DON'S FREEWARE CORNER -- JAN 2014
GLARY UTILITIES
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DON'S FREEWARE CORNER 2014-01
GLARY UTILITIES AND GENERAL NOTE ABOUT FREEWARE
©2014 Donald R. Snow
My Freeware Corner Notes are
printed in our Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group monthly
newsletter TAGGology and posted on my Family History Class Notes
webpage http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
, sometimes with updated information there.
GENERAL NOTE ABOUT FREEWARE
When downloading and installing any software, but especially
freeware, always use the Custom Installation option and NOT the
Express Installation. Also, uncheck things you don't want
installed on your computer. Many companies try to sucker you
into installing bloatware without you knowing it by putting checks
in boxes and hoping you don't read it carefully. Another
tip, when downloading freeware, I add "-Freeware-2014-01-06" at
the end of the download name before the extension, so I can tell
later that it is freeware and the date I downloaded it.
Writing the date in this International Date Format YYYY-MM-DD
makes them sort chronologically and helps in identifying the
latest version.
GLARY UTILITIES -- Available from http://www.glarysoft.com
Glary Utilities is a computer maintenance program
that helps keep your computer running
smoothly. It is
commercial,
but free for private use. It
has features that I use several times each week and have for
several years. The current version is Version 5. After
installation you see 3 tabs at the top, Overview, 1-Click
Maintenance, and Advanced Tools, followed by a button to the right
called Menu.
Overview shows the version number, the database date (for the
viruses and other checks it does), and a Boot Time that shows how
fast your computer booted up and how that compares to other
computers. That's quite revealing and my desktop computer is
really slow. Overview also has options to check for settings
you want or don't want, e.g. you can set it to look for updates of
itself automatically when you run it. And there is a button
there to take you to the Startup Manager so you can see and edit
what runs at boot up that might be slowing down your computer, but
I usually get to that section another way that I'll describe
below. There are several other options in Overview, but I
haven't used them.
The second tab, 1-Click Maintenance, is what I use most
often. It has options you can check or uncheck for what you
want it to do: Registry Cleaner, Shortcuts Fixer, Spyware
Remover, Disk Repair, Tracks Eraser, Temporary Files Cleaner, and
Startup Manager. I check all except Disk Repair since that
one checks all the unused space on your hard drive and it takes a
long time. Occasionally I run that one, but only when I'm
not going to be using my computer for awhile. With the
checks the way you want, click on the green Scan for Issues button
and it analyzes your computer to see what problems it finds in
these categories. You see a progress bar so you can judge
how much longer it will take to finish the analysis. The
result shows how many problems it found in each category.
The first time you run this analysis it may take several minutes
and find lots of problems, but after running it every couple of
weeks, it won't find as many problems. The green button now
says Repair Problems and when clicked it shows a progress bar
while it fixes the problems. When done, the green button
turns into Scan for Issues again. There are also several
options at the bottom of the window. I haven't used those
and I think they just take you to other parts of the program that
I get to from the next tab.
The Advanced Tools tab opens up many categories to help maintain
your computer. The categories are Windows Registry (4
items), Disk Space (5 items), System Tweaks (2 items),
Anti-malware (1 item), Privacy (4 items), System Control (5
items), System Status (4 items), Hard disks (3 items), Drivers (3
items), File management (3 items), and Programs (3 items).
Each item is a link to a part of the program that accomplishes
that task and opens it in a new window. For example, under
Hard disks, the link to Defragment opens up their Disk Defrag
program. Under System Control, the link to Startup Items
allows you to see and edit programs that open when your computer
boots up. Under Disk Space you can find and remove duplicate
files, remove empty folders, and remove broken shortcuts.
Every couple of weeks I run the System Control - Context menus
option since installing programs frequently puts more items on the
right-click menu of Explorer (the Context menu) and this allows me
to edit them the way I want. An option that I have found
very useful is Programs - Check for updates. At first I
thought this just referred to updates of Glary Utilities, but then
discovered that it looks at all installed programs on your
computer and checks to see if there are later versions. You
can have it do this automatically, but I prefer to run it only
when I want. After running, it opens your default browser
showing a list of all installed programs on your computer that
have later versions with an option to click to update that
program. It also shows newer beta versions of the software,
if there are any. In some cases you may not want to update
the program, e.g. FastStoneCapture 5.3, the last freeware version
of it. The current version is 7, but that is now shareware
and no longer free, and the old free version works fine for
me. You may also want to be careful of beta versions of
updates since they are not always stable. Under the Programs
category there is also an Uninstall option, but I have never used
it since I use the freeware RevoUninstaller to remove all traces
of old programs. There are lots of other options in this
Advanced Tools section and you may want to investigate and use
some of them.
In the upper right corner further to the right beyond the tabs is
a Menu button which takes you to Helps, FAQs, Settings, and other
things. You can get lots of your questions answered about
Glary Utilities there.
When you exit Glary Utilities, it gives you a reminder that it is
still running in the tray (lower right side of your computer
screen) so you can exit it completely, if desired. For me
Glary Utilities has been a very helpful program and is free for
private use. I have used it for several years without a
problem and I recommend it. There are other free computer
maintenance programs and if you use one and like it, please let me
know what it is and what you like about it.
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