I always find my self installing many programs and I always find my self lurking back to my all time favourite Acronis True Image to restore the freshness of my system. But there are times that I wonder "Do I really need all these programs?"

I understand that having an antivirus and a firewall is a must as well as a spyware program or two.
But sometimes it feels that it gets too much and I see my system going slower gradually.
Other maintenance programs that find their way in my system are DisKeeper to automatically defrag the system properly and a registry fix program.

And of course with all these you have programs, like a messenger, a PDF viewer, a video converter, a streamer like tversity and a big pack of codecs. And many more that I currently forget and that apply to different needs but we are not going to focus on anyway.
Thankfully enough there is a big wave of portable, stand alone programs that they don't need installation any more like Nero, micro$oft office, fillezila, photoshop etc.

So after all that, the installation of an imaging program like Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost becomes a need as well.

Yesterday I decided to drop both the Kaspersky antivirus and zonealarm firewall as well as one spyware program and just install the zonealarm security suite that contains the firewall, and includes an antivirus based on the kaspersky engine and a spyware program. Thats 3 in one. Or is it?

As for now my maintenance programs are:

• Zonealarm Security Suite
• Advanced System Optimizer
• DisKeeper
• Spybot Search and Destroy
• Acronis True Image

So what are your maintenance programs that you need in order to have a stable and fresh for longer system?

Bump.

Shall I guess that you have no such programs installed in order to have full power and performance for gaming? lol

I run Winpatrol and use Eusing registry cleaner, I've been in China for the last 9 monthe and still runs great, there a LOT of nasties here, badly infected computers are normal, can't even trust whats on a USB stick

AVG
ccleaner
Registry Mechanic 7
Diskeeper

Really don't use anything else, works good for me.

Online Armor Free as a firewall
Avira Antivir Personal Edition
RegSeeker
PerfectDisk

Other utilites, Foxit Reader for PDFs, and CDBurnerXP for burning CDs and DVDs. Used Nero before, but the latest version 8 is too bloated, even if you can choose what to install.