Total Control

How to lose files forever, repartition hard disks, and trim fat without going on a diet.

Remember the swish set of free hard disk management utes we looked at last year: PC Inspector File Recovery (www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/download.htm), Restoration (http://www3.telus.net/mikebike/RESTORATION.html), Force Delete (www.codeguru.com/Cpp/W-P/files/fileio/article.php/c1287/) and VirtualLab Data Recovery Software (http://binarybiz.com/vlab/). Well, here's another neat crop freebies that I have come across in the interim.

Fresh Diagnose
Want to check if your PC (and its purzas) really have all the specs that its makers claimed? Use Fresh Diagnose. This utility from Freshdevices analyses and reports information on the status of your system's CPU, hard disk, video, motherboard, PCI/AGP buses, peripheral (keyboard, mouse, printer, etc.), and network. The program also benchmarks the performance of your PC's hard disk, CPU, CD/DVD ROM, etc. and compares it with other systems. The proggie is quite free of ads and spyware claim its makers!
OS: Windows XP, 2000, Me, NT, 9.x
www.freshdevices.com

Sure Delete
When you delete a file, it merely changes its location to the recycle bin. Maybe you know that. And even when delete it from the kuradaan, it can still be retrieved via an Undelete util. Maybe you didn't know that. However, Sure Delete is a little shredder that can permanently, irretrievably and everlastingly annihilate files for you. Because instead of merely deleting file references, it actually nukes the data itself. It works with FAT12, FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS formats. And it has an easy-to-use a wizard-kinda interface that helps you in the file eradication process.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, Me, NT, 9.x
www.wizard-industries.com/index.php

Fast Defrag
Very often the reason for a sluggish PC that limps along at the terminal velocity of a kachua is memory fragmentation. To get things up to speed in a situation like this you need the services of a catalytic tool like AMS Fast Defrag--to defragment your PC's RAM and free it. This boosts your PC speed and as well as stability-- especially if your PC is low on the RAM quotient and you are always flitting in and out of programs. Fortunately Fast Defrag is a lean, mean utility so it hardly squats on any system resources itself.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, Me, 9.x
www.amsn.ro

Ranish Partition Manager
This one is blessed with the ability to create, copy, and resize primary and extended hard disk partitions. And even support up to 32 primary partitions. It also lets you format drives and create a password-protected boot menu. It includes simulation mode that lets you work with large files so that you can safely experiment before getting your hands soiled with real hard drive partition tables. It’s a good tool to have around if you have multiple operating systems on a single drive. The command line interface may daunt some of you, but it’s not as bad as you as you think.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, Me, NT, 9.x
www.ranish.com/part

TreeSize Free
Not all of “computingkind” is lucky enough to own 60-80 gigs of hard drive real estate. Lots of us less fortunate ones still need to live, breathe and work within the confines of 10-20 GB. A very difficult task in today’s day and age of megaton apps and monster attractions... But we can thank the computing gods utes like TreeSize. This one tells you what all is gobbling up your precious space. You can account for every single folder and subfolder on your disk and even print out a wasted-space report to analyse the data carefully. And then snip, slice and shear away everything that is unnecessary.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, NT, 9.x
www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml