Registry Mechanic

This tool does everything for your registry in just a click. Although it comes with a price, it is worth the bucks you need to purchase Registry Mechanic.

With Registry Mechanic you can safely clean, repair and optimize the Windows® registry with a few simple mouse clicks! Problems with the Windows® registry are a common cause of Windows® crashes, slow performance and error messages. By using a registry cleaner regularly and fixing registry errors your system should not only be more stable but it will also help improve your system performance without expensive hardware upgrades. Learn more about the importance of a clean registry with our registry insight.

Registry Mechanic uses a high-performance detection algorithm to quickly identify missing and invalid references in your Windows® registry. These problems can occur for many reasons including being left-behind after the un-installation or incorrect removal of software, by missing or corrupt hardware drivers, or orphaned startup programs.

With a few easy steps our registry cleaner will scan your entire registry for any invalid entries and provides a list of the registry errors found, you can then choose to selectively clean each item or automatically repair them all. For your convenience and protection Registry Mechanic can also make a backup of any repairs made so that you can easily recover any changes if required.

Download Registry Mechanic Trial here.

USB Vaccine

I tried this piece of software for almost a month now and I never have any problem with autoruns ruining my flash drives. It just did the job of preventing viruses from creating autorun.inf on my flash drive.

The Microsoft Windows Operating Systems use the AUTORUN.INF file from removable drives in order to know which actions to perform when a new external storage device, such as a USB drive or CD/DVD, is inserted into the PC. The AUTORUN.INF file is a configuration file that is normally located in the root directory of removable media and contains, among other things, a reference to the icon that will be shown associated to the removable drive or volume, a description of its content and also the possibility to define a program which should be executed automatically when the unit is mounted.

The problem is that this feature, widely critizised by the security community, is used by malware in order to spread by infecting as soon as a new drive is inserted in a computer. The malware achieves this by copying a malicious executable in the drive and modifying the AUTORUN.INF file so that Windows opens the malicious file silently as soon as the drive is mounted. The most recent examples of this are the W32/Sality, W32/Virutas and also the W32/Conficker worm which, in addition to spreading via a vulnerability and network shares, also spreads via USB drives.

Due to the large amount of malware-related problems associated with Microsoft AutoRun we have created a free utility for our user community called Panda USB Vaccine.

If you are having problems with flash drives spreading viruses into your computer, this is what I would recommend. I have tried and tested it personally. And it's free!

Download USB Vaccine here.