My Alternative Recommendations to: LifeHacker's Five Best Windows Maintenance Tools
LifeHacker, a great site that is on my RSS feed list, has a post titled...
Five Best Windows Maintenance Tools
Best lists are always subjective of course. And, since I don't expect people to agree with my best lists, I'm taking the opportunity to list some alternatives to LifeHacker's list with some reasons why. Here's LifeHacker's list and my alternatives. LH indicates a LifeHacker pick.
LH: CCleaner - No disagreement here. This file clutter remover is a great free utility.
LH: Revo Uninstaller - No disagreement with this LH pick either.
LH: Auslogics Disk Defrag - I used to use this until I became skeptical that it actually does any better than the built-in Windows XP or Vista defragger. My alternative pick is Defraggler which seems to not only do a better job of defragging but also has the option of just defragging specific files (rather than taking the time to defrag an entire hard disk)
LH: JkDefrag - I think this is pretty good. However, if you are screen saver option, be careful in tuning your power management settings. Nothing bad will happen if it is not tweaked properly, but I wonder if the screen saver defragmentation conflicts with timed disk spin downs for power management. And, why have two defraggers in a 5 item list? My alternative pick is something completely different: TrendMicro HijackThis is a free utility that checks for settings that might have been changed by malware. You can think of it as a companion to anti-virus and anti-spyware utilities.
LH: Spybot - Search & Destroy - I used to recommend this free anti-spyware utility myself. However, I had all kinds of problems with its UI not working and not letting me access buttons to click, etc. So, I stopped using it. I still don't have any freeware anti-spyware program I'm happy with. I used Microsoft's OneCare for a while. But, it doesn't provide any useful information when it claims to detect something. So, I stopped using that too. Although the freeware edition of LaveSoft's Ad-Aware does not provide real-time protection, I find it more stable than SSD. If anyone has a good freeware or Open Source spyware detector for Windows, please let me know about it.
Dear Todd, I'm not sure if
Dear Todd,
I'm not sure if you'll like them, but Spyware Terminator, and Windows Defender (by Microsoft) are two thumping good anti-spyware utilities.
And I like SSD as well; you should check out it's latest version (1.6). The TeaTimer, which had something against me before, works much better than before. :)
P.S. First time to your blog and I really like it!