Maintenance Tools

Posted on July 4, 2008

Time again for some more recommendations. This time, I’m putting you on to some free Windows maintenance tools. Microsoft worked mostly on the code of the OS, trying to make the thing work, but not so much time on keeping it running. That’s where these tools come into play. Leave it to the 3rd party developers to produce the missing tools. And here they are in no particular order. Sure, you’ve got your own favorites. Here are some of mine.

FileHippo - The Update Checker will scan your computer for installed software, check the versions and then send this information to FileHippo.com to see if there are any newer releases. These are then neatly displayed in your browser for you to download. When I ran this thing, it found I had 33 programs that needed updating!

RevoUninstaller - This replaces the Add/Remove applet in Control Panel. Actually, this is a lot more than just a remover. See below. Windows Add/Remove takes all of 5-6 minutes to come up on my PC. Revo had completed loading in just over 3 minutes. Why so long? Because I had 708 apps in there. Really, 708. I surely need to do some serious house cleaning and with Revo I can. Here’s a few of the extra things Revo does….

Auto Start Manager - Stop programs that start automatically on Windows startup; speed up loading of Windows!
Unrecoverable Delete Tool - Erase files and folders forever; be sure that nobody could recover your files and folders after deleting!
Evidence Remover - Make sure already deleted files, folders and other data are unrecoverable; securely erase your data!

Auslogics Disk Defrag - Nearly full hard drive. Seems that’s what I’m always facing. Everytime I run ADD, it warns me that I really need 15% free disk space for it to run effectively. I’m always around 3 or4 percent it seems. Nevertheless, it proceeds on and though it takes much longer than if I freed up space, it still does a good job. This is a good replacement for the default defragger.

CCleaner - Clean the crud from your computer. This all-in-one tool does just that, removing all the unneeded stuff that clogs your system memory and makes your PC run so slow. It removes cookies, temps, histories, recent documents, autocompletes, recycle bin, log files, memory dumps, file fragments…..you get the picture.

These are a few important tools you should be using to improve the efficiency of your computer. More later…