Malware Detector and Removal Tools

• Free AVG Anti-Virus - Grisoft has made it a little harder to find their free edition, and it is free for only one computer in your home. If you have more than 2 computers, you will need to purchase AVG Pro Single Edition or even AVG Network Edition.
• avast! Home Edition - Another free for home-use anti-virus.
• Spybot Search & Destroy - A very good anti-spyware program - free.
• Lavasoft Ad-Aware Personal Edition - UPDATE: Users are experiencing errors with the latest version of Ad-Aware, and for right now, I do not recommend installing it until it stabilizes.
• Windows Defender - Free anti-spyware from Microsoft. Requires Windows XP Service Pack 2 (which you should have anyway) or better to run.
• Hijackthis Anti browser hijacking and spyware tool.
• a-Squared HiJackFree - A free way to scan your system and kill malware, particularly good for advanced users.
• UnHackMe - Great rootkit detector and remover

• SpamBayes - Works great with Outlook; not quite so easy to setup with Outlook Express.

• OpenOffice - a good, free Microsoft Office replacement.

• BullZip PDF Printer Creator - A simple free PDF creator.
• Foxit Reader - Fast and free PDF viewer.

• Ultimate Boot CD - An INCREDIBLY useful CD that you can create and boot to with dozens of utilities to wipe data, recover files, run diagnostic test, partitioning, etc. For Advanced users.
• Sysinternals Utilities - Once an independent company, now part of Microsoft, Sysinternals have created a number of beginner and advanced utilities for Windows, such as Contig, a defrag utility, which also is included with Power Defragmenter below.
• Power Defragmenter - This program puts a GUI on Sysinternals Contig utility for fast and powerful disk defragmenting.
• Microsoft Powertoys - Useful utilities from Microsoft such as TweakUI, SyncToy, Color Control Pallet, and Alt-Tab Replacement.
• Local Cooling - used to find energy savings from turning monitor and harddisk off.
• Free Duplicate file removal tool- Search windows and remove duplicate files with this tool.
• FreeUndelete - From OfficeRecovery.com comes a free utility to undelete files from NTFS, FAT32 and FAT16 drives.
• Carbonite, unlimited online backup for only $49.95 per year. We use this at Kirkham Systems.
• Office Compatibility Pack - Allows your older version of Microsoft Office to open and edit the new file formats of Microsoft Office 2007.
• 7-Zip, the free file compression utility.
• Password Corral uses strong encryption to protect your passwords. If you are like me, you probably have hundreds of user names and passwords, and this free utility will protect them, yet remain easy to access. I recommend using a strong password that you do not use for anything else to protect the passwords inside Password Corral.
• KeePass - Another good password storage program. KeePass is a free/open-source password manager or safe which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key-disk. So you only have to remember one single master password or insert the key-disk to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish).
• Eraser - a great way to permantly wipe data from your hard drive. You can wipe files, directories, or even entire disk with this FREE utility.
• BlogDesk - a great productivity booster if you have a single or multiple blogs.
• StumbleUpon - download this tool, and you can randomly search the web for sites others find interesting in the categoreies you choose.
• ieSpell - a spell checker plug-in for Internet Explorer.
• Inline Search - You know when how you start typing something and some applications just drill right down and find while you are typing, such as Quicken? Well, this Internet Explorer plug-in does this for the search function in IE.
• Open Last Closed Tab - Does exactly what it says. If you accidently close a tab, press [ALT]+[X], and it will reopen after installing this Internet Explorer plug-in.
• Norton Removal Tool - completely removes Norton products from your computer.
• Winamp Media Player - nice easy to use media player for video's and songs.
• VLC Media Player - A very basic media player. Can play many file types. Also can play incomplete files.
• Memtest - Here is a link to a download for a bootable memory testing tool. In order to use this you must burn it to a bootable disk with nero or another CD burner.
• CCleaner - CCleaner is a free and fast system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history.
• ImgBurn - If you need to back up CDs or DVDs, or made CDs or DVDs from .ISO files, you won't find a simpler program than this.
• Advanced WindowsCare - Anti-spyware, a Registry cleaner, privacy cleaner, PC optimizer?this all-in-one tool includes more as well.
• FastStone Screen Capture is a free and powerful screen capture utility that will save to a variety of file formats, and allows you to tweak the capture before saving. You use options that allow you to capture certain objects, such as Window, menu, toolbar, etc.
• NK2info - this utility will retrieve email addresses that you have sent to with Outlook, but did not save in Contacts.
• PC Decrapifier - Remove "trial" versions of software from your new PC, speeding it up.
• MyUninstaller - removes those pesky programs that will not remove or uninstall themselves properly.
• NetStumbler - for finding wireless access points and checking for available channels or for mac use macstumbler.
• YahooPops - I'm not sure if this causes problems with Yahoo's Terms of Service, but it allows you to access your Yahoo! mail directly into an Email client, such as Outlook for free.
• StartupRun - Easier to use and more informative than using Microsoft's built-in startup manager, msconfig. Use this application to speed up not only your Windows boot time, but also the overall performance of the PC by turning off unnecessary programs that rob your computer of memory.
• Notepad++ - A great notepad replacement. Designed for programmers, useful for just about anyone that needs a text editor.
• VLC Media Player - This media player will play practically all types of video files.
• Free FLV Converter - Download and convert YouTube videos and more.