Must Have App's for Windows:

Multimedia VLC media player For all your video needs. Even audio if you want. Internet Applications Mozilla Firefox The must have web browser. ( I also suggest to at least get uBlock addon ). Google Chrome Yup, having both browsers, one tied to google and a few other things and Firefox for everything else. I also suggest the uBlock plugin (although it's not as good as the Firefox one) Security KeePassXC Opensource and free password encryption and management software. No Anti virus! - Antivirus free and paid are just as bad as the viruses you want them to protect you from. Just use what comes with windows and while it's a stugle to get it to leave false positives alone, at least it doesn't install other software or have popups. Productivity / Office LibreOffice A good solid opensource and free MS office like suite.(Documents, Spreadsheet, Presentation) Sumatra PDF is a small and fast PDF viewer. Opensource, and not trying to make a quick buck off of you. It also ebook and comic book formats. Misc Tools & App's 7-Zip Open source Windows utility for manipulating archives. Formats 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR are supported fully, other formats can be unpacked. Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement. GSmartControl a tool for querying and controlling the status of your HHD and SSD via SMART.Lets you know if the drives are failing and their errors. Visual C++ Redistributable Runtimes AIO Repack Not really an application, but a bundled set of libraries used by many applications. I find it a must to install on new systems. This package also a cleans up and updates any existing ones. O&O ShutUp10 Allows you full control over Windows 10 and it sharing data with other companies. O&O AppBuster Allows you to remove Windows 10 apps that you dont want but are there anyways. Not an application but Microsoft DirectX installs a number of runtime libraries from the legacy DirectX.(Such as games not released in the last 5 years) Directx 9x offline installer

Other App's:

Multimedia Media Player Classic A clasic and simplist and much better optimized media player. If your PC stuggles with VLC on some codecs, try this one. Foobar2000 If you want a dedicated and simple Music/Media player. Virtual Dub Movie editor. Avi2Dvd is an All In One tool in order to convert with just few clicks an Avi/Ogm/Mkv/Wmv/Dvd to Dvd/Svcd/Vcd. Blender is a free 3D animation and modeling suite. Handbreak HandBrake The open source video transcoder. Open Broadcaster Software | OBS Also called OBS is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. ISO Buster or WinISO Work with CD image files. OpenShot or WinISO open-source video editor for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Gimp open source graphic application, try Gimpshop based on the Gimp but made to feel more like Photoshop. Picasa is free photo editing software from Google and allows easy sharing of photos with friends and family. Paint.NET Is an easy yet capable image and photo editing software for PCs that run Windows. Internet Applications Discord Discord is a chat or direct messaging app for gamers. With this app, gamers can easily enter chat rooms, initiate video calls, and create multiple groups for messaging friends. . Teamviewer The TeamViewer remote connectivity cloud platform enables secure remote access to any device, across platforms, from anywhere, anytime. What I use to help people with computer problems remotely most of the time. Zoom Zoom is an online audio and web conferencing platform for makeing phone calls or to participate in video conference meetings. Skype Communications application that specializes in providing VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. Filezilla FTP client. Mozilla Sunbird Stand alone calendar Mozilla Thunderbird A slick e-mail client. Putty Telnet and ssh client. Pidgin is a chat program which lets you log in to accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. Replaces the need to have Yahoo IM, AIM, MSN, etc. Previously named Gaim. Chromium Basicaly the opensource project that Google Chrome is based on. (IE, it's Google chrome with Googles special hooks not in it yet) Tor Firefox based web browser that puts you into an encrypted cloud to protect you animity. Important if you live within a government that may not like what you do. qBittorrent One of the best free and open source torrent clients, and provide an open-source software alternative to µTorrent. Trasnmission Another greate free and open source torrent clients, and provide an open-source software alternative to µTorrent. Freenet Well p2p other than torrent is dead, but here is once a nice one: A p2p like the network that is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous. Rambox Lets you add accounts from dozens of popular messaging services, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Telegram, GroupMe, Hangouts, Discord, and many more. Security / Protection HashCalc TO validate that the file you downloaded has not ben tapered with but is the same the developer released bu using checksums and hashes of files downloaded. CWShredder When CoolWebSearch just wont leave, this can usually take care of it. ClamWin is a Free and opensource Antivirus program forDoes not do real time protection, scan only., allowing you to scan something you downloaded just to be sure. But I'd use virustotal. Hijack This is a free utility that generates an in depth report of registry and file settings from your computer. Use this when any of the automated tools can not detect or remove an infection. Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Ad aware Another spyware removal utility. Spybot Removes spyware. True Crypt No longer updated. Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux . You do Encrypt you older tax and financial records right? VeraCrypt Is considered as an ideal TrueCrypt alternative. Its features are same as the original software of TrueCrypt with the security enhancements, along with being open source. It offers a plausible deniability mechanism where you can have more than 1 encrypted volume in it. BitLocker A full volume encryption feature included with Microsoft Windows versions starting with Windows Vista, does not offer containers or plausible deniability mechanism. Instructions for setting up Bitlocker Malwarebytes Anti-Malware effective freeware anti-malware tool Productivity / Office Apache OpenOffice Apache OpenOffice is a free, Open Source MS Office alternative with a Word compatible word processor, a complete Excel compatible spreadsheet program, and more. Foxit Reader A PDF reader and writer that supports plug-ins. an alternative to Sumatra PDF and more like Adobe Acrobat. Brackets is a lightweight, open-source, yet powerful, modern text editor. Brackets understand web design that makes it easy to design in the browser with focused visual tools and preprocessor support. It is crafted from the ground up for web designers. Atom an open-source code and text editor used a lot for web development. Atom supports embedded Git Control and the plugins written in JavaScript. IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ IDEA is one of the big three of Java IDEs. To allow developers to dive deeper into the Java code, IntelliJ IDEA boasts cross-language refactoring and data flow analysis features. Eclipse A dedicated Java IDE, Eclipse gets listed as one of the big three of Java IDEs.Eclipse supports application development in several programming languages via plugins. C, C++, Clojure, Groovy, Haskell, JavaScript, Julia, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Rust, and Scala are some of the various programming languages supported by Eclipse. Misc Tools & App's Java This may not be a must, but if your use anything that is java based like Minecraft then it is. Boinc BOINC lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer. The BOINC app, running on your computer, downloads scientific computing jobs and runs them invisibly in the background. It's easy and safe. DOSBox is a DOS-emulator that can let you "re-live" the good old days with the help of DOSBox, it can run plenty of the old classics that don't run on your new computer! UltraVNC Remote desktop program, cross platform, encryption, etc. Synergy+ lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, without special hardware. balenaEtcher Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives, safely and easily. Google Drive Choose folders on your computer to sync with Google Drive or backup to Google Photos, and access all of your content directly from your PC or Mac. Dropbox Dropbox lets anyone upload and transfer files to the cloud, and share them with anyone. Back up and sync docs, photos, videos, and other files to cloud storage and access them from any device, no matter where you are. And has many advanced sharing features. Virtualbox VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. ImageGlass simple picture viewer with which you will be able to display your image collection in a very similar way to the one that Windows provides by default, but with some additional functions' and is a well-known app in the Photos & Graphics category.. Spotify music streaming service. Sysinternals The entire set of Sysinternals Utilities rolled up into a single download. My most used bellow Process Explorer - Windows task manager on steroids, lists resources that are being held by a process and their threads Autoruns - control which programs automatically launch at bootup or as a user logs on Process Monitor, TCPview - offers real-time monitoring of the file system, process/thread activity, and registry. Helps troubleshooting generic error messages, Just start Process Monitor, reproduce the situation in which the error occurs, and then watch for the issue to appear in the interface. TCPview - Lists all the processes that are connected to the internet with a lot more detail and abilities CrystalDiskInfo CrystalDiskInfo is an Open Source HDD health monitoring utility. It displays basic HDD information, monitors S.M.A.R.T. values and disk temperature. CPU-Z CPU-Z is a freeware that gathers information on some of the main devices of your system: Processor , Mainboard and chipset, and Memory. GPU-Z a small graphics card utility that collects and presents information about the graphics card, the temperature, memory and more. Open Hardware Monitor An Open Source system monitoring tool which displays various hardware settings, temperature values and more for CPU chips, memory modules, hardrive and graphics processors. You can have it display in your task bar, and also record temperatures and other values. WhoCrashed An easy to use program that analyses the crash dumps of windows and provide a message reporting the suspected root of the problem so that users can get to work to fix it. DNSBench utility to determine the exact performance of local and remote DNS nameservers. More Advance System/Network/Security Tools Wireshark is a top open source product that allows you to sniff packets on a LAN in order to analyze the network traffic. X-Scan General network vulnerabilities scanner Clonezilla is an open source solution to computer backup, restoration and "ghosting". PS Tools Suite A collection of command-line tools that help you administer your Windows systems.

Antivirus & Malware:

I no longer recommend any antivirus vendor! Antivirus vendors are acting more like the viruses you wanted to be protected from. Quetly Installing other software or compoments. Popups. Mislabeling things that are clearly not viruses but they claim you may not want Default options that are destrutive Paid to lable things that are not viruses as viruses More adds for other products they think you need Installing themselves in your web browser evem when told not too Providing Backdoors Often hide what it is doing, and hide being over to override or correct it Almost every software vendor asks that you disable/remove antivirus for upgrades or installs Causes so many false positives and issues that people are trained to ignore them if you ask them too Multiple privacy viloations and large scale data harvesting Are now the targes of exploit because it's easier than attacking the OS! But if you must, take a look here: Free Kaspersky Security Cloud Free, simple, limited options but solid protection and minimal performance issues. You can whitelist and recover files from valt. Be sure to extend the time things live in the valt though as it has a habbit of making things disapear that you want. Top notch protection. Bitdefender Antivirus Free Free, simple, very limited options but solid protection and minimal performance issues. Last I checked it didn't have a way to whitelist or prevent safe and wanted things from being gobbled up. Does have a habbit of making things you want disapear.Top notch protection. Panda Free Antivirus Free, simple, and simple to use. Not as good as bitdefender or kaspersky but it's easier to control it. Does show adds to purchase itself often.(less than daily) Windows Defender Antivirus Free and less likely to anoy you with side programs or advertising buying the full retail bloated package. Depending on version (as windows 7/8.x it was different) it's harder to to control and less likely to tell you what it just did. Avira Free, simple, and simple to use. Not as good as bitdefender or kaspersky but it's easier to control it. Does show adds to purchase itself often.(less than daily) Sophos Antivirus Lacks most of the features the other compitators, but to me that's a good thing. Not as good as bitdefender or kaspersky but it's easier to control it. Does show adds to purchase itself often.(less than daily) Not Free Kaspersky Security Cloud Free, simple, limited options but solid protection and minimal performance issues. You can whitelist and recover files from valt. Be sure to extend the time things live in the valt though as it has a habbit of making things disapear that you want. Top notch protection. Bitdefender Antivirus Free Free, simple, very limited options but solid protection and minimal performance issues. Last I checked it didn't have a way to whitelist or prevent safe and wanted things from being gobbled up. Does have a habbit of making things you want disapear.Top notch protection. Avira Free, simple, and simple to use. Not as good as bitdefender or kaspersky but it's easier to control it. Does show adds to purchase itself often.(less than daily) Panda Free Antivirus Simple, and simple to use. Not as good as bitdefender or kaspersky but it's easier to control it. Eset Anti Virus Comparable to Bitdefender and Kaspersky but it's easier to control it. Sophos Antivirus Lacks most of the features the other compitators, but to me that's a good thing. Not as good as bitdefender or kaspersky but it's easier to control it. Does show adds to purchase itself often.(less than daily) Don't Recommend Avast Free/Paid, and not bad but has a history of repeated privacy viloations(all free/cloud ones do it to one degree or another but this cross the line multiple times). Does show adds to purchase itself often.(less than daily) Norton History of to anoying, braking systems, to many false positives and not a virus but they don't want you to have. McAfee History of to anoying, braking systems, to many false positives and not a virus but they don't want you to have. Trendmicro Lost flavor of mine, think it was the to many false positives and not a virus but they don't want you to have. Free Online Scanning So you really want to make sure a file doesn't have a virus or shame on you, your computer has one, well this will help. Virus Total is a free online scan service that analyzes suspicious files using 40+ Anti-virus applications. But you only use it to check 1 file at a time. But it's good and helps you identify those false positives and ones that are not viruses but are paid by anti virus companies to be reported as such. Panda Active Scan Trend Micro Housecall AV Scanner Kaspersky Anti Virus Scan BitDefender Online Virus Scan CA Antivirus Scan Symantec Security Check McAfee Free Scan RAV Antivirus Scan Misc Tools & App's

Alt App's:

Security / Protection Productivity / Office Internet Applications Misc Tools & App's

Alt App's:
Security / Protection Productivity / Office Internet Applications Misc Tools & App's

Note: I much prefer Opensource software to pretty much anything. And not because it's free, but because the code of the program is open, viewable and changeable. You have no idea of what else a program can do that you downloaded and run.

My Preferred Antivirus

None!

Multi Computer Discount