A few days ago I stumbled onto a pretty decent Windows maintenance tool I wanted to share. It is called Advanced WindowsCare Personal and is available from snapfiles.com here.

Overall, this is a pretty great tool. It is very easy to use and does a lot of tuning and preventative maintenance for Windows systems – especially home and end-user systems that might not have a corporate IT person to take care of them. It does a good bit of clean up around the system, helps to protect it against spyware and some malware. While not a full anti-malware solution, it does make some basic registry changes to help prevent installation of the most common spyware and other bad stuff.

It did a very nice job of helping me tune a Windows system that I was messing with and in running basic management functions and maintenance tasks. I am not sure I would upgrade to the “Pro” version, but for a free utility, this one is pretty good.

If you still have Windows systems to manage, especially for family members and the like, this may be worth the time to install for them and spend 15 minutes teaching them to use it. Likely, they can repair most of their own problems using the tool, instead of calling you over to Aunt Millie’s for tech support. 😉