I've never been one for running Benchmarking Software. Numbers were just never my thing.
I rely more on the Feel of something than gauges and numbers.
I know the feel of how my own computer runs and I can tell when another computer is running faster or slower.
I don't 'feel' any great improvement in Win-8 over Win-XP-Pro.
But when I sit down to do an install or tune-up on a customer's PC, I can tell whether it's running faster or slower than my own.
So I immediately get a 'feel' for how fast the computer is running. As I perform my Tweaks and tune-up tips, I can see or 'feel' that the computer is running faster. On PC's that have been running for a while, I get comments from my customers, like, "WOW! It didn't run that fast when it was new!". All I can say is "I know."
I spent the last 30+ years, perfecting my Computer Tune-Up and I know it can improve any PC's performance and efficiency.
Many computers are like a pickup truck, running around all the time with a ton of rocks in the bed. The driver gets used to the performance and after a while doesn't even question it any more. Then one day someone comes along and takes out the rocks and 'WOW!', what a difference that makes.
I have a real hard time with those who bad mouth everything that someone else wants to do, Including cleaning up their PC.
I work at least 20 different PC Help Forums and on every one, at least once a week, someone comes on and says that their computer is running "Slow". The answer is almost always the same thing...."Clean up your mess and it will run just like new again".
And at least 7 or 8 out of ten will get indignant and claim that they don't have a mess. BS!
They will want to blame the problem on drivers, or updates or some piece of software.
I recently went to one man's house where his PC was running really slow and the guy said he'd just done his cleanup.
I installed my XPCleanup.bat program with the file counter (it's on my web site) and ran it. It took out over 100,000 junk files, just from the same system folders that are present in every PC.
Then I ran another program that scours every folder on the HD for junk files and took out several thousand more.
Then I installed the Extended Disk Cleanup and got out even more.
There were over 200 pieces of spyware, five trojans and two Viruses, which were removed by AVG, "Spybot Search & Destroy" and "Malware Bytes".
When I got done doing the cleanup, his boot time was down to under one minute, from about 20 minutes and his shutdown time was down from about five minutes to about 8 seconds.
Yes, cleaning up one's mess, does make a difference!*
* If you're going to clean your registry, don't forget to re-compress it after the cleanup.
I use a little (FREE) program, "NTREGOPT" to do the re-compression. It makes the registry smaller, so it takes up less time to load and less space in RAM.
After I removed Office 2007 from my PC, I cleaned and re-compressed my registry and reduced the size by 1/3.
That 1/3 represented just over 30 megabytes.
No brag, just fact!
So Ted, just keep doing what you're doing.
Cheers Mate!
The Doctor