Windows 7: Running light

As of now my config is Win 7 64 home, LUA, 7fw, UAC on high, Sandboxie drop rights/delete upon exit, IE-9 w/ smartscreen on, and MBAM free for on demand scan Now, is it possible to trim alittle fat off with a OS tweak or two? Or is there a tweak or two that will harden things abit without any trimming?

What are you ultimately trying to accomplish? Speed up boot time? Free hard drive space? Reduce CPU usage? This tutorial may give you some ideas.

Optimize Windows 7

Sorry, im concerned with the security end only

You may want to look at some security with active (always on) protection. Microsft Security essentails will take care of that.

Im done with the A/V scene. Its all about tweeking and running light from now on. I know its hard for some to do this without feeling alittle naked, but im enjoying it The ugly truth is, everytime i caught something, there was an A/V involved. The good part is ive NEVER caught anything when running Returnil, Comodo D+, Geswall, or my fav, Sandboxie But thank you for the suggestion Im more looking for a few tweeks maybe, that can be done by the average dummy

Seven Forums will be here when you need help.

Thank you kind sir You should try it with me though, i think youll like it

Been there done that, got a tee shirt. Haven't been back.

Hmmmm...I don't really run any tweaks related to security. I used to run with a LUA on my work laptop...but found that it wasn't really doing anything beneficial for me. The other machines where I don't use a limited account seem to be fine as well.

I leave UAC enabled (although not on high), and I use the Windows 7 firewall along with my hardware firewalls (at work) and my NAT firewall (Linksys router at home).

With regards to AV, we use Trend at work, and I use MSE at home. While neither product seems to really ever find anything on my computers, i guess I don't want to go completely head in the sand and have something crop up which "might" have been preventable.

The number 1 thing which I changed which pretty much stopped problems from happening for me, was getting away from piracy of any kind. Once I quit searching for activators, serial sites, warez sites, commercial software keys, and software which I didn't pay for...it seems to have reduced issues by about 99.99%. And I gave all of that stuff up 6-8 years ago.

I keep mbam around, although it pretty much never finds anything. I also run Spyware Blaster from time to time, from Javacoolsoftware. SpywareBlaster® | Prevent spyware and malware. Free download.. However, I'm unsure if that has really prevented anything either.

The #1 thing I do to keep my machine as light as possible, is that I test and play with software exclusively in a VM. And I load only what I absolutely need on my desktop. This keeps it fast, and keeps plenty of space on my limited space SSD for the OS. Any of my questionable web surfing (like when work forced me to try to jailbreak an iPad), is usually done within a VM running sandboxie.

If your PC runs fine with all that armoury, theres no harm in continuing with that. You dont have to be light because other people are. Also, step out and experiment instead of asking people whats good for you. Make sure your data is backed up at all times, then fiddle, you'll learn much better that way. Just my opinion, no offence meant.