ENDITALL
This is, without a doubt, the PC user's best friend! It closes all the TSR- Terminate-and-Stay-Resident that sap system resources from you even if you are not using the programs. Those cute little icons in your tray all take power you need to run games and sims. System resources are diluted an average of 10% with just three or four running plus the non-closeable Windows ones like Explorer and the tray applet itself.
Yes you can key "ctl+alt+del" or whatnot, depending on your Windows version, to close them one by one but Enditall does it all at once with a couple of clicks. Depending on the version of Windows running, you will see a difference in percentage. With things in Win 95/98 all closed up I got 93-94% free resources and with ME I got 91%. XP no longer shows resources available.
Most importantly, if you plan to play a game or run a combat simulator you should do it from a fresh boot. If you use several programs like Word, a scanner and image software and accessed the web first even using Enditall will not free up all you can by rebooting. Vestiges of the programs lurk in your system no matter what. So boot up, use Enditall and go directly to your game for the best results. You can protect any TSRs you want with Enditall to not shut down. Nice.
Keep the number of pop up icons installed in the system tray to a minimum. Go to "my computer" and find the proper folder and click on the icon to find them. Go to the Start Up menu and delete all start-up icons! It may take a few seconds more to start up the program but it relieves the clutter and allows faster Windows loading too. For that matter desktop icons that are not often used can be removed as well. You can make a desktop folder with all your shortcuts inside instead of having them strewn across your screen. XP has tons of TSRs running at start up, which I've closed with no ill results. I can't be forceful enough in this point- Keep it clean and simple!
There has been a change to where programs are doing less automatic start on boot up and are not placing icons on desktops and in trays. In years gone by intsalling a program meant all that schlock showed up on your machine. So even programs you use once in a month were hovering there robbing strength form your system.
There is an Enditall2 out there and features a RAM booster but I like the original better and it works even in Windows XP with Service Pack 2.
ZDNet: Tech News and White Papers for IT Professionals has the latest version but the simpler 1.0 original can be found using a search engine to a download site.
SISOFTWARE SANDRA
There exist too many free diagnostic utilities to list to gauge various benchmarks and performance with problem areas highlighted. You should try a few to see if they suit your needs. Sandra has two versions. One is a freeware edition and the other is the Pro edition. Being cheap I've used the free one with good results to diagnose my system and find interesting things.
The Pro version allows 50 areas to be separately analyzed with the free edition giving some less, but all your vital hardware is covered. For example, "Windows memory" is analyzed but "memory resources" is not. Actually, Cacheman can cover that. It may tell you that you video card is producing 60 MB out of 64 MB and break that down further and show refresh rate plus a long list of supported modes. It produces almost more info than you can digest. What the free version doesn't cover I've found not lacking.
There is a long list of tips and suggested settings to make that the analysis gives you to improve performance. You can benchmark components of your system against others. These are nicely shown in graphic form. This is probably the best diagnostic and can't hurt anything on your system.
Go to
http://www.sisiftware.co.uk/sandra