Vista is far from perfect but it’s possible to make it a little more perfect and a little more useful by downloading and installing some free utilities for it. If you have no idea where to start or which programs to look for, here are some that will get you well on your way.

These are not listed in any particular order but are grouped by category.

Vista Optimizers

Vista may not operate the way you want, right out of the box and besides removing some startup entries, these programs will do their best to optimize and configure Vista to operate the way you want and not the way Microsoft thinks you want it to operate.

Tweak VI, this program is designed to optimize your processor, hard drive access and various other features to make Vista just a little faster. There is an “Auto Optimize” button that will take care of it for you but note that could turn off some of the more advanced features that you may actually use. Thankfully, it has a built in “Settings Restore” feature in case you don’t like the changes it makes. Available in both free and pay versions.

Advanced Windows Care is another tweaking program but of a different nature. This is kind of an “all-in-one” optimizer, malware immunizer/scanner and junk file/registry cleaner. It works as advertised and is very effective at immunizing against many common malware threats (mostly spyware and malicious cookies) and the registry cleaner not only deletes errant entries but can also “repair” and “optimize” entries that are not functioning as they should be. It will also help you optimize your startup programs. Available in both free and pay versions.

CCleaner is a rather simple utility but is nonetheless effective. It’s sole purpose is to clean out junk files and errant registry entries, however, it can only delete registry entries and cannot repair them. I have found it best to run Advanced Windows Care first to repair and delete entries and use CCleaner to catch anything that Advanced Windows Care may have missed. Completely free but the author accepts donations.

After running these utilities there are probably gaps all over your hard drive from programs, files and registry entries being deleted. Windows Vista may be smarter than previous versions of Windows when it comes to maintaining the integrity and placement of files but it still rates below that five year old jar of mayonnaise sitting in the back of your refrigerator.

Instead, use Auslogics Disk Defrag to close those gaps and optimize file access. Defragging should be part of at least a monthly maintenance cycle, Vista has one built in but it is about as useful as a rotting sandwich. Completely free.

Security Software

Did you know that you don’t have to be shanghaied into buying those expensive security suites? Well, you don’t. Many home users can use a bevy a free utilities available for download to protect their computers at no cost. Note, most of these programs are free for personal use only, charities and non-profit organizations are eligible to download discounted versions of the full programs, anyone falling outside of those categories much purchase the full version of the program at full cost.

AVG Free Edition is one of the better known free anti-virus solutions. And why not? The program is lightweight, effective against most threats and features some of the best detection rates among free anti-virus programs. Features an easy to understand interface and is best suited for home users only.

Spybot S&D, free malware protection, it’s a spyware scanner, it’s free but it’s not as effective as it used to be. I’m afraid that to get decent spyware protection these days, you’ll actually have to buy a program but Spybot is better than nothing.

Adaware SE Personal, spyware scanner only, does not offer active protection but removing spyware after the fact is, once again, doing something, instead of nothing. There are paid versions of the program that offer active scanning and infection prevention systems.

Vista Firewall Control is basically an easier to use GUI front for the built-in Vista Firewall. It will turn on the “two-way” protection of the firewall which is off by default and notify you of which programs already have firewall permissions and which ones are requesting it. This one is offered in free and several tiers of paid versions.

Fun Utilities

Up to know it has been a list of “serious programs” to protect and optimize your system but do little to add to the “fun factor” and your computer should be fun to use. Hopefully these will fit the bill and make you look forward to logging on every day or at least, more often.

Rocket Dock provides a Mac OSX-like dock on your screen. It can be positioned at the top, bottom or on either side of the screen. Settings include running application indicators, zoom effects, minimize effects and minimize applications to the dock among many others. It can be configured to suit each individual user. Free but the author accepts donations.

Iconoid has one purpose, if you are a “file pack rat” and don’t care much for organization, it’s likely that your desktop is a cluttered mess. This is a problem if you like nice desktop backgrounds so hide those unsightly icons until you need them. Iconoid will do just that, set it to always hide the icons, start with windows, hide when started, the choices are endless.

Switcher provides another piece of Mac OSX to Windows Vista users. You may know of the “Expose” feature of Mac OSX which tiles running application windows across the screen so you can easily select the one you need. Vista has the “Windows Tab” feature for 3D flip but this is a less effective method. Switcher tiles open windows across your screen just like “Expose” on Mac OSX would. It even has a search feature so if you have a lot of applications open all you need to do is type its name.

Alternative Browsers

Honestly only a novice’s novice uses Internet Explorer and while there may be instances that you need to use it there is no excuse for using it all the time.

Firefox is probably the most popular “alternative” browser but what makes it unique is that there are tons of “add-ons” and themes to customize it to your liking, you can even make it look and function just like Internet Explorer, except without all the exploits.

Opera, what can I say about it, it’s cross platform for both Windows and Mac, it’s fast but not nearly as customizable as Firefox is.

Then there is Safari, it’s fast too but is quite buggy under Windows and it uses Mac OSX cleartyping instead of what’s native to Windows and the text appears slightly “blurred.”

Alternative Office Suites

Why pay for Microsoft Office when there is a free alternative that gives you most of the functionality present in Microsoft’s program?

There’s really only one free alternative to Microsoft Office being OpenOffice. It’s an office suite, it’s free, the only thing it lacks is an email client. There are also several “online” office suites like Google Docs but I prefer running local programs, maybe it’s just me.

File Sharing

Be careful when file sharing as this is a gray area of the law but there are still many legal ways to use a file sharing program.

FrostWire and LimeWire are two of the best file sharing programs on the planet, their only fault is that they aren’t the best at torrent downloads (though that is supported) and lets be honest here, torrents really aren’t that great unless you have a few hours to wait for a relatively small download. LimeWire has both paid and free versions where FrostWire is an open source version of LimeWire, how they got away with that I will never know.

Photo Editing

PhotoShop may be the standard but for most of us that’s a bit of overkill and some excellent photo editing software can be had for free.

First there is Paint.NET which was meant as a replacement for Windows Paint and is actually maintained by some of the original developers who worked on Windows Paint. Needless to say Paint.NET is far and above Paint with support for layers, unlimited undo, thumbnail browsing of open images, it’s like a “lite” version of PhotoShop. Paint.NET was listed in the top 20 products of 2007 at PCWorld. For most basic tasks and for those who are tired of Paint, Paint.NET will make your day.

Second there is PhotoPlus which is a lot more like PhotoShop with many of the same features, just in a slightly different layout. While it is free, you must register the program online to get a free serial number and you must do this for all copies that you want to deploy. There are also several paid versions of PhotoPlus but if you’re going to buy PhotoPlus you may as well spend that $80 on PhotoShop Elements.

Last but not least is Picasa and while it’s not an editor as such, it does do basic tasks such as cropping and removing red eye but this program’s primary function is to scour your hard drive for photos and organize them in a manner that is easy to understand. It has been compared to iPhoto on the Mac and dare I say that it comes pretty close.

Audio Editing

For those of us that would like to turn our music collection into a few ringtones or the aspiring Podcaster, you don’t need to drop lots of cash on an audio recording/editing program, you don’t even need to drop any cash at all.

Audacity is a free audio recording and editing program though sometimes it doesn’t play nice with newer hardware and it may be hit or miss as to whether it works fully with your system or not. Most should be fine, however.

The program is very basic and offers recording and playback but for import or export of MP3 files requires the LAME encoder. I feel that this should have been built in to the program. The LAME encoder is not hard to get working but it’s just an extra step that irritates/annoys me.

To get a really good audio editing program or compete with professionals, you’ll have to buy one.

Media and playback utilities

While all versions of Windows include Windows Media Player you will find this very limiting as it doesn’t support very many codecs and while there are plugins to make others work with it, it’s still quite limited in what it can do. Here are some media utilities that you may find useful.

Ashampoo Clip Finder is a program that you download and install to your desktop and once you have done so this enables you to search the most popular video sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, MyVideo and others. After you’ve found the clip you are looking for it will either let you watch the clip or download it to your computer for permanent use.

VLC Media Player is a cross platform audio/video media player. It is lightweight and the user interface is very simple to use and it plays just about every audio or video format in existence.

DVDShrink is designed specifically to compress your purchased DVDs to your hard drive and then optionally burn them to a DVDR, DVDRW or DVDRW DL (dual layer) disc. Yes, it lets you create your own personal archived DVD collection in case something happens to the originals or just keep the files on your hard drive and watch the movies any time you please. Nero must be installed to enable automatic burning of backed up DVDs. To enable automatic backup copy burning, a full version of Nero must be installed.

Burning Utilities

CDBurnerXP and DeepBurner are two free programs you can use to burn DVDs or CDs but the free versions of these programs are very limited. They can be used to do basic data backup and burn bootable ISO or drive image discs but cannot be used to burn, say, the backup files from a DVD stored on your hard drive. DeepBurner offers a slightly more fully featured pay version but if you’re going to pay for one you may as well turn your sights towards Nero.

System Utilities

Speedfan is a very simple program that reads and reports the temperature(s) of the various components of your computer. Any component that has a temperature sensor on it will be reported, this is primarily used to check the temperature of your processor, motherboard and graphics card but in some cases other components have monitoring as well. It can also check the SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) status of your hard drive. Hard drives “know” how healthy they are and this information is reported transparently to the operating system but utilities like this are required to check the status. However, this is a bonus and is not intended to replace true SMART monitoring software and none of the good ones are free.

CPU-Z will tell you what type of processor you have, the speed it is currently operating at, voltage status, memory type/size/configuration, motherboard manufacturer and other system information that is otherwise not accessible. This software is good for helping you decide on what kind of memory and how much you can install in your system.

Belarc Advisor is a PC Auditing utility that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about your computer. Everything from operating system version, installed updates, programs, licenses, hardware and what drivers are currently installed will be found by Belarc. If Belarc can’t find it then you don’t have it.

Activation Backup and Restore (ABR) (located near the bottom as ABRbeta3.zip) has one very simple purpose. When the installed operating system on your computer is activated at the factory, the manufacturer probably used an “OEM activation kit” which may or may not match the COA (Certificate of Authenticity) sticker on your computer. If it does match then there will be few problems but if it doesn’t, the operating system may have trouble activating when you use the serial number located on it. The only solution then is to call Microsoft and get another key. ABR will backup your “OEM activation” and after you have reinstalled will either overwrite the current “bad” activation and replace it with the original OEM activation or will just activate the operating system even if you didn’t enter the serial key. Use of a flash drive is required with this utility as that is where it will store the backup activation sequence.

You may have already be using or have heard of some of these programs but I hope you enjoyed this collection of programs for Vista. There were programs that I would have liked to put in here but for one reason or another did not make the list this time. Look for a follow up to this post in the future.