Freeware Utilities Guide (Basic Edition) – LaptopLogic.com
January 26th, 2009Originally published: February 9th, 2006
Content is the property and copyright of LaptopLogic.com and Logic Media LLC
Essential Utilities
Everyone loves getting something for nothing, but how often do you actually get something useful and of value without putting a penny forward? Sure, that free cup of coffee might be vital for your daily caffeine fix, but was it really worth purchasing the previous nine cups for the free offer? Case in point, there is a lot of really good software out there which can give your laptop a much needed performance boost or help you be more productive at your desk, but are the little shareware annoyances or expensive cost of some programs really worth it in the long run?
Maybe it is, but with Freeware you never have to worry about paying for a product that may or many not perform to your standards or have to click through dozens of “Buy Now” messages. The road to the perfect Freeware program is rocky however. With Ad-ware infections at an all time high, users stand to do more damage to their computers than good by downloading utilities and other programs from non-legitimate websites, and even worse, those programs might not even do what you need them to do. As a result, many lists of excellent Freeware utilities have been published across numerous magazines and websites. The only problem with many of these guides is that the programs recommended do one very specific task or promise to deliver exceptional usability but ultimately leave the user feeling jilted once they try it out.
There will always be better utilities out there, that’s the nature of software, but with this series of guides I intend to present the best all-around programs for laptop users in some very specific areas. In this edition you will read about utilities that help improve, tweak, test, and display vital information about the basic hardware in your machine. Many of the utilities that follow are essential to keep your laptop running in tip-top shape. I know this because I use almost all of them. They’re the programs that I consider to be the most effective, easiest to use, and contain the most features in their given category. I did a lot of scouring and searching to find them, but they’ve been the best choices for me and my machine. I hope that you will feel the similarly and maybe take a few new tools away from this guide.
Note: This guide is designed for laptops based on Intel processors. Check back in a later edition of this guide that is tailored for AMD based laptops.
Best Overall System Utility
When it comes to tweaking and monitoring normal system operations, Notebook Hardware Control blows all other freeware utilities out of the water. Not only can you keep tabs on the performance and temperature of all your essential hardware (CPU, Hard Drive, GPU, and Battery) but Notebook Hardware Control allows you to overclock and underclock any of those to your heart’s content, which you of course use at your own risk. Not satisfied with the stamina Microsoft’s performance profiles provides? Leave NHC to manage it. You can even manage the acoustic properties of your hard drive through S.M.A.R.T (provided you use a hard drive with this technology). Add in handy system tray icons that provide information at a glance, a good looking interface, and an unbeatable price and you have one of the most useful and powerful utilities out there for Intel laptop owners.
System Information Tools
Any mechanic worth his salt will tell you that it takes a good understanding of all the essential components under the hood of a car to keep the engine running efficiently, and when a problem arises, the more you know the easier the problem is to diagnose. For users who want to know the essentials of the components running under the hood of their laptop AIDA32 is an indispensable and free tool. AIDA32 presented me with more information about my system than I knew what to do with. I was able to look up mostly anything, from the supported resolutions of my LCD screen to the hardware address of my ethernet adapter and even the codec ID of my laptop’s audio chip.
AIDA32 also lets you look into the software side of things. You can view what programs run on startup, DirectX information, information about Windows, and even a list of every program currently installed. That last one sounds kind of standard, buy AIDA32 gives you a comprehensive list of literally everything installed currently right down to the different versions of one program you might have on your hard drive. For the geek who wants to know everything about their system, AIDA32 is for you.
Hard Drive Performance
Defragmentation: O&O Defrag 2000 Free
Many of us know that Microsoft’s Disk Defragmenter is kind of a joke. A good deal of their standard system tools could stand some improvement (which will be the subject of a later edition of this guide series), but thankfully for the user the Freeware community has your back. Even though you have to purchase many of the systems tools they make, O&O Software offers a completely free version of their award-winning disk defragmentation software.
O&O Defrag 2000 harkens back to the old Microsoft defrag software where disk clusters were represented by blocks, not by lines that form some kind of abstract art like in the more recent version. The reason I chose this utility over many of the others out there wasn’t just because of the software’s ease of use and quick execution, but because the program provides a very detailed summary of what happened during the operation which can help you diagnose other problems if they exist. Never lose that hidden extra space again with O&O Defrag 2000 Freeware Edition.
Drive Cleaner: CCleaner
Defraging your hard drive will only take you so far in terms of freeing up extra space. When every megabyte counts, Crap Cleaner, more acceptably known as CCleaner, will find every last bit of useless data and purge it. CCeaner offers an extensive list of space wasters to select during a system scan. Not only can you manage the waste that Windows tends to produce, but this utility will also help you wade through the junk other programs can generate as well. A registry cleaner is also provided as well as tools that let you manage your installed programs and determine what gets loaded when you start up your machine. All in all, CCleaner is a very effective utility that helped me free up around 170MB of space, most of which was cached images and cookies from IE, deleted 154 old registry entries, and let me remove software that Windows couldn’t even uninstall. CCleaner is a must for users who want to keep their system free of cobwebs as well as those who like easy to use software at very little cost.
File Visualization: WinDirStat
To truly be able to effectively manage your hard drive a user has to know what programs and directories are taking up the most room. All to often I’ve found myself wanting to install a program that takes up more space than I have to offer on my hard drive. File visualization tools, such as WinDirStat, help locate directories which contain the largest files on the drive which can help me make a decision as to what I should uninstall to free up space. Many programs in this category simply scan your hard drive and give you a list in descending order of which files are in what directories and how much room they take up on the disk. I like WinDirStat because it not only gives me this list but it also categorizes files by extension and generates a graphic that can sometimes be more helpful than just a list of files and numbers.
LCD Utilites
Dead Pixels: Dead Pixel Tester 2.0
This is normally overlooked by most utilities guides. As laptop users we are forced to use flat but sometimes finicky Liquid Crystal Displays. This technology, while it has made laptops viable, has become one of the biggest problems out of the box with our machines. Combine the possibility of getting a laptop with a dead pixel or two with the fact that some companies require a certain amount of pixels (sometimes as many as eight) to be dead before the computer is eligible for a replacement and you have a good reason to stay away from notebooks altogether.
There is a solution however! While it is a very hit or miss, these dead pixels can sometimes be “exercised” out of your LCD. By quickly flashing patterns or frantically shifting between red, green, and blue some dead pixels can be cured. But how do I know if I have a dead pixel? The aptly named Dead Pixel Tester can help you out. You can choose from a variety of patterns to display in order to uncover a tricky pixel and if you find something you can use the pixel exerciser to hopefully pop it out. In most cases you’d need to download two separate utilities for this, but DPT is an all-in-one and therefore wins my praise.
Monitor Tweaking: Powerstrip
This program break a little bit with my definition of “freeware”, but I’m willing to let it slide because of a lack of annoying pop-ups and reminders to register. The only thing Powerstrip asks you to do is wait a little while before the program fully loads. As far as I know, Powerstrip is the only program of its kind that does what it does. I stumbled upon this utility when I was looking for a way to manually set my old CRT monitor’s refresh rate because certain games would cause it to flicker for no good reason. Powerstrip essentially gives you complete control over your computer’s display.
With the ability to set up different profiles for certain applications you can configure Photoshop, for example, to use a certain color scheme, have the computer overclock your video card, and use some special tweaks such as turning off your screen-saver or enabling OpenGL multi-monitor support. Under the Display Profiles option you can tweak every aspect of your resolution, refresh rate, and color depth as well as set up custom resolution profiles and timing for specific applications. With Color Profiles you can adjust your monitor’s luster as well as adjust the levels of red, green, and blue as well as experiment with different gamma levels. Finally, Performance Profiles will allow you to overclock your laptop’s graphics chip as well as change options in the Windows registry and with OpenGL that may help with performance and compatibility. I highly recommend using Powerstrip in regard to any aspect of your computer’s display.
RAM
RAM Cleaner: AMS Fast Defrag 2
Are you a power user? Do you keep dozens of programs open across four virtual desktops and play Battlefield 2 on top of that? Do you laugh in the face of Adobe Premier or Final Cut Pro? If so, you probably run over a gigabyte of RAM and you use a defrager for it. Like a disk defragmenter, a RAM defragmenter keeps your computer and tasks running smoothly. Especially at higher capacities, defragmenting RAM is a good idea. The process is a little different from what a similar program would do to your hard disk. Essentially, AMS Fast Defrag 2 will look in your RAM, find a big unused chunk, and place it so that new programs will occupy that larger space.
Long term performance gains are minimal, but an increase in speed will be noticed during more CPU and RAM intensive tasks. I decided to choose AMS Fast Defrag 2 because of its ease of use and other helpful features. AMS tells you everything thats going on inside your RAM including what how much is being taken up, tasks are running, and even some useful Windows tweaks that will let you squeeze every last bit of performance out of your machine. The Memory Guardian feature is also quite useful, allowing you to set when your computer should automatically defragment its RAM.
Memory Diagnostic: Memtest86
It’s a sad fact that despite all the money we may put into our computers, parts are still going to get damaged and fail. While certain components can take a beating many other parts tend to have a shorter life. RAM is one of those components, and especially with “value memory”, a stick of perfectly good RAM could have some damaged bits. Regardless of when you bought it, scanning your memory for any defects is a good idea. It isn’t necessary to check too often but a scan or two could reveal a problem you didn’t even know you had.
I chose Memtest86 because it is accepted as the industry standard. The utility is also pretty easy to use, even though it runs in DOS,and can test for multiple memory patterns. Memtest86 is actually a very simple program at its core. To test for bad bits on a chip, Memtest86 will go through every sector on the RAM, change each bit from 0 to 1, proceed to the next, and then check to see if the previous bit has stayed the same. If the bit was corrupt it would revert back to its original state instead of changing to 1. Slowdowns occur in shoddy RAM because information has to constantly be reloaded in the memory since certain bits refuse to budge. Thanks to Memtest86 you are able to troubleshoot this type of problem before it becomes a real hassle.
CPU
Monitoring: Throttlewatch
Leave it to the freeware community to take a utility as simple as a CPU monitor and turn it into something complex and powerful. Even though Windows has a built-in CPU monitor, part of the Task Manager, most users demand more information and would rather leave process monitoring to a third party appilcation. No longer is it sufficient to just report what percent of my processor is chugging away at tasks. With Throttlewatch I’m not only able to monitor my CPU’s load but I can also check the processor’s voltage, current frequency, temperature, and throttling history. There is a definite benefit for laptop users here because now we can see just what our processors are doing when we unplug our computers. This can help when troubleshooting battery problems or if you just want to figure out if Speedstep is working properly. Throttlewatch can also output a log file in case you want to monitor all these variables while running a benchmark.
Processor Information: CPU-Z
Short and sweet. CPU-Z does everything CPUID does, can tell you all the same information, and looks much better. For the user who need to know literally everything about their processor, CPU-Z will give you data ranging from the useful, such as L1 and L2 cache sizes, to the more obscure, such as Brand-ID and Bus Width. CPU-Z also provides you with some vitals about your motherboard, RAM, and Cache and will even let you do a Registers Dump so you can go even more in depth with your processor, RAM, BIOS, PCI headers, and a host of other nuances related to your computer.
Overclocking: RightMark CPU Clock Utility
Now, I don’t necessarily recommend overclocking laptops. Cooling on most machines is sufficient at best and temperatures can get pretty dangerous inside our packed plastic boxes, so please don’t hold me responsible if you end up using this utility and bad things start to happen. There also a huge strain put on the battery, so only test this program out with your laptop plugged in.
Overclocking is the practice of running your processor at a higher clock rate than it was initially designed for by increasing the voltage sent to the hardware. Most modern processors are capable of some incredible feats of speed, but these are only possible with expensive cooling setups. Increasing the clock rate of your processor will also shorten its lifespan a good deal, so using overclocking as a longterm solution isn’t advisable. Overclocking in small doses, however, can be useful and may drastically improve the performance of some programs and games. The RightMark CPU Clock Utility helps you apply overclocks in these small doses by managing performance profiles for you computer. By configuring the voltages, multipliers, and throttling presets for the included profiles you can improve your performance at the cost of heat and stability. The program is also useful for underclocking your processor, useful for slowing down the CPU even more during battery mode.
Ending Notes
There you have it, our list of recommended freeware utilities made to optimize your new or existing laptop. There are always cutting-edge software released frequently so stay tune Laptop Logic’s update to this guide. In addition, stay tune for more editions of utilities guides like this.