My Top Ten Free Software Tools
There are a plethora of software tools out there to help fix problems with your computer, many of which will cost you money to use. However there are many more tools which are absolutely free to home users. Here is my list of 10 of the most useful tools (in no particular order) which are freely available and can be used to fix a variety of computer problems.
Super Anti Spyware USB Portable
Super Anti Spyware is a very good free spyware and malware removal tool but the USB portable version is even more useful especially if your computer has been infected with spyware. The USB portable version allows you to install and run the program straight into system memory (RAM) by simply plugging in your USB stick which is very useful if you have some particularly nasty spyware/malware that has disabled or infected all your already installed anti-virus and anti-spyware software.
Raw copy is a very simple yet extremely useful tool. Basically all it does is copy one hard drive to another, bit for bit (hence the name Raw). This is great if your current hard drive is on the verge of death and you need to copy your data across to a new drive. As it simply duplicates the data and doesn't try and do anything clever you're much less likely to run into errors that you might encounter when using the commercialy available disk tools. One thing to be careful of however is that you make sure you know the priority of your hard drives as Raw copy only gives you the option of copying from a source disk to a destination disk displaying your disks as Disk_0, Disk_1, Disk_2 etc so if you accidentally choose the wrong destination disk you will copy over any existing data on that disk!
AVG is a great free anti-virus tool which I would recommend to any home user who is not particularly confident with computers as it is one of the simplest anti-virus tools to use. It does all the essential tasks of an anti-virus tool without the user really needing to interfere. By this I mean it keeps itself up to date and runs regular scans automatically and the interface is very easy to understand for when you do need to make changes.
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is a great free anti-spyware removal tool that detects and effectively removes the majority of spyware and malware infections. It has a simple to use and easy to understand interface and in my experience can often remove infections that many of the well known commercial brands of software fail to detect and/or remove.
Avast Anti-Virus free edition has always been a great free antivirus tool with an effective resident shield and a very useful boot-time scan feature helping you to remove some of the most presistent viruses that many other programs can't touch. In the past though it had a very hard to understand interface (similar to DVD software such as Power DVD for some reason?) and an alarming way of notifying you that your system was infected which involded a loud siren followed by a stern voice notifying you that a virus has been detected which bellowed out in such a way that you could be forgiven for thinking your computer was about to explode. The interface on newer versions has been greatly improved and the alerts have been substantially toned down making this a really great, free piece of software.
Ad-aware is a great piece of free anti-spyware software that is really easy to understand and use. What makes this stand out from most other anti-spyware programs is that it has a resident shield which will work away in the background helping to prevent spyware from getting on to your computer, a feature which most anti-spyware programs would require you to upgrade to a premium paid for edition to use.
CCleaner is made by a software company called Piriform who have several free and extremely useful software tools to help keep your computer running smoothly. CCleaner is one of, if not the best tools that Piriform have made to date. It has a useful registry cleaner which can help you by deleting unnecessary registry entries that could be slowing your computer without having to manually edit the registry which is always a risky business if you're not confident using computers. It also has useful tools allowing you to delete unnecessary files from your computer, uninstall programs and edit your start up programs all packaged in a nice simple and easy to use interface.
Another great piece of software from Piriform allowing you to easily recover lost data all from within piriform's easy to understand interface, an area that most free recovery tools need to work on.
Acronis True Image WD Edition Software
Acronis True Image WD Edition Software is the new replacement for the extremely useful Western Digital Data Lifeguard. It is a great diagnostic and recovery tool utilising SMART tecnology. It can identify hard disk problems such as bad sectors and in may cases it can repair the problems and get your computer's hard disk up and running again.
Not so much a single software tool but a collection of some of the best free software tools available all packaged into a single CD. And best of all it allows you to boot into a Windows operating environment entirely in system memory (RAM) allowing you to use many of the included data recovery tools without the risk of overwriting data on the disk while also allowing you to diagnose and repair issues that are preventing your computer from booting etc. To go through all the useful features of UBCD4Win would take forever so I'll simply say this, if something is wrong with your computer the chances are that UBCD4Win has the tools to diagnose and repair it. There are some downsides to UBCD4Win, the most noticable is the length of time it takes to download and then create the UBCD4Win CD which is a pretty complicated process due to Microsoft's Licensing Laws (you will need a Windows XP disk to create it). Also some of the tools and features will not work with systems running Windows Vista and Windows 7 as it is currently based on the XP operating system.