Avast! is the multi-award winning antivirus product line from ALWIL Software, which has been ICSA Labs certified and regularly receives the Virus Bulletin 100% award, for detection of 100% of in-the-wild viruses, and SC Awards 2006 for best antivirus in both the US and European categories as well as Best anti-malware solution category in Europe. avast! is specifically engineered to need low system requirements and automatically and incrementally updates both the program and virus definitions, keeping bandwidth usage to a minimum while always being up-to-date.

Avast! 4 Home Edition is a full-featured antivirus package designed exclusively for home users and non-commercial use. Both of these conditions should be met! Our company offers the Home Edition free of charge, since, in our opinion, it is possible to avoid global virus spreading by efficient prevention; however, many users are not able to or do not want to pay for antivirus software. This page will show you the most important features of this program.

Author: ALWIL Software a.s.
License: Free for non-commercial home use

AVG Free is the most popular free solution available at no cost to home users and provides the high level of detection capability that millions of users around the world trust to protect their computers.

• Easy to use, low system resources
• Automatic update functionality
• Real-time protection as files are opened and programs are run
• AVG’s Virus Vault for the safe handling of infected files

AVG Anti-Virus Free is only available for single computer use for home and non commercial use.

Author: AVG Technologies (former Grisoft)
License: Free for home and non-commercial use

Free virus protection for your home pc: Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic reliably protects your private computer against dangerous viruses, worms, Trojans and costly dialers.

Author: Avira GmbH
License: Free for personal use

JkDefrag is a disk defragmenter and optimizer for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista/2008/X64. Completely automatic and very easy to use, fast, low overhead, with several optimization strategies, and can handle floppies, USB disks, memory sticks, and anything else that looks like a disk to Windows. Included are a Windows version, a commandline version (for scheduling by the task scheduler or for use from administrator scripts), a screensaver version, a DLL library (for use from programming languages), versions for Windows X64, and the complete sources.

Author: J.C. Kessels
License: Open source
Download: http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/

One of the limitations of the Windows NT/2000 defragmentation interface is that it is not possible to defragment files that are open for exclusive access. Thus, standard defragmentation programs can neither show you how fragmented your paging files or Registry hives are, nor defragment them. Paging and Registry file fragmentation can be one of the leading causes of performance degradation related to file fragmentation in a system.

PageDefrag uses advanced techniques to provide you what commercial defragmenters cannot: the ability for you to see how fragmented your paging files and Registry hives are, and to defragment them. In addition, it defragments event log files and Windows 2000/XP hibernation files (where system memory is saved when you hibernate a laptop).

PageDefrag works on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Server 2003.

Author: Mark Russinovich / Sysinternals / Microsoft
License: Freeware