Software That I Use

Posted on: July 26th, 2012

The amount of Software available for Windows is staggering. Sometime it can be hard to find the right one when needed. I found it very useful to check out what other professionals use (eg from screen-casting videos). So I though someone might find this list useful too.

I organized this list by level of knowledge needed to use the software. In other words, from “layman” level to the “geek” level.

Since it’s a pretty long list I’ll just list the name, short description and link to the software’s website. If you want to know more about a software just follow the link.

Important Notice before you download or install any of software below

Pretty much all of these are free software. You will need to pay close attention to the dialog boxes during installation because some of them come bundled with Toolbars and other riff-raff, which you need to uncheck during installation. Also the websites from where you can download them might contain ads. So make sure that you click on the download link for the software you want, not an ad. We cannot take responsibility for the content of the linked sites.

The simple stuff

CCleaner: One of the most useful little programs to keep the computer from getting junked up. http://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER
CrystalDiskInfo: Simple program to tell you whether your hard drive is in good shape, or is it about to go belly up. http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html/
MyDefrag: My favorite defragmenter. Does a lot better job than other defragmenters. It’s thorough, not fast. http://www.mydefrag.com/
PhotoFiltre: A small, quick but feature-rich picture editor. http://photofiltre.free.fr/download_en.htm
Kingsoft Office: A fast and free replacement for those who only use basic functions of Microsoft Office. http://www.kingsoftstore.com/
Picasa: An excellent photo/picture organizer software, which also handles importing from digital cameras. http://picasa.google.com/
Firefox: An excellent web browser. Safer and more stable than Internet Explorer. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/
Adblock Plus for Firefox: I always install this plugin for every Firefox installation. It eliminates over 90% of ads on websites. That speeds things up and gives less chance of downloading something that you didn’t intend. http://adblockplus.org/en/
Skype: Great tool if you want to keep in touch with someone over long distance. It can even make international calls at a very low rate. http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/home
VLC Media Player: Easy to use media player which handles pretty much any video or audio format – can play DVDs as well. http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html
Wordweb: A small offline dictionary. It’s great if you need to look up words and you don’t have internet access. http://wordweb.info/free/

A bit more advanced stuff

Syncback: A fairly simple but versatile backup software. http://www.2brightsparks.com/download-syncback.html
7-zip: A swiss army knife for compressing and decompressing files. http://www.7-zip.org/
Bullzip PDF Printer: an excellent virtual printer. Can generate PDF or image files from anything that you can print. http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php/
Dropbox: Provides 2GB online space for free and the ability to share files between machines. Very useful if you have more than one machine. https://www.dropbox.com/
Launchy: Great tool for the avid multitasker. Makes launching programs much easier, without having to go through menus or find the icon on your desktop. http://www.launchy.net/
KeePass: A simple password vault. One master password protects all other passwords. http://keepass.info/
LibreOffice: An almost complete (and free) replacement for Microsoft Office. Not fully compatible though but has advanced features. http://www.libreoffice.org/
FastStone Image Viewer: It’s a great program if you want to name, resize or do simple actions on a large number of images. http://www.faststone.org/
aTube Catcher: A fairly simple program that can download videos from a number of video sharing sites (eg: youtube), and also can record screen, including games and video playbacks. http://atube-catcher.dsnetwb.com/video/index.html
WinDirStat: Want to know why your hard drive is filling up? Then use this little program that scans your hard drive and adds up how big each folder is. http://windirstat.info/download.html
Thunderbird: An excellent, stable email client. Can handle large number of emails & has an amazingly fast search feature that allows you to find an email in seconds. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
Nostalgy Plugin for Thunderbird: A very useful plugin for TB. Makes it easy to sort out messages, move them to various folders. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/nostalgy/
TrueCrypt: If you have sensitive information stored on your computer then this little program can provide a secure way to store them. It can even encrypt a whole hard drive. http://www.truecrypt.org/
DeepBurner: If your computer didn’t come with CD/DVD burning software. Or that software is not to your liking then you can download this little program to burn CDs and DVDs. http://www.filehippo.com/download_deepburner/
Free Download Manager: If you are downloading large files, or a lot of them, then this little program can save you some serious time. It uses the maximum amount bandwidth that your network and the server allows. http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/

Stuff for the creative minds

Inkscape: Excellent tool for creating logos, illustrations or pretty much any drawings. Many of the graphics on this site was created with it, including our logo. http://inkscape.org/
Audacity: Tool for editing, mixing audio files. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
GIMP: Photo editor with comparable features to Adobe Photoshop but for free. http://www.gimp.org/
Google Sketchup: The absolute easiest software to do 3D design. Plus it’s free. http://sketchup.google.com/
Xmind: Mind mapping software which is also excellent for making flow charts and organizing boards. http://www.xmind.net/
Scribus: A free desktop publishing software. http://www.scribus.net/canvas/Scribus
AVS Video tools: That one is not free but it’s worth the money to have a simple to use and dependable video editing software. http://www.avsmedia.com/AVS-Video-Tools.aspx

Advanced, Geeky Stuff

Filezilla: Great little program to transfer files using FTP or secure FTP. http://filezilla-project.org/
Gbridge: Need to access files from a computer far away? Gbridge can create a secure VPN with your machines without having to configure any firewalls or routers. http://www.gbridge.com/
Teamviewer: A very good, and reasonably priced (compared to the others) remote assistance solution. You can use it for free with some nag screens. http://www.teamviewer.com
NotePad++: Writing programs, scripts or need to keep a number of text documents open? This little gem can handle all that pretty easily. It even has a plugin to upload files via FTP to your website. http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
Netbeans: If you are a bit more serious about programming and working on a project. Netbeans provides a very good IDE with syntax highlighting and code completion features for most commonly used programming languages. http://netbeans.org/
Putty: Need a terminal access to a Linux box or your web server? This tiny program provides that. http://www.putty.org/
Total Commander: If you need to delve into the file system, move files around, find files, etc. Then this is a superior tool to Windows Explorer. Takes some getting used to, but once you do you can zip around with lightning speed. http://www.ghisler.com/
Virtualbox: Testing out a software? Have to work with a finicky program that doesn’t get along with other software? Want to run software that only runs on XP while your machine is running Windows 7? Virtualbox provides solution to these and a lot more things. With it you can create virtual machines – complete machines that run inside your computer but in their own “matrix”. I think it’s one of the coolest things available. Of course you will need a pretty well endowed machine to run other virtual machines. https://www.virtualbox.org/
GmapCatcher: Ever wanted to save a map for offline use, or for illustration purposes? This little program can save the tiles from different maps sources (Google, Yahoo, OpenStreetMaps, etc) which you can manipulate any way you want. No more messing with screen capture, cropping and painstaking alignments. http://code.google.com/p/gmapcatcher/
DriveImageXML: Need to back up the whole hard drive? With this program you can do that. You can even save the backup in a compressed format to save space. http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm/
TinyHexer: Want to see the raw code of files, or the sectors on your hard drive? TinyHexer is the tool for that. You can fix things with this that would be otherwise nearly impossible. But be warned: you can also hopelessly mess things up, if you modify the wrong thing! http://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Miscellaneous/tiny-hexer.shtml/
Areca Backup: Pretty much the only free backup software that can efficiently keep old versions of files. Not particularly easy to set up but works fine once it’s up and running. http://www.areca-backup.org/
WAMP server: Want to turn your Windows machine into a web server? WAMP is a packaged software that will install Apache, MySQL and PHP, plus a little user interface to manage these services. http://www.wampserver.com/en/
Firebug: An extremely useful plugin for Firefox for those who need to develop, or debug website code. It can save hours and some gray hair! http://getfirebug.com/

Phew! This was a long one. I’m pretty sure you will be able to find something new and useful in the above list of software.

If you have a suggestion for a software to be included in the list then please use the comment form below to send us your suggestion. Thank you!

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