fps in FSX.  I'm sure I'll see gains in other areas.
A couple of questions if you could answer them.
What great benefit exactly is it to use O&O defrag over the stock Windows defrag.  What does O&O do, that standard defrag doesn't to improve the system?  I'm just wondering if I should pay up the extra cash for O&O.

In msconfig, I stopped a few programs from loading on startup.  Each time I boot, I get the warning that I changed startup and should go back to normal startup, then it runs msconfig.  What is the best way to stop that.  Should I check the box in the message to not show me that anymore.  Or is there a way to make my current start up the normal startup?
And lastly, will Windows/Prefetch repopulate itself over time, as programs are used, or installed?  I've just read in other places that deleting the files in Prefetch can slow programs loading, etc.

Again, many thanks for your continued efforts here.

Orion66 wrote on Oct 16^th, 2008 at 4:19pm:



I dont have time to explain how everything works however in a nutshell O&O removes CPU/memory cycles which were being eaten up by Windows and the system at boot. The defrag itself fixes part of that and the prefetch change does the rest. The experts on that subject are only 1/2 correct... and with the use of O&O they are flat out WRONG

what you have done is remove the memory footprint Windows places on the system at boot and replaced it with the O&O system of defrag for the boot files. In other words you still have prefetch, you just do not prefetch CRAP and only the files truly needed at boot

Do you need to prefetch MS Paint? Why use that crap system then. All you need to prefetch is what the system needs to boot and what you have done is set O&O up to use a system Windows does not enable by default and only call boot files, and NO your prefecth folder will NEVER have anything in it other than the 2 files I listed... the file LAYOUT.ini has ALL the boot file locations and will rewrite itself with hew information as the computer is used, or, you manually run the command line I posted. In that, you completely replaced the crap windows prefetch system with the one I posed in this thread.


As for startup... is there not a checkbox that allows you to tell the system to not show that message at startup?  Its been a long time so I do not remember

2 Ways to clean that list...

OPTION1
if you are sure you do not need the item, open the program associated with the line and see if there are any options in its properties to RUN WITH WINDOWS.. if so UNCHECK them... that should clear the item

Some software does not have that option, in that case..

OPTION 2

You can manually remove the items from the registry:

START – RUN, type REGEDIT and browse to the following keys:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run


For safety, right click each RUN folder and select EXPORT... name them RUN1.reg and RUN2.reg
If you screw up you can simply double click the reg files and restore the startup items in the registry.

Open the RUN keys and find the item in right pane, right click and delete it. On reboot the item will be gone from MSCONFIG


Also... shortcuts in the START folder in the START - ALL PROGRAMS - STARTUP list will appear in MSCONFIG... check the shortcuts in that folder from the All Programs menu and delete the ones you do not need... you can also back those up for restore as well if you remove something you should not have.

First thanks for your continuing coaching of us all - powerusers and OC'ers well as the rest of us  
Just a quick question (to which you may have given the answer - if so I regret asking, but I've been unable to find it).
Would running your tweaks WITHOUT the offline O&O 8.5 defrag make any sense? Or perhaps what should one avoid doing if the offline defrag is skipped?
Reason for my question - my system is an OEM (Medion) and got hosed when I first went through the list. At that time it wasn't evident why - at least not to me. So I've stayed with the obviously safer parts of your list.
For now - I'm waiting for Nellie to appear - to be able to make an informed cost/benefit decision ("bang for bucks") about my next system.
But I still wonder - what could I do - while waiting?

I have a fresh install of XP with all service packs and updates. At the moment I have a trial copy of Eset AV and Windows firewall. Before I have always had the bells and whistles of the full AVG paid system but wonder whether with what I have now (with Eset being purchased) will be sufficient. I get the impression from what I read that the more protection one has the more the system has to cope with. My system is purely for FS9 and FSX on separate partitions of a second HD. Storage of downloads is on an external Maxtor. Internet access is through a home hub.

Is what I have enough protection ?

Thanks