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.
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.
Ventoy's an upgrade from Rufus cuz you can store multiple ISOs in 1usb drive. The limit is the USB storage so you could have 20+ distros.
And trusting with closed eyes and giving away control of their computers to that big tech co Having ads And enjoying updates at good moments And having to have an antivirus And paying licenses And having your children learn computing on an environment that they'll get used to so they'll have to buy their own when they get older and cope with all this sh*t
You're implying I'm a boomer who doesn't know about stuff like O&O ShutUp10++ which I use. I also use windscribe, pihole on my home network, extensions like ublock-origin and canvasblocker for Firefox, violent monkey with various scripts to not deal with trackers etc, nextDNS as well. And of course I pirate all sorts of shit using qbittorent tied to only work when my vpn is active. So sure, I'm stupid and don't know anything because I use windows (that I pirated and activated for free).
Training the youth on proprietary software should be a sin. Rather than learning abstract skills or free software they can freely get, use, redistribute, inspect, students are taught a narrow, specialized task to where they think they need something proprietary. For instance, 90% of folks would be happy with a combo of darktable + GIMP + Krita for digital raster art/photography, but instead they want to pay Adobe a monthly subscription.
Lol paying for Adobe? Yeah right. You can easily patch the Cloud trials to be the full versions of the programs for free. Why use off brand versions of stuff when I can just pirate/crack the the used programs for free
Why use […] when I can just pirate/crack
Aside from the ethical reasons to choose free software over something built with lock-in in mind by a US-based, publicly-traded megacorporation… Sounds like you have never used Krita or darktable. These are best-in-class applications used by professionals. You also have been bitten into their propaganda that you need Adobe. Schools could even train on cheaper, decent software like Affinity (tho it’s not supported by Linux), but Adobe is funding indoctrination just like Microsoft does with Windows/Office/GitHub.
Considering most places use Microsoft office, Adobe suite, windows in general.. I have no issue using them since I'm not even paying for them anyways
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.
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.
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.
In my experience SpaceSniffer was slightly faster than WinDirStat.
Also if you just want to quickly check the hash of a file you can use the 7Zip right click menu, but it won't verify a file, to my knowledge.
There is also Wiztree which is WAY faster than both SpaceSniffer and WinDirStat.
It can scan a 8 TB HDD in a few seconds and not hours (exaggeration) like WinDirStat
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.
WSL is a Windows program that opens the door to many other useful programs :)
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
Everything. A very small and fast search and indexing program, much better than windows search
2 programs I've been using for almost 20 years now:
www.foobar2000.org Media player https://www.slsknet.org/news/ Soulseek for music downloading
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.
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/
