Microsoft PowerToys is a fantastic program if you like to tweak your experience with Windows.
It lets you do things like set up individual zones within your monitor that act like picture in picture or another monitor. It has a robust color picker, which helps greatly when it comes to photoshop and template creation. I also use the text extractor very often to extract text from pictures, which it copies to the clipboard.
The best, and technically the worst, is it lets you change settings that you can't normally do in Windows.
While it could get someone YOLO adminning in trouble, thankfully it has a lot of warnings before you mess things up too badly.
Those are the features I use, but there are too many useful features to name in one go.
I can't live without powertoys. Fancyzones is a must. Power rename is also great. I don't understand why this stuff isn't just built into windows now though.
While not a "Windows program," Ninite allows you to queue up and download a lot of the most common software installs you'd make after a fresh install.
In terms of actual windows programs, I quite like "Everything." It's basically a database of all the files on your computer that allows for near instant searching.
"Space Sniffer" is an excellent utility for finding what takes up a lot of room on your drive.
"Unidentified flying raw" is a free program that allows the manipulation and conversion of raw picture files. I use it before editing in Gimp, but if you have Photoshop, it's not necessary.
"Dark Table" is an acceptable free light room alternative if you have the patience. It's pretty slow though.
"Everything" is amazing. Works great as a search tool, and it has really cool capabilities. Lately I've been using to mass-rename files, instead of downloading a specific tool for that (or learning bash).
That program is essential windows software since the stock windows search utility is basically fake. There's no way to actually search without it.
Also I found a new good use for it recently. You can sort the entire file list by date and it updates live. So suppose you're using a program and it saves a file without telling you where. Since it's Windows and the file system is obfuscated to shit, there's no way to know where it is. But it will be near the top of the Search Everything file list.
Also, Ninite pro tip:
Do not delete the Ninite exe. If you want to update all your apps later at once, just double click on the. exe again and Ninite will download & update all the installed apps and skip those that don't have any updates.
Notepad++ for any text file that needs to be opened, and VLC for any video file that needs to be opened. Both are great.
Create bootable USB drives the easy way
You can use it to flash an ISO for a free operating system instead Microsoft Windows spyware. You could go Linux, or BSD, or Haiku, or whatever so long as your personal data & freedom are respected.
VoidTools' Everything. Indexes your whole filesystem (across all drives too) and allows you to search your whole filesystem for matching filenames, save search presets for later, and even allowing RegEx search queries if you need files of names matching some pattern.
I am an IT guy, as a general rule I don't install stuff I don't need.
That being said, we all have different requirenments for our computers, and I would be dumb to enforce my requirenments on you.
So here are some great tools and utillities that I have used and in some cases still use.
Firefox - Google Chrome needs a rival to keep the web happy, it is an excellent browser and have served me well for 20+ years.
VLC - Video Lan Client, I have yet to find a media file that this player can't play, this is less relevant since piracy have gone down, but I still keep in on my system.
digiKam - A photo organizer, works well with all formats I have thrown at it, currently manages my growing collection of photos (see my profile for a photo I took of a Lynx Kitten), it also makes me able to do light photo editing, but I mainly use Affinity Photo for that.
Strawberry Music Player - An advanced music player, based on Clementine Music Player which is based on amaroK musik player. It gives me a great album interface to managemy music, less usefull now since I buy most of my music through iTunes, but still does an excellent job of managing growing collection och C64/Amiga remixes from remix64.com
Notepad++ - This should be on every windows computer, it is an advanced text editor, it has everything you need from a text editor, plays way more. It is fast, has persistant tabs, syntax highlighting, autocomplete, themes and way more.
VS Code - Visual Studio Code, this is a source code editor, it is like taking Notepad++, making it snort cocaine and bolting a modern interface to it. This is not a general text editor, this is a program where you write and edit code, Notepad++ is excellent for reading and making quick changes to text files, VS Code is what you use to develop the code. It assists you constantly, from autocomplete, to error checking your code, I write a lot of Powershell code in VS Code at work, and it is great. It is slower to get going than Notepad++, but once you start it and have it co figured it works great.
Gimp - The Gnu Image Manipulation Program, free but less refined version of Adobe Photoshop, it is highly capable.
Libre Office, a less refined version of the office suite.
Funny you mention piracy going down, this is absolutely not true lol. Also you should pirate music instead of giving money to apple
I used most of the stuff you listed though I usually switched to mpv instead of VLC. On Linux, I used Strawberry for quite some time though I use foobar2000 on Windows. Deadbeef is a good lightweight alternative to that on Linux but always seems to play catch up to it's elder cousin.
Thanks for this! I'm in agreement with most of your list but an looking forward to trying out strawberry and digikam
Took me about 4 fucking seconds of scrolling to find someonr basically shouting "UsE lInUx" (using it myself and find this attitude highly annoying)
Keep to the question and let people use what they want, which leads me to:
Qbittorrent, best torrent client imo
Files app by yair, pretty nice looking file manager with tans and other goodies
This, people who use Linux will always let you know they use it especially if you didn't ask
For me, there are exactly 0 people talking about Linux except you.
WUB or Windows Update Blocker.
It's one of the first things I put on a new after the initial Windows update.
It safely turns and completely turns off Windows updating and the services involved with updates.
It's practically a necessity if you use a metered or paid internet connection, or connect your laptop to a cell phone for an internet connection via a hotspot.
Windows doesn't listen to its own settings about metered connections and if it deems something worthy of killing your data plan for the month, it'll do so without your knowledge.
The best part is that when you're ready to download critical updates or something from the Windows store (Whatsapp, Minecraft, Power Tools, etc.) then it's as simple as a button press to reactivate updates without restart.
Does this really work? I have a little windows miniPC that runs some home services. And I hate that it just updates and reboots (or sometimes just ends up shutting down) whenever it’s feels like it. I don’t have the energy at the moment to clear it down and rebuild from scratch with Linux so this update blocker sounds bloody amazing.
I have been using WUB, and some other extremely helpful tools that this company makes, for a few years at this point.
The part that I LOVE about WUB is how complete and exhaustive the shut-off is for the ease of use.
There's no editing files, no editing anything, just download and press a button to turn on update blocking (while protecting the services that could mess up by blocking). Press another button to unblock everything as good as a fresh install.
It's as if it was never blocked when updates are toggled on, and it's as if Windows update is completely removed with the blocking is toggled on.
If you're still using Windows 10 you should try out Powertools by Microsoft. It adds a lot of quality of life improvements, like adding a grid to snap your windows
Powertools
I think you meant PowerToys. :)
Almost can't install windows without powertools these days
PowerToys.
Seconded for PowerToys. it does so many useful things.
NAPS2 (Not Another PDF Scanner) does exactly one thing, scan stuff, and it does it incredibly well. Bypass all the garbage software that came with your scanner, plus it supports batch processing and profiles.
Helps me run my business
AutoHotkey - one of the best GUI automation and scripting tools for Windows. You could create anything from a simple key-ramapping macro to full fledged, standalone apps - it's super easy, yet super powerful. Highly recommend checking out if you ever wanted to automate something, or you wanna make your own app for whatever, but you don't wanna learn a complicated programming language.
Strange, as a programmer i find autohotkey complicated haha. (Granted, I've barely touched it in the past)
Everything. A very small and fast search and indexing program, much better than windows search
Got to mention Quicklook by Paddy Xu.
Just like the original functionality on mac, you press spacebar to inspect any highlighted file.
This was was one of those tiny things that a massive difference for me when I switched to windows.
I also use startisback to customize my taskbar and start menu.
Chris Titus Tech's debloat tool (source code)
Snipping Tool - take custom screenshots of your screen
ShareX is great for this! https://getsharex.com/
Even better, try Flameshot. Open source, cross platform, and lets you do very useful simple edits, like add arrows, shapes, text, and censoring.
Windows Shift S. Select an area of your screen which you can then paste. Also, Alt printscreen captures the current window.
If I would have been asked to choose one really useful piece of software on Windows it would be Agent Ransack. I use it to find strings in a bunch of files, even compressed ones. I believe it can do much more but I use it for this purpose on daily basis. There's a paid version but the light one is free and does all I need. https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/
Windows has a clipboard tool for caching several different pastes, you may have to turn it on though.
You can use ctrl left/right to jump whole words, this also works with shift to select.
Flow Launcher. Alt + space to open anything. Faster than powertoys run and all the other tools i used before.
First time hearing of this and geez, it's 178MB?! Meanwhile, Executor (in it's 16th year of development!) is only 1.8MB. That's nearly a 100 times smaller than Flow, yet with a ton of more features. Just what the heck is Flow coded in?!
I prefer Launchy which is very lightweight. But regardless of the tool, this is the best way to navigate your computer. I've literally forgotten how to get around to files and folders without it.
Beyond Compare 4 - various types of file comparison and merging operations.
WinDirStat - makes it easy to identify and clean up files taking up your drive space.
Everything - I resisted using this for a long time and wish I hadn't.
Joplin - note taking app with markdown editor.
QTranslate - discontinued freeware, most recent version that I'm aware of is 6.10.0. very useful translation app that supports Google, DeepL, Yandex and others.
RapidCRC (Unicode) - file hash creation and verification
also shout out to Windows Firewall, not really a new thing but many people don't bother learning how to use it properly.
