It's not often that a 50-year-old balding cheapskate like me has a chance to look cool. But I had my moment to gloat last year when my wife and I went to rent a car along the coast of Crete.

A brash foursome of 90210-good-looking American college jocks barged ahead of us in line, only to be told that all the cars available had manual transmissions. That's the case in most countries of the world other than the U.S., where only 5% of us drive a stick shift. They glanced at each other with uncertainty, and then their fearless leader said cockily, "A stick? Cool man! How hard can it be?"

After waiting patiently, my wife and I finally got the keys to our rental car and headed out to the parking lot. There sat the four pushy princes in their five-speed Fiat, lurching forward a couple feet at a time, then stalling, lurch, stall, lurch, stall....

Smoke rose from the tires. A series of foot-long skid marks trailed off across the parking lot behind their car, looking like the "Tear Here" marks on the bottom half of your electric bill. The lurching motion became so violent at one point that the driver's Smith sunglasses flew off his face and smacked against the windshield.

The cool dudes inside the car were not amused, although the gathering crowd of locals was having a blast watching. As I smoothly slid our rental car into first gear and rolled out of the parking lot, I gave a friendly shoulder shrug to the onlookers and said something in quasi English-Greek, like "Yish! Crazy Americans."

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Product Preview: Liebherr 2062 Series 36-inch French-door refrigerators Liebherr says its 2062-series refrigerators "created a buzz in the design community and on consumer blogs and message boards" in the months leading up to their expected debut later this month. Since we haven't yet tested any of these 36-inch models, $5,000, we can't add to the apparent buzz, but here's what we've discovered about these German imports. The 36-inch-wide stainless-steel freestanding and fully-integrated models keep with the French-door-refrigerator trend, a style that combines a side-by-side with a bottom-mount freezer. These Liebherrs have dual freezer drawers with telescoping rails, intended to make for easier access to frozen goods. The sleek-looking refrigerators feature LED light columns to illuminate the refrigerator's interior, which has a claimed capacity of 19.5 cubic feet (13 in the refrigerator compartment, 6.5 in the freezer compartments). Among the interesting features are GlassLine shelves, designed to convey an airy look with strength—the manufacturer says each 6-millimeter-thick shelf can hold up to 180 pounds. These Energy Star models also have electronic controls, dual compressors, and an interior icemaker. Essential information: Read our latest report on refrigerators, and use our new Home Improvement Guide interactive to find buying advice for appliances throughout your home. And watch our video buying guide for refrigerators (below). Subscribe now! Subscribe to ConsumerReports.org for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products. Update your feed preferences

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As a tech writer, one of my biggest pet peeves is the plethora of bad advice littered across almost every web site dedicated to system tweaking. Besides the tweaks that simply don't work, some of them will actually cause your computer to run even slower—or worse. Let's examine some of the most offensive myths out there regarding PC performance tweaking, and debunk them once and for all.

Disabling QoS to Free Up 20% of Bandwidth

This tip made the rounds with people believing that Microsoft always allocates 20% of your bandwidth for Windows Update. According to the instructions, you were supposed to disable QoS in order to free up bandwidth. Unfortunately this tip was not only wrong, but disabling QoS will cause problems with applications that rely on it, like some streaming media or VoIP applications.

Rather than taking my word for it, you can read the official Microsoft response: "There have been claims in various published technical articles and newsgroup postings that Windows XP always reserves 20 percent of the available bandwidth for QoS. These claims are incorrect... One hundred percent of the network bandwidth is available to be shared by all programs unless a program specifically requests priority bandwidth."

Make Vista Use Multiple Cores to Speed Up Boot Time

This bogus tip made the rounds recently and almost everybody got caught including Lifehacker and big brother site Gizmodo... although commenters called it out quickly on both sides, and the editors updated the posts. (That's yet another reason to always participate in the comments here.)

According to this tip, you were supposed to use MS Config to modify the "Number of processors" drop-down on the Boot tab. The problem is that this setting is only used for troubleshooting and debugging, to be able to determine if there is a problem with a single processor, or for a programmer to test their code against a single core while running on a multi-core system. Windows will use all your processors by default without this setting.

Clearing Out Windows Prefetch for Faster Startup

The Prefetch feature in Windows XP caches parts of applications that you frequently use and tries to optimize the loading process to speed up application start time, so when a number of sites started suggesting that you clean it out regularly to speed up boot time it seemed like good advice... but sadly that's not the case, as pointed out by many Lifehacker commenters.

The Prefetch feature is actually used as a sort of index, to tell Windows which parts of an application should be loaded into memory in which order to speed up application load time, but Windows doesn't use the information unless it's actually starting an application. There's also a limit of 128 files that can be stored in the prefetch folder at any point, and Windows cleans out the folder automatically, removing information for applications that haven't been run as frequently. Not only that, but a well-written defrag utility will use the prefetch information to optimize the position of the files on the disk, speeding up access even further.

Windows expert Ed Bott explains it:

The .pf files don’t get used at all until you run a program. What actually happens when you click an icon is that Windows uses the information in the Prefetch folder to decide which program segments to load and in what order to load those pages.

Cleaning the Registry Improves Performance

The Windows registry is a massive database of almost every setting imaginable for every application on your system. It only makes sense that cleaning it out would improve performance, right? Sadly it's just a mark