I thought this was interesting with some useful suggestions. See my suggestions too - MATT
Most of you reading this have encountered people asking you to solve problems on their computers - more than once. You’re an expert in their eyes, and they want you to solve the problems they’re facing with their PCs. They might be your family members, your colleagues or whatever.
If you frequently encounter situations like this, you can arm yourself with the following tools and make things easy for yourself and others when you’re working on a problematic computer system. Feel free to suggest your favourite softwares in the comments section below.
Anti Spyware
You gotta have one. Install Spybot Search and Destroy and/or Ad Aware. Both do a good job, but the former is a bit slow when compared to Ad Aware.
Don't forget Windows Defender from Microsoft. Free for XP and built in to Vista
Anti Virus
Avast! Free - That does a lot for being free, I should say. The On Access Scanner is the best part and you’ll have to leave it installed on the PC - the next time any of your closest ones click on a ‘Congratulations, you’ve won $$$’ banner, their PCs are protected for sure thanks to Avast’s on access realtime web traffic scanning.
Another good antivirus is AVG, does a lot of stuff, but still Avast! wins. You can read a comparison of AVG and Avast! here.
I have also read some good things about Avira Antivir free
Junk File Removers
You surely must have seen disks filled with nothing but junk. Sometimes they go up to a few GBs or more, and that’s the place where tools like these get handy.
CCleaner -That’s the best junk remover I’ve ever used. Has all that you might need in one place: a junk file cleaner, an uninstaller and also a registry cleaner. It’s more reliable than other such junk removers.
HijackThis - Scans the nook and corner and checks and reports to you. You can remove bad items from start up and take down other suspicious services. But beware - be sure of what you’re doing with this program.
I have a paid subscription to JV16 Powertools which is a good program but for free CCleaner is the go
PC Decrapifier
Rightly named, this tool removes the nuisances that come pre installed with your Windows PC. If anyone from your family has just got a new PC installed with Windows, you gotta run this program to cut the crap. Download it here.
If you buy a new PC like my Dell laptop they load it up with all sorts of custom applications. Some are useful but most are not. This program strips away all the excess rubbish and will usually make your new computer run faster as a result.
Partition Manager - GParted Live CD
Sure you’ve tried many partition managers else before, but I can’t resist myself by putting this up here. GParted is open source and is very very light. It can do copying, resizing, moving operations in around a dozen filesystems.
Ultimate Boot CD - Recovery Tool
It’s the ultimate Swiss Army Knife that comes packed in with tools that do varied jobs like memory tests, hard disk diagnosis, partitioning, system benchmarking and lots more. Definitely a must have. Get it here.
UBCD for Windows
UBCD4Win is similar to the above mentioned software, but runs directly on Windows.
I have used UBCD before and I have found it to be easier to use than some of the Linux 'Live' CDs
DriverMax
DriverMax lets you copy your current hardware drivers and reinstall them later if you don’t have the setup files of each of your hardware drivers.
Quite useful, but the person on whose computer working on must already have a driver backup that’s been done using this software.
There are a number of similar programs and that's because backing up your drivers is a good idea.
gOS
Ahh! You can ask why this is listed here, but what if you can’t get your PC’s OS to work? You want the internet to work and need something desperately done, but XP won’t start.
Not a problem if you have a Linux live CD in hand. Just pop the CD in, access the internet, send the email that you had to send or do whatever you wanted to get done. All without writing on to your hard disk and not damaging anything that’s already there.
I’m mentioning gOS here specifically because it has got quite good integration with Google services and pretty much works out of the box.
There are many other Live CDs available, you can check here for that. Make sure you download one and have it burnt on a disk for emergency uses.
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