Most of the readers of this blog are familiar with CCleaner, probably the world’s most free popular hard drive (and registry) cleaning program, featured in my “Top 30 Freeware” post. But if you have a lot of apps installed, there is a high likelihood that a lot of redundant and useless files are accumulating on →
GetFolderSize: scan and sort your hard drives by folder and file sizes
GetFolderSize is a small, free program designed to reveal the disk size of folders and files on your hard drive(s) in a sorted list, to determine which folders, files or programs are taking up the most hard disk space. It simply scans your selected hard drive or partition, displays both the folder list and the →
SD Explorer: integrate “Windows Live Skydrive’s” 25 gigs of cloud storage with your desktop
Windows Live SkyDrive is a service that gives you online storage for uploading files and sharing them with other people. It was renamed from Windows Live Folders in August 2007 launched in February 2008, and in December 2008 it got a bump in its storage cap, from 5GB to 25GB. It has been getting minor updates →
Partition Wizard Home Edition: excellent, free partition management utility
Partition Wizard is a free partition management utility that works on both 32bit and 64bit systems. It offers a wide range of functions, including creating, resizing, formatting, copying, deleting, and hiding partitions. Other functions include setting active partitions, changing drive letters, performing hard drive surface scans, checking the file system on your partitions, and even →
Comodo Time Machine: roll back your PC to a previous state, including every file on every partition
Comodo Time Machine is a free program that can roll your system back in time, on-demand, to a previous state. It provides the ability to “undo” any kind of undesirable event, such as a virus or malware infestation or any event or events that might have caused your PC to become too cluttered, slow, or →
Eraser – Securely Delete Your Files
I’ve previously discussed why you shouldn’t just throw out or recycle your computer without wiping the drive first to protect your identity and files in a 404 Tech Support article Before you recycle/garbage that old computer. If you’re deleting files from your computer that need to be kept from prying eyes, you should be using →
Windows Surface Scanner: check for bad sectors on your hard disk
Windows Surface Scanner is a free, fast utility that scans your hard drive(s) for physical errors. It will examine each sector on your hard drive for read errors and reports them if found. It is purely diagnostic and will not fix or “mark” bad sectors or recover data. It happened to me a couple of weeks →
DiskCryptor: encrypt hard disk partitions, flash drives, and CD/DVD media with this versatile tool
DiskCryptor is a free, open source disk encryption software. It encrypts entire hard drive partitions, including the system partition as well as flash drives in real time without affecting performance. It can also create encrypted CDs/DVDs (through the use of disk image .ISO files). It offers excellent performance for mounted encrypted volumes and a good →
Easeus Todo backup: backup, restore and mount drive partitions
Easeus Todo backup is a free program that can create backup images of your hard drives or partitions and restore them on demand, and can also copy (clone) a hard disk/partition into another. It can process active primary (boot) partition via a bootable CD/DVD that it will create for you on-demand. Advanced options include mounting →
FreeFileSync: powerful folder comparison and synchronization tool
FreeFileSync is a free/open source folder and file synchronization program that features a beautiful, two pane user interface and a host of powerful options. It can do the following: compare files by their content or by file size and date, synchronize files and subfolders, process multiple pairs of folders at once, load/save folder comparison sessions, →
WinCDEmu: mount disk/ISO images by double-clicking them in Windows explorer
WinCDEmu is a free, open source program that can mount disk images (.ISO, .IMG, .CUE, .BIN and .RAW) into virtual CD or DVD drives. It works invisibly without a user interface, and simply allows the user to double click on an image file to mount a CD/DVD image into a virtual drive, and to right-click →
SpaceSniffer: explore a “treemap” representation of your file and folder sizes
SpaceSniffer is a free program that displays the size of your files and folders in a visual “Treemap” representation. It allows you to browse your folder structure, drill in and out of represented elements, and filter the display by any combination of criteria (filenames, extensions, size, date). It also allows you to access your Windows →
