Best Free System Tools4.756

BEST FREE MAINTENANCE PROGRAM

Glary Utilities - great system repair and cleaning program, which also includes antispyware protection and other interesting features.

Alternatives: CCleaner, EasyCleaner , Advanced SystemCare 3

BEST FREE HARD DISK HEALTH MONITORING UTILITY

Crystal DiskInfo – Real time hard disk monitoring utility, provides awesome in depth information about your hard disk drives.

Alternatives: - HD Tune, HDD Health

BEST FREE DISK BACKUP UTILITY

12. DriveImage XML – Great freeware program, you can backup your hard disk data and then restore the image if needed.

Alternatives: - Acronis True Image

BEST FREE FILES BACKUP AND SYNCHRONIZATION UTILITY

Create Synchronicity – Outstanding open source utility, powerful and easy to use.

Alternatives: -

BEST FREE PARTITION EDITOR

Gparted (Gnome Partition Editor) – Open source partition editor, very powerful, can be used on a bootable CD, USB stick, PXE server and Hard Disk.

Alternatives: - Cute Partition Manager, EASEUS Partition Manager

BEST FREE DISK DEFRAGMENTER

JKDefrag GUI – Awesome disk defragmenter, fast and reliable. Can run scheduled defragmentation sessions or run as a screensaver, only defragmenting when your system is idle.

Alternatives: Auslogics Disk Defrag, Defraggler

BEST FREE MEMORY TESTING UTILITY

MemTest – Tiny freeware program that allows you to test your memory from Windows.

Memtest86+ – Open source advanced memory diagnostic tool, runs at boot-time from a bootable CD or other media.

Alternatives: - MemScope

BEST FREE FILE RECOVERY UTILITY

PCInspector File Recovery – Very good data recovery tool, supports all file systems (FAT and NTFS), finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged.

Alternatives: Recuva , Unstoppable Copier

BEST FREE DRIVER UPDATE UTILITY

RadarSync – Finds driver updates for your hardware, downloads and installs them. It can also find updates for your software.

Alternatives: DriverMax – I don’t consider DriverMax as freeware anymore

BEST FREE FILE RENAMER

ReNamer – Very easy to use drag and drop file renamer, it offers all the standard renaming procedures: prefixes, suffixes, replacements, case changes, as well as removing contents of brackets, adding number sequences, changing file extensions.

Alternatives: Lupas Rename 2000, Flexible Renamer

BEST FREE SYSTEM INFORMATION PROGRAM

SIW (System Information for Windows) – Great free system information tool, provides info about the components and software environment in your computer. Also has some interesting extra features like network bandwidth monitoring and password manager.

Alternatives: Everest Home Edition, PC Wizard 2008

BEST FREE SOFTWARE UPDATE PROGRAM

Software Informer – A very good software updater, also has a community of users that can ask and answer questions about the programs.

Alternatives: FileHippo.com Update Checker, UpdateStar, SUMo (Software Update Monitoring), Update Notifier

BEST FREE MEMORY OPTIMIZER

SweepRAM – Outstanding tiny freeware memory optimizer with an unique approach. What you should do is, after you’ve turned your computer on, and started all applications that will be running all day long (antivirus, etc) run SweepRAM. That way, all running applications will reduce their memory use to the required amount, giving you as much RAM available for your work as possible.

Alternatives: Free RAM XP, CleanMem

BEST FREE SYSTEM RESOURCE METER

SysTrayMeter – Tiny resource meter that sows you the CPU and memory usage. You can easily close it by double clicking on the icon in the system tray.

Alternatives: - TinyResMeter

BEST FREE WINDOWS TWEAKING PROGRAM

TweakUI – Free from Microsoft? Well, it’s for real A must have for any Windows XP user, allows you to tweak the setting you wouldn’t have access to normally.

nLite - freeware tool that allows you to customize your Windows installation bootable CD. That means you can remove Windows components that you don’t want to be installed right from the start.

Alternatives: -

BEST FREE PROCESS MANAGER

Process Tamer – great tiny freeware tool that allows you to control the processes that are running in your system.

Alternatives: Process Explorer

BEST FREE PROGRAM UNINSTALLER

Revo Uninstaller – uninstalls your programs and helps you to clean the leftovers that remain after the uninstalling is completed.

Alternatives: - MyUninstaller, ZSoft Uninstaller

BEST FREE WINDOWS EXPLORER CONTEXT MENU MANAGER

FileMenu Tools – freeware program that allows you to tweak the windows explorer context menu while adding several nice features to it.

Alternatives: Mmm Free

BEST FREE HARD DISK BENCHMARKING TOOL

CrystalDiskMark – You can use it to test your hard disks and even USB sticks and external hard disk drives.

Alternatives: - Active@ Hard Disk Monitor

BEST FREE DISK SPACE ANALYZER

Sequoia View – Innovative freeware program that gives you the tools you need to analyze the files and folders on your hard disks and find those huge files that you forgot to delete.

Alternatives: - jDiskReport, WinDirStat

BEST FREE FILE MANAGER

FreeCommander – A very good alternative to the standard Windows file manager.

Alternatives: - xplorer² free, UltraExplorer, UnrealCommander, Nomad.NET

BEST FREE PROGRAM LAUNCHER

Find And Run Robot (FARR) – Absolutely wonderful freeware program launcher, very fast, lightweight, powerful and extremely customizable.

Alternatives: – Launchy

BEST FREE PROGRAM SCHEDULER

System Scheduler – An alternative to the Windows Task Scheduler, with more features and flexibility.

Alternatives: - XStarter

BEST FREE TRAY CLOCK REPLACEMENT

TClockEx – It’s free and simple and it doesn’t replace your standard Windows taskbar clock, but enhances it to show the date, calendar and more.

Alternatives: Free Desktop Clock 2.2

BEST FREE FILE COPIER

KillCopy – Very customizable freeware program that copies your files faster than Windows Explorer. It integrates in the shell and it also speeds up network file transfers.

Alternatives: TeraCopy

MISCELLANEOUS PROGRAMS

PC Decrapifier – Clean up your PC of all that useless crappy software that the PC manufacturers give you when you buy a new PC.

Wubi – It installs Ubuntu on your Windows PC without any worries or difficulties.

Sizer – Tiny freeware utility that allows you to resize any window to an exact size, useful for webmaster and web designers.

WhoLockMe – Tiny freeware Windows Explorer extension that shows you which processes are blocking a file from being moved, deleted or renamed.

Alternatives: Unlocker

TaskSwitchXP – Advenced Alt+Tab manager, replacing your standard Windows feature. If you use it once you’ll never uninstall it or go back to the pretty lame Windows feature.