Tuesday, January 5, 2010

My Favorite Free Windows Applications

I rely on a small set of free tools (suggested on Lifehacker) to keep my Windows (virtual) machines (and relative's Windows machines) running smoothly. They are:

  • Revo Uninstaller: To remove programs, but perhaps more importantly, to nuke junk that auto-starts (click Tools, then the traffic-light icon). Does a nice job of removing the extra junk that inconsiderate programs leave behind.

  • Ccleaner: To clean up trash on the hard drive and registry. I make sure to uncheck cookies for the cleanup in all my browsers. Longer-term, I will probably mark the cookies I care about as safe and let it nuke the rest. Then I run the registry cleanup repeatedly until it doesn't find anything any more.

  • Microsoft Security Essentials (antivirus): Free, highly rated, low-resource, no hassle. Time will still tell, but so far, so good. I've always thought that Microsoft should be the one responsible for protecting their own operating system.

  • MyDefrag: The "Weekly" script rocks. I don't run it weekly, but it's amazing what a mess Windows makes of its drive. It's like an animal soiling it's cage. MyDefrag really helps boot times. I'm very impressed. Note: I do not like the "Monthly" script at all. Sorting files in name and directory order seems like a total waste of time and disk-life to me.


Honorable Mention:


  • sdelete: A command-line utility from Microsoft that zeros out unused disk space. This is nice for security reasons, but I use it to keep my virtual disk images really small. I run "sdelete -c C:" Then in Linux, "VBoxManage modifyhd --compact"

  • cygwin: A Linux command-line emulator for Windows. I wouldn't live without it, but people wouldn't have a need for it.


The above programs have helped me tame the most clogged-with-crapware systems and make them secure and responsive again.

If someone told me that once I ran Linux, I'd think nothing of running several Microsoft operating systems, I would have laughed. But Windows works great in a VM. It's a fun toy when you don't have to rely on it to do anything useful. I use one VM for IE6 (for testing) and the other for IE8 (for programs that don't have Linux equivalents). Both are running Windows XP SP3. A Windows 7 VM is probably in my future.

1 comment:

Peter said...

"It's like an animal soiling it's cage." - Bwahahahaha!!!

Seriously, I don't use all of these, but those that I do I think are excellent recommendations.

I never thought the day would come when I would see you (or anyone else I respected so highly) recommend Microsoft, but I guess that day has come and I should take note. Sometime in this New Year I should switch to MS Security Essentials.

Anyhow, thanks for this list!