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yeah, diskeeper does an infinitely better job than the built-in defrag utility. I particularly like the screen saver defragmentation mode.
Yeah, i've noticed the same things with regcleaner...after using it certain windows functions wouldn't work reliably anymore, like ctrl-c, ctrl-v. also I noticed that the path to system32 was destroyed, so I couldnt run ping or ipconfig from command line. i had to go all the way to c:\windows\system32 for it to finally work. weird. thats why i stopped using regmech.
Finding your drivers is fairly easy if you know exactly what motherboard you have. But some hardware won't detect the proper way. Like my audio chipset shows up as a mysterious "PCI Device" that will not autodetect when I install the UAA drivers (like the motherboard site says to). I have to go into device manager and manually point it to the new drivers.
I do the same shit with printers...HP printers mostly. Why they think we need 70Mb drivers is beyond me, so I just extract the drivers to a temp directory, and let windows grab what it needs. The last thing I want is HP Director on my machine to cause all sorts of mayhem. With some drivers you dont have a choice...HP has made everything so dependant on each other so that nothing will work if you dont go through the install procedure...bastards!
My dad is also going on about 3 years without a reinstall. I think that how long you can go without one is determined by how much you eff around with the system. Since I do a bunch of shit all the time, I'm generally ready every year or less. Oh well!
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