Yea, though it's not necessarily underground but unless you know what your looking for it could be difficult to find.

I am sure there are a lot of programs similar to this that we don't know about, and that's the main purpose of this thread.

Please add AVG AntiSpyware, great tool for spyware.

Updated!

Spybot Search & Destroy? BTW, thanks for the link to Advanced Windows Care. Found a bunch of problems on my laptop and now it runs soooo much smoother/faster. I was looking around for a good registry fixing tool, and I believe that was it! =)

Its a great prog, also the Defrag works really good too. I spent the money on the Pro version cause the Personel version did so well on all my computer i figured i would support a prog like this one for doing such a great job.

And Must have hardware would be:

SD Card - Vista Readyboost
G7 Cordles mouse woooo.

And a gaggle of external hard drives for massive on the go movie and music storage.

how about must have hardware?

Went lookin' for this thread again to get some links to a program I was lookin' for and read this.

Must have hardware would be updated every 4 - 6 months!!!

I have to admit I don't really use anything. I have no antivirus at all (I make sure I don't give my email address to any porn sites LOL)

Other stuff I do run, though:

- Nvidia ntune, so I can OC my card in Vista
- Windows Defender, which does a good job of blocking most everything
- IE7 with built-in pop-up blocker

And that's about it... don't need anything else

Must have hardware (that never really grows old):

- Saitek Eclipse keyboard (takes a licking and keeps on ticking)
- Logitech MX518 (nice wired gaming mouse)
- Dell 2405WFP (which I sadly no longer have )
- A good USB sound card (for everday use or emergencies)
- A good pair of headphones (I recommend Koss Porta-Pro)
- A Firewire harddrive (never trust USB with your data)

I noticed that the site for i9kfangui is down, I can't find it anywhere and now my fans are running full blast. I live in Thailand and even though I have aircon i want my fans under my control cause 100+ degrees isn't fun

Updated the list with a couple of new cool programs I found while trying to track down a problem on my laptop.

Active Ports and Process Explorer; PE is awesome.

I would recommend adding Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic to the list, as it has served me for years now, and I never had any complaints. Tried AVG a couple of times, but always came back to AntiVir. It updates regularly, detects everything it should and is rather unobtrusive. Can be downloaded here.

Updated the link for DC Pro 1.5.

Does anyone know a good program that'll benchmark hard disks and other storage media? What do most reviewers use?

I don't ever bench HD's but here's a few tools:
HDTune
HDTach
Atto disk benchmark

I tried HDTune, it's pretty cool but something that will do the writing/reading for you would be much better. HDTune just monitors the hard drive and you pretty much have to do the reading/writing on your own. Which isn't that bad, but I'm lazy. I'll try the other two.