15 Great Free Utilities You've Never Heard Of

System Tools

Are you the kind of person who needs to peer deep into your PC, know exactly what's running on your system, and then fine-tune the works? Then these five programs are for you.

What's Running

So you want to know about every single process and every single service, view every single IP connection, find out the details of every driver--and even then you're still not satisfied? Then you'll love this program. In a simple, tabbed interface, you'll find out all those things, and plenty more as well, such as a list of all the programs that run on startup, and a comprehensive listing of your system hardware and software. The program does more than peer into your system, though. It also lets you take actions, such as stopping and starting processes and services, and halting unwanted programs from running on startup.

Download: What's Running

Eusing Free Registry Cleaner

The more software and hardware you install and uninstall, the more full your Windows Registry gets. A great deal of software doesn't clean up after itself, and leaves behind old and obsolete Registry entries, or upon install creates invalid ones. There will be pointers to missing DLLs, listings of no-longer-valid file extensions, invalid paths, invalid ActiveX Controls, and much more. The more your Registry fills with this junk, the slower your PC gets--and the more often you'll have system crashes.

Eusing Free Registry Cleaner fixes the problem neatly, in a simple, two-step process. Tell it to scan your Registry, and it does so, finding whatever problematic items and junk there may be. Then tell it to repair the Registry, and it tidies things up. Making changes to the Registry can be dangerous, and isn't for the faint of heart, so this program has a few extras to cover you. If you want, you can first look at the problems it finds and tell the program to fix only some of them. Better yet, the program also lets you restore the previous version of the Registry, if for some reason its changes have undesirable effects.

Download: Eusing Free Registry Cleaner

Undelete Plus

Windows users sometimes get too smug about being able to recover files that they've deleted. After all, there's the Recycle Bin, so why worry about accidentally deleting files? There's bad news for you. First of all, you may have emptied the Recycle Bin. Secondly, if you delete files from within a DOS window, or a network drive, those files aren't sent to the Recycle Bin. Instead, they're deleted directly.

The free Undelete Plus, however, can come to your rescue. Run it, and it scans your system for files that have been deleted, even those removed from the Recycle Bin, or deleted on a network drive or via a DOS window. It lists all the files, and tells you whether it can likely be restored. (In some instances, the delete file has already been overwritten; in that case, you can kiss it sayonara.) Then tell the program to restore your files, and they come back from the dead.

Download: Undelete Plus

Advanced WindowsCare

This all-in-one tool combines an antispyware feature, a Registry cleaner, a privacy sweep to delete your surfing traces, a system analysis tool, and more, all combined into one package. It's best suited for advanced users who aren't scared away by delving deeply into their systems. But it's exceedingly simple to use: Launch the program, just choose which feature you want to run, and it then goes about its work. There's too much here to go into detail, but each module is surprisingly full-featured, something you wouldn't expect in an all-in-one tool.

Note that you could get confused when you first start the program. Just be sure to click the Start button at the bottom of the screen. If instead you click any of the links, such as "Computer Type," you're whisked to a page that tells you that the feature is available in the paid version.

Download: Advanced WindowsCare

System Information for Windows

Think you know the innards of your Windows system? Well, think again. Download and run this program, and you'll realize just how little you know. It's probably the most comprehensive free system analyzer you'll find anywhere. It gives you a complete rundown of all your hardware and software, your system setup, your audio and video codecs, your motherboard, your network cards, your system slots--and that's just the beginning. It also includes real-time monitors for things such as network, RAM, and CPU usage.

How much detail does it give? Consider these few bits of data. It will tell you the temperature of your CPU--and if you've got a dual-core processor, it will show you the temperature of each. It'll even tell you the temperature of your hard disk. And it somehow also manages to report on your software license keys as well, including the ones for Windows and subsequently installed software.

Note that this program is significantly different from What's Running. The latter shows the system processes and programs that are currently operating on your PC, but it won't analyze your hardware or peer deep into your system. System Information for Windows, on the other hand, is a system analyzer that shows you information about your hardware and installed software.

Download: System Information for Windows