TeeJay3800

As a replacement for Winamp, I would recommend Quintessential Player. It doesn't play video though, so you'll need something else for that.

FYI, auto update now works.

Exactly! That's what I was just thinking. The auto updater is much easier than uninstalling, downloading, and reinstalling the software. I'll never understand why they can't activate the automatic service when the update is first released.

That's good to know! I think I'll be sticking with MVPS in that case.

You can use a program like Homer. It allows you to replace the "cannot display" message with an image of your choice. Also, I did not realize how many more items are blocked in the hpHosts hosts file!

I fixed mine too, but now www.howardforums.com will not load for me. Is this happening to anyone else?

I'm not exactly sure what you mean. If you mean displaying an image or something else in place of the "cannot display" message that using a hosts file sometimes causes, you can definitely do that. If you mean something else, then I'm not really sure. Out of curiosity, can I ask why you use that hosts file instead of the MVPS file?

Cool, thanks!

You need to follow this link: http://www.emro.nl/freeware/jkdefraggui.rar Unzip that into the JkDefrag folder and then run JKDefragGUI.exe.

The services were running even after I disabled automatic updates. When I manually stopped them, I couldn't successfully do a virus definition update or a virus scan. I got an error saying something about the program not being able to communicate with another needed service... I've used AntiVir before but was disappointed by the slow scan speeds.

So I tried it and I uninstalled it after 5 minutes. Even though there is NO real time protection, there were still 3 running processes that were using a total of 30MB! That's ridiculous! Needless to say I won't be using it again anytime soon.

Jetico is an excellent firewall! It can be a little intimidating to n00bs, but it only takes a short while to get used to it. The offical support forums on Smokey's have several very knowledgeable people who can answer any question you'd possibly have. It is BY FAR the lightest-weight firewall I've ever used...uses VERY little memory/system resources!

Here's what I use for disk defragmentation (best defrag software out there): Auslogics Disk Defrag JkDefrag O&O Defrag 2000 Sysinternals Contig with Power Defragmenter GUI Sysinternals PageDefrag

I am thinking about switching anti-virus programs and have been using AVG Free for a long time. I have also used Anti-Vir and Avast! in the past. I'm interested in a free (no trials etc) on-demand scanner and have no interest/need for real time monitoring. BitDefender 8 Free Edition looks like a very good program, but I have seen very little mentioned on this forum and wanted to know if anyone has used it before or what people have heard. What input does everyone have?

I prefer HostsMan mostly because the GUI is easier to use, but from what I understand, Hoster is a good program too.

If didn't like my Firefox extensions and themes so much, I would definitely switch to K-Meleon.

Definitely! HostsMan is a great piece of free software.

I have to say that at this point I am pretty confused. Whenever I've installed the anti-spyware component of the Yahoo toolbar, it automatically downloaded a product called Yahoo Anti-Spy with Yahoo branding that didn't look anything like the screen shots above. Does this mean that the newer version of the toolbar installs Norton, or is it only IE versions?

I don't know what to say to that. When I installed the toolbar for Firefox, I clicked the anti-spy button and it downloaded and installed the Yahoo product....nothing to do with Norton at all. Maye they changed the toolbar in the last few months...

The toolbar, like all toolbars, is useless in my opinion. The Anti-Spy app is simple and works well for a quick scan here and there. I was mostly wondering about how effective it is and what other's opinions are of it.

I hear ya there, but the toolbar is very easy to uninstall so that didn't prevent me from trying Anti-Spy.

Although I never use browser toolbars, I did want to try Yahoo Anti-Spy. You have to install the toolbar first, but you can delete it as soon as Anti-Spy is installed (as I did). I was just wondering if anyone has used it, or if they've heard anything about it. It scans very fast, and even picked up on an item that Ad-Aware missed! What can anyone tell me about this app?

Since it's a laptop, most likely there is only one physical drive. You see both C and D because your machine has a partitioned hard drive. Partitions basically trick windows into believing there are two hard drives. This can be useful for some people who want to split up there storage space. C is typically the main drive where windows is installed, but you can use D for any kind of storage just like you would C.

Today (01-31-07) MVPS updated their hosts file. Just a little FYI.

After some research, I believe that this prefetching function is only included with Windows XP and newer, which may be why I see no option for it in CCleaner on my Windows 2000 machine. If anyone has any more info on this subject please comment as I am still somewhat in the dark on this.