Over the weekend a good friend asked me to take a look at his sons computer. He’s a great kid, and like all his peers, he loves music. He downloads songs, pirated of course, at an alarming rate. Because this was my third time cleaning his pc, I decided to take note of what I found.

Since it's release on May 7th there have bee libraries written about the woes of XP SP3. In addition to the problems there have been many reports of installations with no problems. In fact there are three times as many people who have had no problems what-so-ever. This is as expected given the 25% failure rate that we've seen at PC Pitstop. But with a 25% failure rate, this service pack is anything but ordinary.

Friends, it's great to be here at the retirement party for Windows XP. As you all know, he'll be leaving his full-time job at Microsoft as of the end of June. Just like Bill Gates, it won't be an abrupt break with the company. You'll see XP wandering the halls for a few years to come. Keep your guard up; when you least expect it you'll be hit by an XP practical joke. Just last week I noticed he tried to hide file extensions for known file types.

Most people don't know it, but our product Erase is a very useful tool as a Data Profiler. That is, you can learn a lot about a person from analyzing their activity on their PC. Erase was originally designed to help one erase their tracks from snooping eyes, but we have learned that the free scan portion of Erase has been used by law enforcement agencies to determine quickly the recent activity of a computer at a crime scene. I made this cartoon at Toondoo to highlight this capability of Erase.

We spend a lot of money on advertising and a lot of money in search. Just got off the line with our advertising guru, and in rough numbers, we burn over 6 times as much money with Google than we burn with Microsoft and Yahoo COMBINED. That's an astronomical difference between Google and the rest. Furthermore, we have tried to spend more money with both Yahoo and Microsoft, and neither has enough relevant search results to allow us to increase our spend.

It’s summer and it's been a tedious time since the XP SP3 debacle. There is no doubt, the old OS could use some mending. Mine sure did. Let's schedule a little spa time. Put her on the rack and get out the gunk. You’ll be amazed at the way she handles after some TLC.

Yes, we know Vista has problems but lets get this lazy hog up and running like the wind. Whaaat, don’t think that’s possible? Well, think again. I’m listing what I do for my Vista Installations. Some of these suggestions will change the security and functionality of Vista, so if your main interest is security, you may want to skip a suggestion. Before attempting any of these changes be sure to log in as “Administrator”.

To confirm the safety of these suggestions, I performed all these changes on my Gateway laptop with a brand new “from the factory install”. If you want this latest operating system to work like you know it should, then lets get started. I think

I am very excited and proud to present a brand new report from PC Pitstop. Given the outrageous traffic on our web site, we are able to see the absolute fastest PC's in the world, what technologies they use, and why they fall into an elite performance standing. It took a lot of culling of the data, but I am pleased to announced the PC Pitstop Notebook 500. This month we will look at the fastest portables that money can buy. So let's get to the results.

Just when I was becoming accustomed to using spyware removal tools and running the occasional Pitstop virus scan (few people keep their antivirus current these days), something new comes along.

Have you ever wondered why your machine seems like it's operating in mud or is just ignoring you? Well that's probably because it's operating just fine for someone else. Yep, we're talking Botnets. Botnets are using your CPU, draining your memory, just waiting to be told what to do by someone making money from your investment. You don't mind do you?