AVG got a good reputation a few years ago for being free and fast with good detection rates. And I recommended it back then. Now Avira has surpassed AVG in every category.

The new AVG also has some stability and resource usage issues. I've encountered numerous cases where AVG was the sole cause of bogging down a machine. Even if you're not having any issues with AVG, I still recommend switching because Avira > AVG in every way.

excellent list.
I'm not sure about infrarecorder tho, I find imgburn or CDBurnerXP better. I suspect you went for infrarecorded because it's open-source?

tl;dr

Also, in my experience Foxit is faster to load & render than sumatra.

Notepad++ is probably another decent piece of software that some users need.

I admit that I have an open source bias. IMGburn and CDBurnerXP are both fine but Infrarecorder doesn't have any glaring deficiencies that would make me switch.

Anyone requiring Blu-ray should go with CDBurnerXP imo.

Re Foxit: This hasn't been my experience. Sumatra and Foxit are nearly identical in perceived rendering speeds for me. I made the switch to Sumatra over a year ago because Foxit was having issues rendering some pdfs i had. I haven't gone back so maybe it has improved.

I agree that Notepad++ is a great text editor. I mainly tried to tackle categories where the junk applications dominate the market. MS Notepad is super simple maybe to a fault but I can't consider it junk.

while we're at it 7-zip in place of winzip/rar

I already have pidgin. I was looking at the OTR link but i have no clue which one of the downloads to download and install.

W32 installer for Pidgin 2.x

7-zip over winrar? care to eleaborate? used winrar for years. thanks

also, funkyworms, thanks for the vids and the help. much obliged

This really has helped my machine run quite a bit faster though.

Question though... you mentioned after checking your processes at after rebooting that if we have any more than 40 processes running we should look into slimming down. I'm starting out at 80. I know this is a bit generic of a question, but where is agood place to start looking?

Very nice!

Hmm
I just checked on of mine PC's as well
38
I have either not a clue where to start yet :s

Edit : Ahh nevermind, I know how I got there . Solved it

well, for one winrar is not free whereas 7-zip is open-source and 7-zip does everything winrar does and more.
Winrar was the best there was a few years ago but i believe 7-zip is way superior now.

7zip is free as in beer and as in speech. Where as winrar is only free as in every time you go get a beer, there is guy asking you if you want to pay for the beer when you don't have to.

funkyworms,
You changed the page file size, but didn't really specify the reason. What is the benefit for doing this?