Tide with Bleach IMHO is the absolute best detergent for white. It has a bleach activator in it so the oxygen bleach works very good...just if you can find the HE which I'm told is hard to find..I don't buy the HE..also Amazon sells Tide Professional with Oxi...its not cheap but works amazingly well. Its formulated for hotels so it has more Oxygen Bleach in it than what's on the store shelves, its also got a more neutral PH to keep hotel linens looking nicer longer, and although it has a wonderful scent in the box it only leaves a fresh clean scent on the clothes since hotels don't want their linen having a perfumed scent. There have been a few rumors that this stuff is the same as what's on the shelf just bigger boxes but that's not true. Did I sing its praises enough LOL.

@mamapinky, in your case, it's my opinion that appliances from that era weren't exactly BOL. I mean, you could purchase ANY dishwasher and get the exact same results. The same goes for ovens, and refrigerators. Things we're made, much much better then. Dishwashers actually used water. And, with Detergent's... formulated well, it didn't really make a difference what model you had. You'd still get a clean load of dishes. One of my favorite dishwashers, actually was a BOL GE Triton from a Disney Grand Floridian Resort Villa. I joke about that, because, they we're probably the cheapest, builder grade appliances they could find. But... every single load, would come out, completely immaculate. Even the tough stuff, like oatmeal stuck on bowls & stuck on egg, just rinsed completely away with the Phosphate Detergent packets they gave us. Like I said, older appliances, we're much better made. I don't think it really mattered what you bought ;)

Really frustrating part.. is there is no more Tide W/ Bleach Powder with a "clean" scent. The Clean Breeze scent... is gone. And the new "Original" scent... sticks to fabrics, and smells horrible. I was looking on the Tide website, last night. And I swear... it seems like there's a thousand less powders available. It's just, so modest, so little. Yet there's two million different liquids, in different scents. So... disappointing to say the least. Powder Wise. The ones I know I can find easily, locally are... Fab, Cheer, Tide, Gain, Xtra, Purex, All (F&C) and Arm & Hammer. Then there's American Ariel & Phosphate Free Foca and Roma. But... you better like whatever's on the shelf. Because there's typically just one or two different variety's. Sad... because when I was growing up, I remember shopping with my mom at Target... and seeing a one whole side, of an entire aisle of just Powder Detergents, in a million different options. Now... it's pretty slim. I think it's quite different overseas though. And in Mexico, almost everyone seems to use Powder, exclusively.

Judging by the German Persil Pro powder: oxy bleach comes 4th and bleach activator 6th. Zeolite, a water softener popular here, is somewhere in the middle. That's good - I find - because this stuff does not dissolve and is the reason why dedicated cycles for dark clothes use a lot of water in the rinses (to flush visible zeolite residue off the clothes). Persil Megaperls has zeolite as the first ingredient. Finally there are enzymes at the end of the list. Six of them, which sounds pretty good.