Scanning, syncing, and safeguarding: Every PC user, at some point, needs to perform these three tasks, and usually it can’t wait for a trip to the local computer superstore or for FedEx to deliver a CD. These five free apps will help you get your digital life organized between PCs, patch up any security breaches, and clean up your files. The biggest benefit, though: They’re all free. No need to fork over for a suite of utilities or security apps, of which you’ll use only a small subset.
AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition
AVG Anti-Virus Free has long been among the best in basic, free virus-stomping apps, and it just got better. With the company’s recent acquisition of Sana Security, AVG has added LinkScanner Active Surf-Shield, which checks what’s lurking behind the links you are about to click. If it notices anything nefarious, it notifies you. That’s an important level of additional protection, pushing the free version of AVG a bit closer to for-pay do-it-all security suites.
SyncToy
SyncToy is part of Microsoft’s Windows XP PowerToys, and if you own or use more than one PC, it should be a staple of your freeware arsenal. The first time it runs, SyncToy will walk you through the process of linking folders on one machine or with others over a network (but sadly, not over the Internet). It’s particularly useful for backing up important folders and files over a NAS drive, or when plugging in a flash drive or external hard drive.
WinDirStat
This free app will scan your drives and give you a revealing, colorful mosaic layout of all your files, so you can see what’s taking up all that space. Maybe you have a few old backups you forgot about, or home movies you’ve already burned to DVD. This program is a great way to recover drive space long occupied by unnecessary files. After a few minutes poking around with WinDirStat, if you don’t find anything you’re willing to delete, it’s probably time to buy another hard drive.
Macrium Reflect Free Edition
Macrium’s Reflect Free Edition makes drive imaging fast, simple, and, best of all, free. The program looks great and is feature-packed. Not only can you make a disk image from within Windows and compress it heavily to save space, but you can also schedule the backup to take place when you’re not in front of your computer. You can even back up over a network to a shared drive, handy for keeping all your home’s data backed up on a single NAS drive. And if you just need to grab a file or two from an image, you can browse your backed-up contents through Windows Explorer.
EASEUS Partition Manager 3.0
Partitioning large drives is a good way to keep things organized. You can keep your OS and apps, games, and media all on different partitions. It’s also the simplest way to dual-boot two operating systems if you have only one hard drive. Partitioning used to be a difficult task requiring careful steps outside the world of Windows. But with EASEUS Partition Manager, you can create, resize, and tweak partitions all you want, right from within your 32-bit Windows operating system of choice. (Unfortunately, the free version of the program doesn’t support 64-bit operating systems.)
