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Hi. I'm VanCliffe, the author of this tutorial and the designer of this thread layout. Enough for me, now lets talk on the subject. This tutorial will help you get past most of the problems you have with your computers. Making your computer faster, is simple and easy. Most of you just don't bother doing that, laziness is the number one factor. Some people just don't bother cleaning their system, they just go to the ultimate and last resort weapon called "Format & Fresh Install". That's the last thing you want to do. If you have no other option, or if your system is so badly infected and is breathing it's last breath then "Format & Fresh Install" would be the great and the wise choice to pick. If you wish to make your system run at top notch speed and performance, even making it a PCish Ferrari then read below.

• Checking & Cleaning the system from Malware
  
• Removing un-used programs
  
• Removing un-used start-up programs
  
• De-fragging
  
• General Clean-Up

First thing's first, getting rid of any kind of Malware that's present on the system will increase the performance and stability of the system for sure. We are going to do the checking and cleaning of your system with one of the most famous Malware Cleaning software. It's called "Malware Bytes' Anti-Malware". First thing's first, download MBAM from the official link I provided. (Click "here" to download MBAM) After downloading and installing MBAM, please proceed by starting MBAM. A window should appear, something like this:
Select "Perform Full Scan", sit back or get yourself a cup of coffee or tea because this is going to last for a while. It takes approximately about 15-30 minutes, and I recommend you to close all programs that might effect the scanning (Yes, this means Anti-Virus programs as well), like games, graphics editing software and whatnot. The lesser programs, the better performance the scan will have and the shorter it will take to complete. Once the scan is completed, there will be a log file shown in a new notepad document. It will tell you either you have infected files or not. Now head back to MBAM, and if you see "Objects Infected:" marked as red, this means your computer is infected. Just click the button "Remove Selected" but before, be sure to check all of the boxes. With this being done, your PC will be clean from Malware. Now let's proceed to the next step from this wonderful guide.

This step will pretty much just free up space on your hard drive. I've seen in some cases speeding up the computer and actually increasing system performance and stability. Most of the people if not all have programs installed that they don't use daily, or haven't used them in a long period of time. Navigate to "Start -> Control Panel -> Programs and Features", in Windows XP: "Start -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove programs". It should look something like this, if you are in Windows 7:
Now what you should do is look EACH and EVERY installed program carefully, and ask yourself did you install this particular program, and do you need it. If your brain responds with "No" to both of the questions, then hit the "Remove" button. Doing this step will mostly free up free space, but will increase performance a bit as well.

There are programs and applications that don't ask you either you want them to start up as the system starts, but just add themselves as a start-up program anyway. In this part of this wonderful tutorial, we are going to talk about what programs you need to start up with your computer and what not.

Recommended programs:

• Anti-Virus
  
• Graphics Card Driver/Software
  
• Sound Card Driver/Software

Not Recommended programs:

• Internet Messaging Clients
  
• Games
  
• Third-party applications
  
• Updates
  
• Game Clients (Ex: Steam)

To remove a program from the start-up list, we are going to navigate to: "Start -> Run -> msconfig.exe". Make sure that in the "Genera" tab, the "Normal startup" option is selected. Now click on the "Startup" tab. This is the tab that contains all of the programs that are set to start-up when the system loads. Now, if you are a performance hungry person, use the recommended programs that I stated above, but if you are a multi-tasking and working in an office kind of person, then you can do whatever you want

Cleaning the rest of the garbage that some programs leave when uninstalling is a-must step to do. You may have done this before, but if you haven't we are going to de-frag your whole hard drive. We are going to use Microsoft's Disk Defragmenter, because it's stable and well it's made by MICROSOFT. To start Microsoft's Defragmenter, please navigate to: "Start -> Run -> %windir%\system32\dfrgui.exe". It will show you all of the hard drives that you have, like shown in the photo below:
Now the best show we have is to first Analyze one partition at a time. After analyzing one partition, if it shows a percentage of fragmentation (Ex: "(10% fragmented)") just hit the "Defragment disk" button, sit back and wait. Do these 2 steps for all of the partitions and drives you have in your computer, and once everything is done just simply "Restart" your machine and after starting back up I promise that things will work smoothly.

---

This is the last step you we are going to do, just keeping sure that we delete the things that can slow our computer.
We are going to delete the following things:

• Temporary Files
  
• Temporary Internet Files
  
• History
  
• Cookies
  
• Memory Dumps
  
• Jump Lists
  
• Clipboard
  
• Recycle Bin

First thing to do is download "CCLeaner" made by the company "Piriform". After downloading CCLeaner, install it but be sure to un-check the Google Chrome offer if you already have Google Chrome installed or don't want to have it installed at all. Then just simply execute the shortcut you have on your desktop, and in the "Cleaner" tab from the left select the following cleaning methods:

• Internet Explorer
  
• SELECT ALL OF THE OPTIONS
  Windows Explorer
  
• SELECT ALL OF THE OPTIONS
  System
  
• Empty Recycle Bin
  
• Temporary Files
  
• Clipboard
  
• Memory Dumps
  
• Chkdsk File Fragments
  
• Windows LOG Files
  Advanced
  
• Old Prefetch Data

After that's done, just simply click "Analyze" and wait for the analyzing process to complete and hit "Run Cleaner". It might take a while, depending of the time range you ran the last clean-up. But after that is done, in the left side of the program select the tab "Registry" and make sure every option is ticked on the left of the inner program part. Click "Scan for Issues", wait for it to complete and if any registry issue is shown on the list press "Fix selected issues...". Wait for that part to complete, and after that restart your machine. You will for sure notice about 20-30% maybe in some cases 50% times performance and system stability increase.

Not a bad guide, although it's not very original. There are already so many guides that talk about these same exact things. Well written, though.

Thanks for the tutorial, I already knew some stuff, but I also learned a bit.

No problem guys. The image look kind of weird because this was originally a tutorial I wrote for HF (hackforums), I just copied it. If it bothers you, I'll re-make the images.

Very good explained tutorial VanCliffe as always. This tutorial completely removed the viruses/tojan's from my PC.
Thank you a lot.

I'm very happy to read that positive reply, John*. I'm also glad that you got your PC virus-free as well.

It's nice of you to do this, writing it out so clearly. Props on the guide and I hope to see more from you.

Maybe you will make tutorial on how to delete viruses with HiJackThis, will really appreciate it if you make a tutorial about that.

-John*.

(04-09-2011, 02:47 PM)John* Wrote: [ -> ]Maybe you will make tutorial on how to delete viruses with HiJackThis, will really appreciate it if you make a tutorial about that.

-John*.

Yeah! That would be great if you added that!