OK smartasses, you thought you had me, didn’t ya? You thought “Oh look, he forgot to post up a FreeWare review today”, didn’t ya? Yeah? Well…you’re right. I did forget. I suck! On the bright side, I did already have a plan for it, so we’ll go ahead and with that right now.

Today’s exciting Freeware pick is IOBit’s Smart Defrag software for Windows. Like virtually any defragmenting software it’s far superior to the built in Windows Defrag, but more than that I’d say it’s probably better than many of the commercial defragmenters currently on the market. As a Windows user, the need to defragment your hard drive is a simple fact of life. You either do it or you face a downward spiral of decreasing performance, slower access times for all your software and worse performance for Windows itself. Windows Vista is particularly bad about this; an untended drive can easily become 30-40% fragmented in a matter of weeks or months depending on use (though in fairness, Vista is far more resilient to fragmentation than earlier versions of Windows have been).

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Most people probably haven’t heard of IOBit, but if you use a PC at all you really should. IOBit provides some very interesting free software that I’ve enjoyed using for about a year now, and I’m happy to be able to report that their software is both high quality, professionally polished and updated damn frequently. It’s with this idea in mind that I introduce today’s Freeware Review product, Advanced System Care 3.

Just what is Advanced System Care? Let’s start with the basics. Advanced System Care will help you remove spyware threats from your system, inocculate against future infection by scanning for and plugging known vulnerabilities in the OS (read: Windows flavor) you use, and it will check for items that can be optimized to get a little better performance out of your system. If you’re a user of some of their other free products it’ll integrate with those as well.

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Clickfree Automatic Backup 320 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive HD325 (Metallic Blue)It’s something everyone needs. Clickfree portable backup drives add a level of simplicity and security to the crucial task of backing up digital fil... Read More >