| Useful Tool | Description |
| Piriform’s CCleaner | This is a great utility that will scrub your system clean. |
| CPUID’s CPU-Z | The utility to find out the specs of the CPU on your system. |
| CPUID’s HWMonitor | Great little program that gives you a quick break down of your system’s temperature and other sensors. From the maker of CPU-Z.
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| Igor Pavlov’s 7-Zip | A free, open-source utility that unzips almost everything you can through at it. I install it on all my systems. |
| Malwarebytes Free | When you need to scrub a machine of some nasty malware, this utility will help you get the job done. |
| Memtest86+ | The live CD memory tester. This tool boots from a CD and gives your RAM a workout looking for problems that can cause errors such as BSODs and data coruption. |
| Microsoft’s Sysinternals Utilities | The definitive collection of utilities to discover and fix almost anything going on with Windows. My personal favorite is Process Explorer. |
| Gnome Partition Editor | Gnome Partition Editor, or GParted, is another live CD that will enable you to resize and repartition your hard drive without reformating. Make sure you have a backup before using this or any paritioning tool on a system you care about. |
| HiJackThis | HijackThis is great for getting rid of those annoying browser toolbars. It’s basically a high-powered version of MSCONFIG. |
| ImgBurn | For all your disc image burning needs. Many utilities come in ISO format and must be burned to a disc before use. If you are using Windows Vista or previous versions of Windows, ImgBurn will make it easy to burn those ISOs properly. |
| Wireshark | Everyone should have this famous protocol analyzer in their toolbox. |
| VirtualBox | The freeware VM that’s great for getting your feet wet with virtualization. |
| Rufus | When I need to make a bootable thumb drive this is my goto utility |
| Secunia PSI | This utility checks every program on your system, checking for latest versions. Goes way beyond Windows Update. |
| Versacrypt | Bitlocker is great if you have the right version of Windows, a TPM chip and want to encrypt an entire drive. For those who don’t, there is Versacrypt. |
| Nmap | The best network security scanner out there! (Included in Kali distro) |
| Metasploit | The number one penetration testing framework (Included in Kali distro) |
| Hashtab | A darn handy Windows hash calculator that embeds itself into the context menu on your system |
| Kali Linux | The popular security-centric Linux distro. Contains many of the tools listed here |
