Two Maintenance Programs?

[swinny1710]

Hi;
There doesn't seem to be a forum specifically for software questions, so I'm posting here. I'm sure someone will point me in the right direction if this isn't the correct place.
What I'm basically interested to know, is if anyone has any knowledge or experience with a couple of system maintenance type programs from something called Daschhoundsoftware. The 2 programs are called:
"Anti Crash", (to monitor and repair your system related to crashes)and "Hare", which is designed to optimize the performance of your computer. I know that a lot of these types of programs promise the world, but end up being not only useless, and a waste of time and space, but memory hogs as well. These "sound" good, but was wondering if anyone had tried them.
Located at:

http://www.dachshundsoftware.com/index.html

Cheers, and thanks!

Pat

 

[DefaultUser3000]

Hi Pat.

I have been tweaking systems for well over 10 years now. Most of these programs work ok.. but the things they do ..you can do yourself.

I would suggest doing a seach on the interent for

"TWEAK windows 98"

Rather than spending money on this software I would suggest upgrading to win2k or XP. Win 98 is a nightmare.

 

[kippy13]

I would have to agree with Defaultuser.
Heres a good starting point:

http://www.dougknox.com/

An upgrade to XP would be the preferred option but only if u have a PC with good enough specs for it.

"Sometimes I do not know but I try hard"- R.F. Haughty 1923

 

[mainegeek]

Hello swinny1710,
XP is a bigger hog than Win98.
Win98 can easily be maintained with scandisk,defrag,
msconfig,disk cleanup,spider,spybot and adaware which are all free and a good anti-virus.

 

[kippy13]

mainegeek,
A lot of people dis XP, and it is a far hungrier animal than 98, however it is far more stable, manageable and supports far more software and hardware. If you can afford a decent speced system its a far superious OS.

"Sometimes I do not know but I try hard"- R.F. Haughty 1923

 

[mainegeek]

Hello Kippy13,
I have Xp on some of my systms as well as some older OS's that are not pnp (which most of you new techs know little about) and that some of us older techs still like to fool with and I wasn't "dissing it" as you put it..
I simply stated that XP is a bigger hog than Win98, which it is, and I offered some tips.

 

[kippy13]

Fair enough.
Apologies.

"Sometimes I do not know but I try hard"- R.F. Haughty 1923

 

[carrr]

I'm with mainegeek.

I spend a lot more time maintaining and cleaning up XP machines than 98 boxes.
Granted XP has a lot to offer, but I never had to clean after the last two or three big viruses on any of our 9x machines.
Besides, swinny1710 asked about two programs, not for collective OS opinions.

...Of course, I wouldn't want to "dis" anybody.

"'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds." - Malaclypse the Younger

 

[kippy13]

Sorry, for some reason this has been turned into an OS thread.
Just to continue, I have worked in and environment with Windows 95 and am currently working in one with XP and we rarely have calls on System crashes or lockup compared to when we had the 95 machines. Some of or 95 machines got those viri and had to be totally reimaged whereas we had our XP machines protected through the a patch installation package.
Getting back to the main question: I would agree with tuning 98 as much as possible manually. and maybe purchasing extra memory for the system instead of forking out on tuning software.

"Sometimes I do not know but I try hard"- R.F. Haughty 1923

 

[swinny1710]

Hi Folks;
As I was reading the posts, even I started to forget what the original question was, and of course I posted it! But hey.....it was fun while it lasted. Anyway, thanks for the feedback. With your suggestions, and info from another forum, I think I'll stick to what Defaultuser3000, and Mainegeek have suggested, and continue to do stuff manually. Unfortunately I'm one of those who find something while surfing and then want to try it....just to see how it works. FYI here is is what a contributor at another forum had to say about these too particular programs. So you can be the judges.

Cheers, and thanks again!!

OTHER POSTING:
I have Anti-Crash installed here. It is a fairly good program, but won't cure everything no matter what it claims. It can also cause confusion if you aren't careful.
I had a bad experience with it not too long back, which messed up Windows and finished up with me having to restore a previous registry backup to fix it.

I have also seen Hare in action. Again a good program, but there is a vital caveat. It works by replacing the base Windows system processes, not improving them.

So while it does indeed give faster response at startup, you cannot remove it by using uninstall. If you do, then you will mess up your system and finish up having to reinstall.

So, if you decide to use Hare, accept it is non-removable once in place. This is why, while I know how good it is, I personally won't install Hare on my system as I feel the risks are too high

 

[kippy13]

I'd say you were happy to receive the feedback about the applications.
They have their advantages but by the looks of those comments it may be wise staying away from these two.

"Sometimes I do not know but I try hard"- R.F. Haughty 1923

 

[PatrickDickey]

While I haven't had any experience with these two programs, I have ran Windows 98 on an older computer. I would suggest following the advice about manually defragging, scandisking, running spybot&Adaware, and an antivirus program. In fact there are a lot of good free antivirus programs out there.

Rather than look for maintenance programs, I would find a 'system monitoring program'. And, I would perform your maintenance bi-weekly, or as you find necessary. When you do scandisk and defrag, boot into Safe Mode, and turn off your screensaver. Do the thorough scan (Scandisk) and then defrag. It will take a while, but it will do a better job of maintaining your computer.

http://www.iarsn.com/download.html

This is one that I've used before. The option is Task Info.

As for upgrading, If your computer is an older one (My Windows 98 computer was a Gateway Essentials with a 433MHz Processor and 192MB SD-RAM), I would recommend Windows 2000 over XP. I upgraded to Windows 2000, and it's pretty stable. I have upgraded to Windows XP Professional, and it runs alright. But, it's geared more for the faster computers.

Hope this helps you a bit also.
Patrick.