Useful Freeware » Diagnostics & Optimization

Drive Manager is a Drive information viewer

bbetov — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:36:18 +0000

This little utility can be used to display whole bunch of information about your hard/cd/dvd/usb drives. Here are the main features at a glance:

Display a list of all partitions and drives;
Mapped drive letters;
CD-ROM/DVD Drive info and capabilities;
CD/DVD Media info;
“Subst” i.e. assign a drive letter to a folder;
Drive details like Vendor, Serial Number, etc.
Portable – just one executable;
Benchmarks;

Version Reviewed: 4.10

Home Page: Drive Manager

Portable Hardware Info/Diagnosric Tool HWiNFO32

bbetov — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 23:53:46 +0000

Following an earlier post about SIW for a software to use as a hardware detection here is a great portable alternative. HWiNFO32 Features very comprehensive hardware detection set. It can also monitor various sensors on your computer (like temperatures, voltages, etc.). Contains some basic benchmarking, which can be useful.

Overall a very useful program to have on your USB Drive.

Monitor Motherboard Temperatures and S.M.A.R.T. HDD Parameters with SpeedFan

bbetov — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:59:17 +0000

SpeedFan is a fast and small program for showing and monitoring various temperature sensors on your computer as well as reading S.M.A.R.T. values from your hard drive. It can also read and monitor voltages from most computers. I use it mostly to look at temperatures for my hard drive, for which I sometimes wonder if it overheats. Very valuable to read the S.M.A.R.T. values to see if there are any cluster reallocation, etc. The tool is a must have.

Get Information about your system with SIW

bbetov — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:36:34 +0000

SIW is a system information utility that can help you find out all your system components and information about them. It can detect myriad of software and hardware properties and information about motherboard, chipset, sensors, BIOS, CPU, PCI/AGP, Video Cards, etc. On the software side it can help you determine software license keys, recover passwords, audit installed applications and windows components, reveal passwords behind asterisks, and many others.

SIW is a portable application, so it is suitable to add to and run from your USB memory stick to have it handy anywhere you go.

CPU-Z System Information

bbetov — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:07:30 +0000

CPU-Z is a small utility that detects and reports information about your computer’s CPU, Memory and Mainboard. Since it is portable and does not write any information on your computer it makes it a good candidate to include in your USB drive tools collection.

CPU-Z reports CPU make/model/voltage/speed/socket/etc., Chipset and BIOS information, Memory size/speed/latency. It supports a wide variety of chipsets and CPUs, from very old to very new since it is frequently updated.

Defragment your hard drive with JkDefrag

bbetov — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 02:09:58 +0000

JkDefrag is a fast and easy to use disk defragmenter with a very low overhead. The program is very small in size (the whole download is about 320k) and it is portable. Just unpack the executable(s) and run it. There is a command line version, which is very useful for scheduling defragmentations on a regular basis.

Another great feature is the screen saver option, which enables you to set it to work whenever windows turns on the screen saver. You can also set a minimum time interval between defragments, so it doesn’t unnecessarily defragment the disk every time the screensaver starts.

It features several data optimization strategies. Another feature I find very useful is that it can defrag individual folders and files. Overall probably the best freeware defragmenter (and possibly better than many commercial ones). It needs some polishing of the user interface, but otherwise a perfect replacement of the standard windows defragmenter.