Computer System Scub

I'm frequently asked questions regarding computer cleaning, viruses, malware, spyware, and optimization. Often times it's due to either a perceived lack of funds or education required to do system maintenance. The surprisingly positive answer to many of these questions come in free downloadable tools you can use to address such issues. Now I openly admit that when it comes to tools used to address these kinds of problems, sometimes the tools themselves can be just as bad. Well, here is the fist in a couple of posts addressing some of the best tools I've found and since cleaning and optimization go hand in hand, the topics will be covered somewhat together.

Basic Cleaning/Protection:
Whether you have a new system you want protected, or suspect you have a system that could benefit from a good cleaning, this is where I would start.

AVG Antivirus Free Edition: (direct link)
A good approach to cleaning and protecting a system starts with a good antivirus program. While McAfee and Norton are both great commercial products available, AVG Antivirus is a great free version for personal use. With a user base of over 100 million users, AVG gets a constant stream of information on new threats to constantly keep their database current.

Advanced Windows Care Personal: (direct link)
If you wouldn't classify yourself as a Geek and just want a solid all around tool for malware and spyware detection and deletion, Advanced Windows Care is for you. All you do is install it, hit scan to find issues, and hit repair to fix them. This is a great tool to have in your arsenal as it finds malware, some really deep viruses/Trojan horses, bad registry entries, and internet cache storage. This is a great all around tool for basic protection.

Advanced Cleaning/Protection:
As an alternative to Advanced Windows Care, there are a number of more specialized tools for addressing malware.

Ad-Aware Free:
Lavasoft's Ad-Aware was at one time the only free tool readily available to protect your computer that was worth downloading. It's still one of the most robust detection and cleaning tool for all kinds of malware.

Spybot Search and Destroy:
This free utility has been on the top 10 list of several magazines for the last few years. This is by far one of the best deep scan and protection utilities out there. It also has one of the best scan on boot options of the free tools available for those really hard to be rid of malwares.

Spyware Blaster:
While its detection of already present threats is weak, its integration with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and even Opera for blocking threats before they're installed is awesome.

CCleaner:
Regardless of whether you go with Advances Windows Care or the Ad-Aware/SpyBot/SpywareBlaster trio, you will also want CCleaner. Previously known as Crap Cleaner, before they accepted that the name alone was making widespread adoption slow, this tool is one of the best system cleaning utilities out there. It doesn't address malware, but instead focuses on the junk your system accumulates in the way of temp files, internet cache, program cache, broken shortcuts, and bad registry entries. This is perhaps my all-time favorite tool.

Once you have your system this far, then it’s time to start looking more closely at optimization.