I had a laugh about that the other day when my sister had the manual for it in with computer games. At the time it seemed so amazing but it became a huge flop because it was just a gimmicky to track consumers without any benefit to the users.

BTW you got screwed because RS gave those away! :D

I'm pretty sure your problem is temp garbage that has accumulated over many days/months/years (have seen this way too often) of usage. This can many times be cured (at least a bit) by removing the problem causers.

First, go into your browser and delete the temporary internet files.

Second, nuke the temp files that programs left behind.

To do this open up notepad and paste in one of the following lines:

Win9x/ME:
rmdir /s /q "%WINDIR%\\temp"
Win2k/XP/Vista/7:
rmdir /s /q "%USERPROFILE%\\Local Settings\\temp"

Save this as removetempfiles.bat on your desktop.

Double click this batch file and it will remove all the junk. On Vista/7 you may need to right click and Run as Admin. You will want to do this every now and then to keep your computer uncluttered from temp files.

After this reboot and hopefully there will be a vast improvement in speed. If not I still have a few more pieces of advice for getting your machine up to par. Good luck!

Tiny Flashlight is great. It has a simple LED flashlight that can be as bright or dim as you want along with other small tools. Be careful using any LED flashlight though since the LED can get very hot to the touch!

I'm pretty skilled in C/++ and like to use the Win API without any layers to get the full view of how my code and the system work together. Once you do all the lower level stuff with the API then you know how to take control of things that MFC, etc. would have done for you but without learning nearly as much.

Good luck on the projects. I had wanted to do something similar but have too many things that took priority.