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Fix Your Own Computer

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Jul 1, 2009 7:00 am US/Eastern

Fix Your Own Computer

Reporting
Lesley Van Arsdall

PHILADELPHIA (CBS 3) ―

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There is plenty of free software that will help you fix your own computer.

All the links below will bring you directly to that company's free products. Remember these are for PCs, not Macs.

Here are the top 5 sites :

Comodo - http://www.comodo.com/products/free_products.html

A great site and a great company with the saying "Free Means Free" for their free products (no gimmicks or tricks here). They have 13 different free products (virus protection, firewalls, registry cleaners, etc) to help keep your computer safe and running happy. This is the place to start!

Adaware - http://www.lavasoft.com/single/trialpay.php

Produced by Lavasoft this product is for the detection and removal of Spyware. The free version is easy to use with the only drawback being that it does not run automatically (every so often you have to click on the Adaware icon so it can do a scan…not a big sacrifice for this great product)

CCleaner - http://www.ccleaner.com/download

Over time your computer slows down from all the junk files it accumulates. CCleaner (which stood for Crap Cleaner) gets rid of all your junk and makes the computer run faster. Comodo has a similar tool but CCleaner is so easy and fast (some scans take less than 5 minutes) that you may want to use it instead. Also the people who bring you CCleaner now have 2 other free tools: A defragger called Defraggler and a file recovery tool called Recuva (yes both FREE) - http://www.ccleaner.com/

Belarc - http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

There's going to be a time you need to call tech support. Instead of flailing around looking for answers to their questions about your computer wouldn't it be nice to have all that data in one spot? Run Belarc once, print out the file and you will know any and everything there is to know about your PC. Model numbers, serial numbers, software versions, update histories, who's ever logged on, and much more.

PCTopTips - http://www.pctoptips.co.uk/software.html

From our friends in the UK. This person put together a website of mostly free software in all different categories. On this site (about halfway down under Disc Utilities) there is a link for Active Killdisk (this is the software that should completely wipe your hard drive)

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