Favorite Free Utilities

In another discussion, we brought up CCLeaner.

This is a good general-purpose utility. It does a good job rooting out temporary files for deletion and you get to select what kinds of temporary files it cleans out.

It is also a convenient place to remove programs. It may be urban legend that it removes more of the stay-behind, "crap" files than windows. But as they said in boot camp, "I don't know, but I've been told. ..."

It has a place you can go to to turn off programs that start automatically on boot-up. For example, the utility that I use to update my GPS. I use this program once a quarter. I don't need it running in the background every day.

One of its better features is its disk wipe. As they taught us I Computer 101, when you delete a file from a drive, the file and all of its information is still there. All that is removed is the pointer to the file. For about $40 you can buy a utility that can recover this data.

Disk wipe overwrites the data so it cannot be recovered. You can wipe the free space on your C:Drive or you can wipe a flash drive. If you are giving away / selling / throwing away a computer or flash drive or any other media, you may consider wiping the drives as a security measure.

It has a registry cleaner. With modern OS, registry errors, contrary to what the TV ads say, are normally not an issue. I haven't used this tool since my early XP days. Put this one in the "when all other recovery attempts have failed" category.

There are two "annoyances" with CCleaner. One is that it puts itself in the startup menu and it will bug you with notices that you can save X GB if you clean out your temp files and give you the offer to do so. You can turn this off using CCleaner.

The other is that there always seems to be a later version to update to .

I have about a dozen other favorites, but I'll post them in separate posts.

My other favorites have to do with computer security: Security Essentials, Malwarebytes and Malwarebytes anti-exploit.

Security Essentials is Microsoft's anti-virus program. It is a part of Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 where it's know as Windows Defender. You have to download it and install it for Windows 7. It's a "good enough" anti-virus especially if you practice safe computing and don't do things like trying to download pirated software. It's lightweight and it doesn't bug you to upgrade to a paid version.

Normally you do not want to run more than one anti-virus program at a time. However, I just read an article that the coming update to Windows 10 will allow Windows Defender to run with other anti-virus programs and offer a "second" opinion.

I would like to hear from people who use other anti-virus software and their reviews of it.

Malwarebytes: I can't say enough good about this utility. It's so good, I bought an annual subscription to it so I can run it automatically every night. It will detect and remove about 95%+ of the Malware out there. Unless you have reason to believe you have a specific problem, it should be the first tool you should try. Depending on the size of your disk and processor speed, it should take 10 - 40 minutes to run a scan. It's worth while to run it about once a week. I always ran it just before doing any sensitive computing like paying bills online. The tool is free, but it worth it to me to pay to have it run automatically each night.

Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit is a separate tool that attaches itself to whatever browsers you have installed. It keeps malicious scripts from running and keeps you from being redirected to questionable sites.

BTW: It is probably worth mentioning that downloading software is an art. Many sites give you a downloader which bundles in crapware and sometimes malware. It is usually best to got to the developer's site to get the software and avoid places line download.com. Even reputable sites often have boxes to uncheck so as to not download something you don't want.

I've found piriform to be a safe site so far.