Essential Tools: A Definitive List

[yellowbadger52]

great list wanna add coretemp? similar to speed fan and gives load% and temps for all your proccessor cores.

And also how about memtest for testing for bad memory.

 

[GaibanKnite]

Which anti-virus from the list do you recommend?

 

[Toukin]

thanks for the list of tools quite helpful to say the least

 

[Fabzz]

not a free one but tune up utilities helps alot for that quick tune up/defrag/registry sweep

 

[mattM_-]

This is in no way an advertisement, I am simply posting for your benefit

http://www.wireshark.org/

Wire shark is a great networking tool to sniff your network for any intruders. This also helps with a better understanding on your router communicates with the numerous computers/consoles/smartphones on your network.

 

[makethssnd]

CoreAffinity Resident is nice to have. Lets you tell specific processes which core(s) to use, or not to use - so you can keep your system on one core and your game on another. It works off an existing system that Microsoft has to allow you to set the affinity of a process already running inside of Task Manager.

 

[Mr.Game]

not a free one but tune up utilities helps alot for that quick tune up/defrag/registry sweep

A freeware version of that (of course, legal) is from Ashampoo, its called WinOptimizer. Just go [ame="http://download.cnet.com/Ashampoo-WinOptimizer-2010-Advanced/3000-18512_4-75021499.html"]here[/ame] and download it, the future updates are completely free with an included key (registration required).
If you want to try it out, make sure when installing/registering you don't sign up for the newsletter or special offers, keeps spam away.


Great resource site for freeware: http://www.techsupportalert.com/
Even though some reviews are slightly outdated, it does have a great listing of freeware I wouldn't have found anywhere else.

 

[crackdaddy]

I just want to point out something that everyone should be aware of.
True Crypt is Awesome, but it is very susceptible to header corruption which will 100% make you lose all of your data. I know this first hand how it works.

Lets say your like me and you have a big fat USB drive, you put private and valuabl
e documents on a 100 gig partition of this drive.
Every time you plug it in, it will see both drives. If that hidden drive is NOT mounted, every time you accidently click it it Windows will ask you, It appears this disk is not formated, would you like to format now? Of course I say no, every time. But the problem is, Windows keeps reading this data and accessing, now maybe my pc came unplugged while doing it, maybe the act of windows reading it alone caused it, anyway. I lost very very dear and irreplaceable data because I DID NOT BACK UP THE HEADER FILES. I had no idea, what one was, or how to do it. But I'm telling you right now. back it up, and back it up on a disk and on a cd and put it away.
I've lost stuff that really makes me sad that I did, I had every intent to back up that data in a simliar fashion, but kept putting it off, and I'm so sad I did. So don't think because you have it backed up on a drive that you rarely use, that it's safe. Back up that Header file As soon as you encrypt a disk.

 

[crackdaddy]

BTW- Boot Disk for Dos and Boot Disk for windows is fantastic,
It's free and packed full of every utility you'll ever need to diagnose and and fix a problem.

 

[Die Geheimwaffe]

The GPU-Z version you have on your list is very outdated, it's on version 5.3 now. If you link to the root of our GPU-Z download directory it will show the latest version by default and give you the choice of downloading older versions if need be.

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/SysInfo/GPU-Z/

 

[Citan]

Newegg has the full version of MalwareBytes on sale for $14 right now. It's on sale until 1-16-2012.

 

[Muffs]

^Would have been a good deal /: