Just follow these rules and stay away from 3rd party software

To maintain your computer

10 Tips on How to Properly Maintain Your Computer

Steps that I did not notice on the guide include:

Running a scan disc before doing a defrag

Using Microsoft Security Essentials and Malwarebytes.

Making System Restore points, at least once a week

Makaing a system Image once a month (varies by user)

Not relying on your A/V common sense, should prevail. You know of many sites can cause a problem.

Do not use any reg cleaning or optimizing software.

Download and use Ccleaner about once every two months. Untick any registry entries.
http://www.piriform.com/

If you follow these instructions, you will be trouble free for a long time to come.

Be sure to back up your hard drive about once a month (varies by user) and to keeep system restore points up to date.

Optimize Windows 7

For the best security
Microsoft Security Essentials
Malwarebytes for once a week scan
Eset online security for once a week scans
http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

Glad that we could help.

Agreed. Nowadays, it's all about what your ISP pushes to you. Even back in the dial up days they didn't work. PC's, routers and modems are advanced enough to where you're basically getting all that you possibly can.
Kinda reminds me of the programs people used to believe in that were "supposed" to free up your ram while it was running....never worked as advertised and it just wasted more ram than it supposedly free'd.

IMO, net optimizers, ram optimizers, and registry cleaners are never trustworthy. Bad things can happen when you try to push your system to do something that it wasn't designed to do, and messing with things that you don't ever see is not something I want some "program" doing.

I ran TCPOptimizer on my Vista64 PC. Didn't hurt anything. But I think most of the settings were already at suggested. For XP and older OS it's worth doing if you have broadband.

If you access internet via network cards see if the settings in device manager are optimal.
The only thing that really works well that I know of for acceleration is Giganews Accelerator if you have a Giganews account. It's a free download. Many of the newsreaders do the header compression now built-in but I like to still use the GN Accelerator so that I can control the overall bandwidth when using multiple newsreaders. I can set the max from a central location to leave a bit for surfing while I download. It's only for Giganews Usenet service accounts though.

I have heard of some web accelerators but you need the cooperation of the web server. The stuff on the server side is compressed, sent over the wire, and decompressed on the other side. Probably only worth doing for dial-up. Also since graphics(pictures) are already compressed the major gain would be text compression. Might work well if you are reading newspapers online or something text intensive.