A PC Maintenance Software Toolkit Of Essential Free Applications
Most PC users install and uninstall numerous software applications over the life time of their computer. This introduces faults to the registry keys, fills up the hard drives with legacy/junk files and generally slows down Windows.
One approach to take to repairs would be to boost the hardware configuration by adding more memory, more hard drive space or in the extreme case upgrade the CPUs. This approach does not however remedy the underlying issue of what is causing the machine to perform badly. The simpler approach is to give your PC a spring clean using one of the free software applications specifically designed to repair applications/registry keys and clean out old unused files from your hard drive.
Thankfully, software houses and developers have created a great many applications to maintain a pc. The following freeware solutions are fully featured and already been effectively used by thousands of Windows users for a number of years. Each provides a subset of the functionality required in a piece of PC maintenance software including registry cleaning and repairs, file system cleaning of junk files etc. Each tool is freely available at download.cnet.com
Glary Utilities
This tool is the most fully featured listed here with tools to backup & restore registry files, remove junk/legacy files from hard drives (to free up space) and reconfigure memory and modem/internet connection settings.
The additional security features provide the ability to shred files and web histories to within a government standard level.
CCleaner
CCleaner was one of the early leaders in maintenance software and they have resisted the lure of adding dozens of tools to focus on some key functionality.
The ease to use tabbed GUI has a step-by-step approach to CCleaner’s key focus of cleaning hard drives of junk, repairing and cleaning registry keys and cleaning private data from general applications (for example, personal data cached in web browsers).
Ashampoo WinOptimizer
Ashampoo interestingly have targeted the full spectrum of computer users with their application. For those who are not technical experts they provide a One-Click function to execute a battery of optimization tools over the full PC.
Tech-savvy users can delve deeper running one of the 21 tools for themselves from the tabbed interface. As with a lot of these applications there is a registry back up facility which should be run prior to making changes.
Auslogic’s Disk Defrag
A last task during any PC maintenance should always be a disk defragmentation to reassemble file fragments that occur as a result of uninstalling & installing applications and regular system processing. Anyone who has used Microsoft’s defrag tool in the Control Panel will know this can be a slow task to complete, especially on large disks. As an alternative, Auslogics utility uses a proprietary algorithm to scan and resolve file fragment much quicker than the Microsoft tool. Their reporting and graphing interface also provides some valuable insight to the current status of the scanned drives.
For a commercial online PC maintenance software solution read my Reimage review to discover out how this one stop pc fix tool can repair your PC.