Re: Essential shareware utilities for XP users?

AL D wrote:

On my previous (Win98) PC, I had a short list of useful freeware or
shareware utilities to keep the system healthy: Spyware Blaster,
System Mechanic, Regclean, Ad-Aware, and AVG antivirus (no longer with
fee updates, it sems) and Kerio firewall which I now use on my XP
machine.

Can anyone suggest a list of similarly essential utilities for an XP
user to acquire?


Those all have XP versions already but why do you have Kerio on it?


I've only been using XP for a few days, and it's already doing strange
things: mouse clicking taking more than a minute to have any effect
sometimes and XP's initial  "loading user settings" taking forever,
sometimes etc. Tried reloading the OS but it didn't cure the probs.

Need to find out what the problem there is before you start loading it up with additional bells and whistles and, in particular, I'm wondering if that Kerio firewall is causing a problem since XP SP2 has it's own built-in firewall turned on by default. And firewalls in general can cause problems if not configured properly.

Need to know what the setup is, though. What's the computer? Multiple machines networked? What's your internet connection? Logging into a domain?

Have you popped up task manager to see if something is hogging CPU time? Checked your event logs for odd reports?

Also looking for a cheap but secure directory-locking program and/or
file encryption program.

Locking how and for what purpose? XP has multi-user security built in. If you simply want to block access to other users don't give access rights to them.


Is there a problem-fee way of moving programs from one directory to
another (without uninstalling, then re-installing them)? 

Can't help ya there as I haven't done that in a coon's age, and not on XP.


Thank you.

Al D 

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