Windows Desktop Essentials

For the past years that I have been supporting users using computers, I deduced that are some essential software that you can't do without, of course there are lot of great commercial software out there to the job, but I'm always interested to the ones that are Freeware or Free-to-use - these babies have a very good bang-for -the-buck ratio! Let me now give you my top picks! Don't go using Windows without it!

AVG Free Edition
Anti-Virus, descent but free anti-virus protection, free for Home/Non-commercial use. It's been a very good substitute to the otherwise bloated anti-viruses out there. It provides basic anti-virus protection, email anti-virus filtering, scheduled scans and most important of all, frequent virus database updates.

 

 

CCleaner
Registry and Temp Cleaner, this a very useful tool for clearing your registry of un-used entries and well as clean temporary files used by popular windows programs, this includes, temp files from browsers like Mozilla, Office, Internet Explorer and etc.

 

Primo PDF
A very useful app allowing you to generate pdf files, from any application all just by sending it a print job and selecting the primo pdf printer. No need for you to have a full-blown PDF maker.

 

 

VideoLan VLC Media Player
The mother of all Media Players, able to play any formats where no other media player has played before, what's more is, its free, its multi-platform and it rocks!

 

 

 

IZArc
A superb compression/decompression software, Windows already can handle zip files, I use IZArc to extract the not-so-common compressed files such as, *.rar, *.tgz, *.lzh, *.iso - well, you get the picture

 

 

PhotoFiltre A great photo-editing and resizing software, something like Adobe PhotoShop, but it's free!

 

 

Notepad++
A drop-in replacement for the trusty notepad, think of this as the Notepad in steriods! It has tons of features like multi-tab window for opened files, syntax-highlighting, macro-recording, session-save and a lot more!

 

Audacity
Ever need a way to edit mp3 or wav files?? say, increase the volume, add echo or simply need a way to record sounds effectively? If yes, then this is the tool you need, it is also a very good drop-in replacement to Windows Sound Recorder.

 

NVu - New View
A great Free, Functional and feature-rich web authoring tool loaded with lots of feature all to make the web author inside-of-us happy, best of all it's free!

 

 

Mozilla FireFox and Friends
Mozilla Firefox, A free and fast Internet browser, feature rich and extensible, Along with it's friends Thunderbird - POP/IMAP email client, SeaMonkey - Full blown, Browser, Web authoring and email all in one app.

 

Picasa
A photo/picture Manager from Google, a great way to manage and simple re-touching software, it usually use this to download the pictures from my digital camera.

 

Adobe Reader
This app needs no introduction, it's a very useful app for viewing pdf files, of course there are lot of them out there, but since Adobe Reader is giving this for free, it's probably worth to have it here!

 

Open Office
Of course, our desktop wouldn't be complete without a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software right? so this is where Open Office comes in! I have saved the best for last, Open Office is free and multi-platform office suite, it's feature-rich and functional!

And that wraps it up, just finished giving you the run down of my personal Windows Desktop Essential Software! So the next time you're building your New PC or formatting and reinstalling Windows, you're pretty much aware of which software that goes to your system first.

Till next time! Happy Pragmatic Computing!