FWIW I believe disabling updates totally is a bad idea. A better solution might be to set it to ask you about which updates to download and install. That way you can skip the ones that aren't really necessary but still install the critical ones.

If you are selling your computer or giving it away, you need to make sure your files cannot be accessed. Luckily, there is specialized software that is made solely for this purpose.


Super Shredder

is a good file shredder, and even better, it’s free. A file shredder permanently deletes and removes any file. Once a file has been shredded, no recovery software can retrieve or restore those files. Think of it as a paper shredder, a computer file shredder works in the same way except it shreds the document on the computer.
You can shred a single file or you can wipe the entire hard drive using shredders

Of course there are other file shredders that are great applications: File Shredder , Wipe and delete and DBAN are well-known shredders.

If your computer supports a second hdd (or already has one) the second hdd MUST be a physical drive not just a partition on the first hdd - then move your system pagefile to the second hdd as well as all pointers to the temp file folder - I have done this on about 500 PC's and every one has seen a significant performance increase., some as much as 25% - note: don't forget to delete the original pagefile on the system drive

Ok


These 2 articles explain the two settings in question in detail. The first article explains that the processor scheduling option controls the time slice each thread gets before another thread can preempt it for processor time. Since the science applications invoked by BOINC run at the lowest possible priority regardless of which setting is selected this option is unlikely to make any real noticeable difference on most machines although it may make the operating system appear less responsive to user input (such as mouse clicks or keyboard inputs). The second article explains that the system cache option allocates more memory for file caching. Since most WCG science applications don't do much disk I/O, selecting system cache is more likely to degrade performance for BOINC/WCG than improve it.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;259025
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/895932

Now to next one

Google Images Basic

Ah, Google images. What would I ever do if I didn’t have a ready repository of “ready to be Photoshopped” pictures at my disposal? Problem is that awhile ago Google switched over to a different display method, and I don’t like it all too much.
There is an option to turn if off, though!
Scroll to the very bottom of your Google image search and click on Switch to basic version.

It’s 2009 all over again! If you want to go back to the regular way, simply scroll back to the bottom and click Switch to standard version.