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One of the challenges experienced today was to move all the photos around on my family’s PC and aggregate them on a single partitioned drive located on the secondary hard drive in the system. For some reason I could never really get the access to the photos I wanted. I could see them, but couldn’t move copies of them to my local laptop for editing or use as I desired.

After I moved all of the photos and images to the new drive I couldn’t get my local machine mapped to the new drive so I could access the photos as I had hoped. The problem was that I kept getting an error that I couldn’t connect to the share because there was already a connection made using the same login.  I couldn’t find the login for anything thought, not sure what was going on.

Eventually I did what I end up always trying in events like this. Reboot. I did a full shut-down and reboot of the desktop computer along with a full shut-down and reboot of my laptop as well. Figuring this would close any existing connections using a login I was using, I would be good to go after the reboot.

I was right. Everything is good now.

In a recent post I asked what you readers chose as your preferred security and maintenance tools. These are the applications you consider indispensable when trying to keep your systems in top running shape and secure from the variety of potential attacks and intrusions from nefarious entities found on the intarwebs!

Here’s my list of applications that I used even today as I was cleaning up my family’s desktop PC.

CCleaner which is short for “CRAP” Cleaner. It does a great job of finding all the hidden pieces of installed applications that sometimes don’t get removed with the program’s default uninstall function.

Revo Uninstaller is very similar to CCleaner, but I choose to take advantage of both as an option in case one just won’t get rid of something. I usually run one, followed by the other to just insure that there are non remnants of anything I’m wanting to make sure I get rid of in the end.

Lavasoft Ad-Aware Free is a great tool for finding any malware, trojans, hijack apps and other annoying little critters that love getting into our systems and mucking everything up.

Windows Live OneCare has been my preferred option for real-time antivirus and malware protection on my systems and others. Recent news that Microsoft will be nixing their OneCare product may lead me to be looking for a replacement and free alternative in the future. Microsoft will be releasing a free option of their own, but I’ll wait and see how it looks before making a choice. I’m interested in what free antivirus applications you all recommend.

Belarc Advisor isn’t a tool to remove much of anything, but it provides a great resource for quickly cataloging and finding out what’s on your system and how you stand on a variety of security fronts.

Images: Various logos from application pages downloaded

In my last post I shared an extremely helpful, but very low-tech tool I use to help keep the various computers I manage running in tip-top-shape. I regularly serve as “tech support” for a variety of friends and family members and I have a thumb drive that I carry with me with a variety of little apps on it to help clean-up and service those computers.

Before I share my list of tools with you though, I’m very interested to see what you all are using in your own software toolboxes. What apps do you use for anti-virus, spyware, registry clean-up, defragging? We’ll not limit ourselves to just those items either. Any tool you use to help service computers or keep them running smoothly, I’m interested in hearing about it.