8 Ways to Sunday

Windows Startup Inspector has an easy-to-use interface (click to enlarge)

I’ve been using Windows Startup Inspectorfor for over a year now. It’s a great tool that I’d recommend to any intermediate or advanced Windows user. It not only helps you reign in the hidden startup tasks that can bog down your computer’s performance, but also provides valuable advice on what can be safely discarded.

Startup Inspector goes far beyond similar tools, which just list your startup tasks without providing further explanation. Press the “consult” button in the toolbar, and Startup Inspector fetches information from an online database of known startup programs. Each of the startup programs on your own computer are then flagged with an easy-to-interpret icon that tells you whether they are essential, optional, dangerous, or unknown:

Click image to enlarge

Armed with this information, it’s easy to disable undesired startup tasks and even re-enable them later if you change your mind.

The first time I used Startup Inspector I noticed an immediate improvement in my computer’s performance. With so much software today installing “stealth” tasks that start along with Windows and run in the background, a tool like this is essential. Startup Inspector is easily the best of the bunch — and it’s free.

It’s important to note that, while Startup Inspector is very good at what it does, it is not an anti-spyware tool. To get complete spyware protection for Windows XP, I’d recommend Microsoft’s own Windows Defender (currently in beta). If you use an older version of Windows, try Spybot Search & Destroy or Lavasoft Ad-Aware. Both of the non-Microsoft programs provide very good spyware protection, but Windows Defender is geared more toward the novice user. If you’re an advanced user who is often called upon to help your less-savvy friends, I’d recommend installing Windows Defender on their machines once you’ve finished cleaning them up with the other tools.

Over the last four days, while I was busy playing Half-Life 2, this weblog was hit with one of the worst spam attacks it has ever endured. Over six hundred spam comments were left, but I only ended up having to manually delete 61 of them. I have Kitten’s Spaminator, a WordPress plugin, to thank for this.

As far as I’m concerned, Spaminator is the anti-spam plugin for WordPress. It’s at least as good as Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist for Movable Type — possibly even better. If you have a WP blog, get this plugin. Period.

I’ve been using Paint Shop Pro 8 as my primary image editor for over a year now, and have been very happy with it. I recently downloaded the trialware version of Adobe’s famous (and famously expensive) Photoshop CS specifically for a major scanning and restoration project, and was very impressed with its capabilities. I’ve been planning to start writing reviews on this weblog for awhile now, so I decided I may as well start with an informal head-to-head of these two excellent products. (more…)