"Must have" performance optimization programs?

I do,however, think there are loads of make my PC like wicked fasterer scam web sites for the mentally challenged with money to piss away. :)

here is a quote from a pc word nz (magazine) editor:

"Our testing shows that for a mechanical hard drive fragmentation doesn't noticeably affect pc performance. It does however make data recovery easier."

nostaw5 said:

here is a quote from a pc word nz (magazine) editor:

"Our testing shows that for a mechanical hard drive fragmentation doesn't noticeably affect pc performance. It does however make data recovery easier."

So the magazine editor is basically saying who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?

Now, me, I'll always take the word of some unnamed magazine editor testing some unspecified machine with an unspecified drive with unspecified testing software over my 26 years of PC programming experience.

edit: although a defrag might not add 10% performance to a benchmark, the performance increase you do get happens with less drive thrashing. It's like if you tune up your car. The top end on the highway doesn't go up.. but it gets there a lot more smoothly. It's a win/win as long as you don't get obsessive with the defrag strategy.

Hoggorm said:

I'm not actually looking for software or solutions to gain any performance, however I'm looking for simple software to run from time to time that keep my system as clean as possible.

Aside from useless files on disk, there are system services running that you might not think worth the memory usage and CPU cycles if you knew what they were doing. What they are depends on how you use your PC. One example might be Windows Media Player constantly scanning all the files on your system looking for medial files to add to its library or share over the network. Me, my network is small enough I can share stuff manually if I want and I'm not likely to play them with WMP unless they have PGS subtitles anyway.

It's a good idea to document what services you have running before you change anything. One good way to do that is use LookInMyPC

Don't let the name fool you. Even though it sounds like it's geared to the less knowledgeable user, this program does a lot of nice things and can print out nice tabular reports, such as all services on the system with current status and startup settings.

It's a nice free software.

Windows 7 will defrag itself in the background, that is enough.

Best way to keep WIndows 7 running like new is to only install what you need on the machine. Use a virtual machine for playing and all testing.

Nothing else is really needed.

pparks1 said:

Windows 7 will defrag itself in the background, that is enough.

...

Afaik there's still no simple API to return the busy status of the system HD. Which means if defrag in the background isn't going to blindly kick in even though the disk is very busy(such as already doing a defrag with another software) then it is measuring statistics with performance monitor. Which is itself a big performance hit. Until they come up with a simple API call such as PercentBusy = DiskBusy(drive) then defragging in background while the disk is in use is a flawed concept.

I think Diskeeper was one of the 3rd party apps using this scheme. Tried it and it was as lame as I expected.