Hi Chazyb,
A.) Browser Tracking…. I very much recommend you give this some more attention, because the various websites that you visit "will" be gathering that identifying information about your machine and your internet activity. I will do some more research for additional locations/methods to investigate. It is "possible" that one of your installed applications is renewing the tracking code after you remove it, and that the situation will persist until you discover additional information.
B.) Your Restore Point settings are "tolerable". There is a complex method to even further reduce space reserved for Restore Points, but the gain would not be worth the difficulty of the procedure. I'd leave it this way for now.
C.) "The Internet stuff will not be correct cos I don't know the correct values" <– not sure what you are referring to here
You "will" benefit by adjusting your
TCP Receive Window size to 64240.
Go to this instruction page:
http://www.pcpitstop.com/pcpitstop/IntBuffer.asp
Follow instructions #1…. #10 at the bottom of that page.
D.) "it says something about security" <– These references refer to allowing Firefox to "remember" website login passwords and to "auto-complete" information and address strings instead of manually typing them in. For the
convenience, you give away security because Firefox carries that personally identifying information to all sites that you visit.
Want to see your "saved passwords"?
In Firefox
Click on Tools - Options - Security - Press - Show Passwords
By default, Firefox shows a list of websites for which you have saved usernames and password.
By default, Firefox only shows the username in the second panel, but press the button "Show Passwords" on the second panel again to have your password also appear in a column.
You can make this significantly more difficult to display by creating a master password to protect the passwords……….. but realistically if you have configured Firefox to automatically log you in to a website, it saves the information for retrieval.
If Firefox can retrieve it, how hard do you think it would be for a hacker to retrieve it?
D.) (Continued comment from your D.) "security")
1. You appear to be running Ad-Aware actively on your machine from Boot (from the instant your machine loads Windows)
This is neither necessary nor recommended, since you already have NOD32 antispyware running active.
2. Your JAVA JRE (Runtime Environment) is sorely out of date and vulnerable.
Recommendation: uninstall "all" JAVA and JAVA JRE items via Control Panel - Add/Remove
Install the latest JAVA JRE from here: http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp
(fourth item down on that page)
3.) Your Spybot Search and Destroy is sorely outdated.
Recommend that you Uninstall Spybot Search and Destroy via Control Panel - Add/Remove
Install the latest version of Spybot S&D (1.5) from here: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/mirrors/index.html
4.) Do you use the installed Yahoo ToolBar? If not, uninstall it via Control Panel - Add/Remove
_________________
The above may be enough to accomplish for now.
Complete those steps and post a fresh PCPitstop Full Test
In my next reply (after reviewing your fresh PCPitstop Full Test), I will address the StartUps and some of the resource hogs and the matter of Ashampoo realtime defrag vs. possibly better options.