PC System Utilities Software

For cleaning out the registry, temp files, and empty or broken shortcuts, Glary Utilities is hard to beat. It will also scan for programs that have updates available, delete programs without leaving bits behind, and has an easy to use startup menu manger. I prefer it over CCleaner, which can be too aggressive.

For defragging, Windows 7 native defragger works just fine. Glary Utilities has a boot time defragger but, since my boot drive is a SSD (SSDs should never be defragged), I disabled it. I have Win 7's defragger set to defrag my HDDs in the wee hours once a week (my computer runs 24/7); my HDDs never get over 1% fragmentation, usually, not even that much). One can also manually defrag a drive as necessary with Win 7's defragger.

LMiller7 said:

It is best not to mix use of Windows and third party defrag utilities. Each has it's own concept of the optimum defraged state and they will fight each other. This won't do any real harm except wasted time as one undoes the actions of the other as it imposes it's own order. NTFS is quite resistant to fragmentation. Not that it is resistant to becoming fragmented but that it just doesn't matter much...

An excellent example of why I do not recommend using anything other than Win 7's native defragger. Other reasons is the native defragger does a good job whereas some of the others do not. Defraggler is an example of one that does not. It worked great with XP but, in Win 7, it is slow and can damage a disk.

LMiller7 said:

...Avoid any program that claims to "defragment" or "optimize" memory. These programs are worse than useless and will impair performance.

Registry cleaners generally cause more problems than they solve and should be avoided...

This is one reason why I do not care for CCleaner even though it is popular with Geeks. It tends to be pretty aggressive and can do serious damage unless one knows what they are doing (and, occasionally, even then). At least, it will make a backup of the registry before doing anything to it. I prefer imaging my entire boot drive before doing anything to it rather than depending on a backup of just the registry.

One of the reasons I like Glary Utilities is its registry cleaner limits itself only to entries that no longer point to anything. It's debatable as to how much good registry cleaners can do but, at least, Glary Utilities does no harm (I do recommend turning off boot time defragging if one uses Win 7's defragger and especially if one is using an SSD).