Metis
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Five free utilities for your computer
I once was active in another forum but left as it was becoming a bit too childish for me there. However, one of the more mature posters left me a parting message recommending your site. Therefore, I’ll lurk here a bit to see what it’s all about.
While I do, maybe I can add to this section with some advice on five free utilities I use to make my on-line computing life much easier:
1. AVG antivirus – the best free anti-virus out there, IMHO.
2. Spybot Search and Destroy – the spyware equivalent of the above.
3. Zone Alarm firewall – a tad better than he Windows one and free as a bird for personal use.
4. Win AOS Registry Optimizer – cleans up your registry, optimizes your system, clears unwanted rubbish and more. It’s free if you don’t mind correcting things 10 errors at a time. Some mentioned CC-cleaner – this application does as much and much much more.
5. DateTime – a simple program to access the atomic clocks – for some reason Windows will never do it right on my system.
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11/23/2007, 11:30 pm
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Pastor Rick
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Re: Five free utilities for your computer
So we need to give five utilities we can not do without in this thread? No duplicates right?
1. BeClean - cleans all temp files, registry, history and more (also creates a registry back-up in a separate location so you can restore from there in the event of major troubles).
2. Ad-Aware SE Personal edition - removes adware.
3. MRUClear - cleans the mru list which seems to be forgotten by most utilities.
4. RegCompact.net - Look for the freeware version for a good registry compactor (no longer shows up on the developers site)
5. Auslogics Disk Defrag - better and faster defrag than what is supplied by MS.
Last revised by Pastor Rick, 11/24/2007, 12:14 am
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11/24/2007, 12:13 am
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Lesigner Girl
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Re: Five free utilities for your computer
Thank you for posting those, Metis, and please thank your friend for sending you our way. 
Thanks also to Pastor Rick for your list as well.
I use AVG, Spybot, ZoneAlarm, and AdAware, although I use some more than others. My installation of Windows XP seems to synchronize with the atomic clock, so I've never needed to look elsewhere for that, but I do know someone else who has that problem so I think I'll recommend it to him. I should try one of the registry cleaners, though.
I only have one that I can think to add to the list right now. It's not so much a download in itself, but you do need to download a tool to interface with their online virus scanner.
* Housecall by Trend Micro
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11/24/2007, 12:54 am
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Metis
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Re: Five free utilities for your computer
Well, it depends what you are duplicating.
Yes, you usually shouldn’t run more than one anti-virus or software-based firewall application at a time (the exception to the “firewall” rule is that you can run a hardware-based firewall with a software-based one, as I am currently doing).
However, there is nothing wrong with running, say, both Spybot and AdAware consecutively as one might catch a nefarious program that another may not (you should remember to update these often too so that they can catch the latest editions of the “malware” out there).
Also, I’ve had no trouble running various registry cleaners consecutively as, once again, one may catch a problem that another may not.
My advice would be to try several of the applications then settle down with the ones you are comfortable with.
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11/28/2007, 12:22 am
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