To maintain any PC over its lifetime requires some scheduled maintenance to optimize the performance as more and more applications and devices are installed, which are vying for your valuable memory & CPU resources.

Some users resort to adding extra hardware (faster memory, larger hard drives) but this does not resolve the underlying cause of the problem. The wiser approach is to use software solutions to maintain and repair the registry, operating system and file system.

Thankfully, software houses and developers have created a great many applications to maintain a pc. The following freeware solutions are fully featured and already been effectively used by thousands of Windows users for a number of years. Each provides a subset of the functionality required in a piece of PC maintenance software including registry cleaning and repairs, file system cleaning of junk files etc. Each tool is freely available at download.cnet.com

Glary Utilities

Millions of users of this tool can’t be wrong. This application has a great list of utilities that cover all the essential PC maintenance requirements. It has tools to backup and repair the registry, clean hard disks of unused/orphaned/junk files and is even able to tweak memory usage and internet connection settings to speed up download & upload speeds.

The additional file shredder functions enable the user to delete beyond all recognition (well, to a government security level of deletion) any personal data and browser caching and history files of a sensitive nature.

CCleaner

CCleaner was one of the original PC maintenance applications to really take off and, to its credit, has specialized in a handful of performance functions rather than offer dozens of utilities in the single tool.

The simple tabbed interface guides you through tools to back up, clean & repair registry keys, remove unused files from hard drives and an extensive privacy tool set with options to clean out the web history and cached internet files for all the major browsers.

Ashampoo WinOptimizer

This free to try application provides enough variation in its user interface to make it suitable for non-techies and IT pros alike. Non-techies can use the One-Click Optimization tool that takes care of running a battery of features to speed up and clean up Windows.

For technical experts, and the curious, the tabbed interface can be used to execute individually some of the 20+ tools covering everything from registry fixes and file cleaning to configuration tweaks and security data shredding.

Auslogic’s Disk Defrag

After cleaning out hard drives of junk files and unused applications the file system will be a patchwork of fragmented files which slows down file access considerably for most applications. Microsoft’s own disk de-fragmentation tool is a good solid application but the Auslogic tool is noticeably faster due to the algorithms Auslogic use during their scan. For those with large hard drive then speed to complete is the over-riding factor for such a utility. It also helps that the tool has an excellent reporting and graph generating interface to inform you of progress.

For a commercial online computer repair and maintenance solution read my Reimage review at PC Maintenance Reimage to discover out how this one stop pc fix service can repair your PC.

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