Glary Utilities Slim

Glary Utilities has a good reputation among users who need safe and reliable system cleaning and maintenance in an easy-to-use package. Glary Utilities Slim is a freeware bundle of Glary’s disk and registry cleaners and other system tools. It also enables easy, centralized access to a number of built-in Windows tools. Some of its features you’ll only need once or twice a year, like an oil change; others are for regular duties. It slims the package by leaving out some automatic and duplicate features.

Glary Utilities Slim bears a strong family resemblance because it shares the family interface. The compact interface is tabbed along the top for Status, 1-Click Maintenance, Modules, and Menu, which accesses the Restore Center, Help, FAQs, Settings, Skins, and more. After checking for updates to make sure we had the latest definitions, we moved to the 1-Click Maintenance page, which offered check boxes for the Registry Cleaner, Shortcuts Fixer, Startup Manager, Temporary Files Cleaner, Tracks Eraser, and Spyware Remover. The Tracks Eraser lets you choose which programs and features to clean. The program offered to clean Windows, IE, and Firefox, including plug-ins, but not Chrome. We’ve run Glary’s tools often. The scan returned Details for all the results it found; we simply deselected those we wanted to keep. Clicking Repair Problems fixed everything we left checked. The Modules tab enables individual access to Glary’s scanning and cleaning tools but also many extras: Startup Manager, Context Menu Manager, File Shredder, File Undelete, Encryption and Decryption, Splitting and Joining, and access to Windows tools like Check Disk and Disk Defragment.

What’s left out? Well, a separate disk defragmenter, for starts. Solid-state drives (SSDs) are the future, and many users already use SSDs for Windows and hard disk drives (HDDs) for storage. You should never defragment an SSD, which doesn’t become fragmented. The disk defragmentation tool built into Windows does a swell job, so there’s no need to include one in Glary Utilities Slim. A better question might be, what more do you need? Chances are, if it’s not in the Slim version, it’s in the Pro upgrade.