Some great free software for keeping your pc in good shape

Uhh… no. Longer DEV times without less bugs or more content.

Added & Edited some stuff. Hopefully someone will find this usefull.

Ah, good call on the VLC. That's an outstanding freeware media player.

I am using Wise Disk Cleaner and Wise Registry Cleaner for cleaning my system. Great programs and regularly updated.
http://www.wisecleaner.com/

Originally Posted by Dark Savant
I am using Wise Disk Cleaner and Wise Registry Cleaner for cleaning my system. Great programs and regularly updated.
http://www.wisecleaner.com/

Cool, thanks for those - I'll take a look. Nice thread, BTW. I have to say I use Symantec because I get the full subscription paid through work …

This will save your life

http://www.ubcd4win.com/

It did when I tried to use Norton's for what it was originally intended for: recovering my hard drive. Instead it made it unbootable and the Windows disk refused to to recognize it as a Windows partition after that (I attempted to do a complete install of Systemworks. The utility in question attempted to keep my Boot partition safe but it instead made it unbootable and locked me out).

However, even the UBCDW did not have an app that could find the files.

I eventually found a simple utility called FINDNTFS and FINDPART. Get them here:
http://www.partitionsupport.com/utilities.htm

(it was Norton's that actually was my original problem. it scanned my rar backup of my old hard drive and found a virus. It deleted and destroyed the entire rar file tyvm. I never did recover it no matter what I tried).

(update: I just found my old hard drive. it turns out FINDNTFS did recover it . But what to do about the infected file ?)

I have long felt that Nortons was a virus!!

More free programs I am regularly using:

SpeedFan - great for temperaturs and fans control
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

AVG Anti-Rootkit Free
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/download…otkit/us/frt/0

Thoosje Vista Sidebar - greatest sidebar imho, uses very little resources
http://www.thoosje.com/

NT Registry Optimizer - great for optimizing registry
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

Starter - manage your startup programs
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/starter.html

Disk Heal - fixes various problems with inaccessibility
http://diskheal.googlepages.com/index.htm

this thread is very informative and helpful! keep it up! also you guys can try Ad-aware se personal… (free)

I've been using it for years. Thought we'd already mentioned it!!

You'd already mentioned it? hmm didn't see it!

Added:
http://www.auslogics.com/registry-defrag/index.php
A nice tool. Worked great for me. People at snapfiles.com seem
to like it too.

Spybot and Adblockplus were mentioned but not Adaware. daware is probably poorly name in this era of the Internet.

I've questioned Adaware since they went commercial. A For example, they took Fate off their Spyware list.

Nevertheless Spybot and Adaware together have the ability to catch things the other one misses.

A very good one, but only if you know what you are doing, is HijackThis.

It gives you the ability to remove and uninstall any process or application that is currently running. It's very easy to remove important programs though so a deal of caution is merited.

This isn't really a piece of software for system maintenance, but CDBurnerXP Pro is an outstanding CD/DVD freeware burning tool. It takes up less than 30 MB hard drive space and for basic tasks, which is about 95 percent of what most people do, it's pretty much flawless, IMO. It isn't just an alternative to Nero or Roxio, it's actually BETTER, in my opinion, and takes up a lot less space. There's no spyware or cheesy registration system involved with this; just download and use.

http://www.cdburnerxp.se/features.php

Originally Posted by Sir Markus
This isn't really a piece of software for system maintenance, but CDBurnerXP Pro is an outstanding CD/DVD freeware burning tool. It takes up less than 30 MB hard drive space and for basic tasks, which is about 95 percent of what most people do, it's pretty much flawless, IMO. It isn't just an alternative to Nero or Roxio, it's actually BETTER, in my opinion, and takes up a lot less space. There's no spyware or cheesy registration system involved with this; just download and use.

http://www.cdburnerxp.se/features.php

That's actually very interesting. I would very much like to get rid of nero in favour of a freeware / opensource alternative. However with this program the last version update was "Version 3.0.116 - 2004-10-31 16:40" .. that's… 3 years ago.
It does seem there's some BETA thing going on.. so I guess it is still actively being developed, though.

Also: "Writes all kind of mediums apart from double-layer DVD (follows in next version). Burning video-DVDs is limited."

Other than that the features page looks very impressive:
http://www.cdburnerxp.se/features.php

Thank you, I'm going to keep an eye on this one. I want that "Next Version" they are talking about Hopefully it's the thing that is now in the beta stage.

Definately a possible addition to my list.

Originally Posted by Zakhary
That's actually very interesting. I would very much like to get rid of nero in favour of a freeware / opensource alternative. However with this program the last version update was "Version 3.0.116 - 2004-10-31 16:40" .. that's… 3 years ago.

Wow that is a long time since the last update, I didn't notice that. In any case I see they made a post two days ago in their 'News' section so it at least appears they are still working on it.

Oh, and this thread is not limited to "system maintenance/tweaking" -software. I feel any well made, lightweight and stable software contributes to keeping a PC in good shape.

http://www.jimwillsher.co.uk/Site/Main_Intro.php

Jim have made 2 programs which I use regulary. The first is Bulk Rename Utility. If you have loads of files and enjoy to fix their names quickly, this is a program for you. Fix the filenames of your MP3 collection with a few clicks, number your documents or add your name before every filename. The other program is Disk Info Utility, which he unfortunally dropped. I do not know if he provide it on his website anymore. It's a program that calculates the size of each folder on your harddrive so when you need to make space you will quickly find what folders carry the most data. It's a great utility when you cannot find the %)#(%# files that sucks up all your harddrive space. It once found a 5gb .avi recording from FRAPS in my \Program Files\Fraps folder, after I accidently had started a recording of Splinter Cell… without DIU it would have taken ages to find out why I had -5gb on my harddrive…

WinPatrol is a nifty little program that I've been using for some time. It monitors several things, auto-startup, scheduled tasks, HOSTS file, file associations etc. and alerts you of changes.
Cathy - An extremely small, very fast and easy to use media cataloging tool. No install needed.

Great stuff, people. Keep 'em coming.