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Survey: Craplets & Bloatware What is causing your PC to feel bloated? What's New at PC Pitstop, January 2005
Your Source for Free Online PC Tests & Diagnostics
IN THIS ISSUE
More Information on Safe Surfing
Our series on spyware and Internet scams can help you and
your family stay safe while you cruise the Internet. This
month's article shows some of the scams and deceptions you
may find, including drive-by ActiveX dialogs, peer-to-peer
download dangers, and deceptive advertising. We also show you
some of the email scams such as "phishing" that attempt to
trick you into giving out your personal information.
If you haven't seen last month's article on spyware and kids,
be sure to check it out as well!
Give Your PC A
Disk fragmentation is a major performance killer on any system.
Executive Software's Diskeeper eliminates fragmentation and
gets your drives running at full speed. With Diskeeper's simple
"set it and forget it" setup, you never need to remember to do
disk maintenance again!
PC Pitstop Test Enhancements
This month we've added a new feature to our Full Tests and you
can now see the complete list of software that is installed on
your system. This list comes from the Add/Remove Programs list
in Control Panel, but we add one very useful feature that you
can't get in Windows: The list is sorted by the date that the
programs were installed. This can be useful for all sorts of
problem solving, especially for things that crop up suddenly
due to some recently installed program.
Top Dawg Challenge Winners
Our first-ever Top Dawg Challenge was a big success, but more
importantly it was great fun! Steve Hogan took first prize in
the stock category with his stock 2.6GHz Athlon FX-55 system.
Tim Starace won the overclocked AMD category with an Athlon
FX-55 juiced all the way to 3.427GHz! Doug Bender claimed top
prize in the overclocked Intel category with a Pentium 4 maxed
at 4.417GHz. All of them get top-end video cards courtesy of
the Challenge sponsor, BFG. Many thanks to BFG and all the Pit
Crew that helped judge and check scores. Get the full rundown
on all the winners and prizes at our Top Dawg Challenge page:
Two Great Spyware Cleaners Many people are concerned about spyware, and shady companies are exploiting those worries by selling ineffective anti-spyware products. Some purported anti-spyware products actually install spyware onto your system! We can recommend Spyware Doctor and Pest Patrol for legitimate and effective anti-spyware tools. Is AMD Cleaning Intel's Clock?
Our Top Dawg Challenge shows that although Intel still has chips
running at the highest clock speeds, AMD manages to get a lot
more work done at lower clock speeds. If you're going out to
buy a new PC, don't let Intel's higher clock speeds trick you
into thinking that Intel chips are faster. Want more help in
finding the right chip for your next computer? Ask at The Pit:
Join the PC Pitstop Folding or SETI Team
Can a PC cure cancer? The Folding@Home project uses your spare
CPU time to find proteins that might be useful in the fight
against diseases. SETI@Home puts your computing power to work
searching for messages in the signals we receive from space.
Learn more and join the team at the Distributed Computing
section of our forums! About PC PitstopPC Pitstop, LLC (http://www.pcpitstop.com) was formed in February 2000, and offers users a unique way to make sure their PCs are running fast, stable and secure--all through a free, Web-based interface. Don't Want This Newsletter?PC Pitstop's monthly newsletter is an optional feature of your account. Instructions to change your account settings are here: http://www.pcpitstop.com/faq/account.asp |
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