MBAM is NOT a virus checker! It checks for spy/mal/crapware.
If you haven't installed a true virus checker, and you're not getting MS Security warnings, then most likely Win7 has defaulted you to using MS Security Essentials. Which, surprisingly, does a pretty good job and uses few resources (compared to McAfee or Norton).
If you had Norton/Symantec, then be sure to also download and run the Norton Removal Tool (NRT) to make sure you get everything out of there. Yes, Norton is
so badly written that you
need an extra tool to uninstall it.
For free AV programs, my favorite is
Avira. It has always placed in the top 5 among ALL checkers, and recently took top honors from a Brazilian 'zine for finding foreign (non-English) viruses. Since the majority of nasties seem to be coming out of .ru, .ch, .tw, etc., this is an important factor to consider.
Also,
after you've got everything set up, software-wise, the way you like it, download and install "CCleaner" (the first "C" stands for "Crap"). This will clean out your registry, get rid of temp files and buffers, and just get rid of the... crap... that accumulates. You only need to run this about once or twice a year, as Win7 does a pretty good job of keeping things tidy.
You can also use the tried-and-true "msconfig" to check to see what's running at startup. On Win95-XP, click "Start --> Run... --> {type}msconfig {enter}". On Vista/W7, "Start --> Search --> {type}msconfig {enter}". Once launched, the tabs you want to look at are "Startup" and "Services". Under Startup, you'll see a list of all the programs and utils that load up. Uncheck those you don't want - if it's something you need, then go back and re-check it. Then click on Services, check the box below labeled "Hide all Microsoft Services" (as those are usually needed), and you can Google any entries to see what they are/do. Disable those you don't need, and restart.
Hardware-wise, you may want to poke around in your BIOS and see how much memory you can re-assign to your video. The memory is pooled (shared) with main system RAM, so if the current setting is 256M, then you have 3.75GB left over for the system. If you're able to bump this up to 512M, then you're left with 3.5GB for the OS. Still a pretty good size to run things.
If you seem to be having problems with games, look at your DirectX (
NOT ActiveX) settings/updates, and check for sound card driver updates. Most folks don't think that the sound would affect the video, but when running games, it can slow down things to where you think the problem is video, when it's actually the audio handling causing the video to "hiccup" (I ran into this very problem way back in the Win98 days with Nascar and a Soundblaster card.)
If you're not searching for files on your hard drive all the time, then turn OFF "indexing". Go to "Computer", right-click on the hard drive, select "Properties", and at the bottom of the window, you should see a check-box that says "Allow this drive to be Indexed for faster searching". Uncheck it, and you're good to go. Note that this does not deactivate searching, it only makes it take longer to actually search for files, since it doesn't have a pre-built index to work from (to build this index, it scans the drive while you're doing other things, and you'll notice that just sitting there twiddling your thumbs will have the drive periodically hammer away for a few minutes). The less work your hard drive is doing when indexing is more work it can do to run games/work.
Finally (at last!), if you need a good word processing program, I can recommend two good ones: Libre Office, an offshoot of OpenOffice.org (now owned by Oracle), and AbiWord. Libre is an entire suite, like MS Office, but it allows you to install just those components you're actually going to use. If you're not going to be using formulas, then skip the math/latex component. Also, it imports and exports to MS Office formats fairly well (some things are still a work in progress, as MS has been perpetual poopie-heads about making things compatible). Conversely, if all you need is a good word processor, then AbiWord fits the bill. It was one of the first to have bi-directional (Arabic, Hebrew) typing
on the same page. It's small, full-featured, and awesome.
barcode
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