The Ever-Growing Free Windows Software List

Is it possible for you to make a new thread that is called "Must haves for every computer" It would be nice to see a thread that gives a full list of recommended software all computers would have. From tweaks to monitoring and so on.

 

The problem is, there is no simple "must have".

Everybody has their own needs/preferences.
Hence such a list would overall be pointless because people end up installing rubbish they don't need. (rubbish = unneeded software that's just "Bloatware" as the user would not need it)

 

yea....but its kinda obvious to not install what u dont need ^^ It would be a nice guide for recommend software. Like most people should have a file recovery program, iso program, basic performance tweaks like ntune, hardware temp monitor, and so on.

Also it would be nice for such a guide to have current up to date drivers too. I would not ever known about the intel rapid storage drivers or whatever because windows driver update never told me my matrix drivers were completely obsolete. Along with other things

 

Here we already disagree....
File Recovery Program - generally not needed - most people will never ever do a file recovery. (Albeit in principle very useful)

ISO Program - what do you mean with that? To run a virtual drive? I think I once had something like that... just ads bloat - something to burn ISOs - well, where are you getting your ISOs from? In theory you could burn data discs with Windows - I did it once... a horrible experience... I like Nero - but this has become quite large and a tad bloated too (I'm not on the latest)

Tweaks - if anybody does any "tweaks" on my laptop expect to thrown out with potential damage to "your" person.
Tweaks = Breaking the OS in most cases - there are very few things that you can do that will no change anything, that's mainly stopping programs that YOU added - but leaving the OS alone - and all those "tweaking guides" - once someone says he/she has a computer problem and did some "tweaking", well, get lost and reinstall your OS - Period.
Additionally, most software does not clearly document what it does - so even if you do know your way around the OS to some extent you might not be able to undo "tweaks" manually and are stuck with something broken.
On that note - Most people who claims to really know Vista or Win7 will be lying - Microsoft themself don't even know the OS as a whole - it's just too complex - There are people who make a living from understanding the OS - Mark Russinovich belongs to that group, but he works for Microsoft, hence he also has insight into aspects of the OS we don't get to - and obviously, he spends a lot of time with it. He's responsible for the Sysinternals Suite: Windows Sysinternals: Documentation, downloads and additional resources
And some other programmes will have spent time with a certain aspect - and have a fair amount of knowledge - but they will not claim to know the OS in and out.
Most "tweakers" haven't got a clue - or just find some info on MSDN and then draw conclusions - some of which are wrong or do not consider the wider implications.

Hardware Temp Monitor - again, not something most people need.
Why do I need that bloat? It might be interesting as a curiosity, but it's not something that you need to install or regularly check.
(That's for the majority of laptop/computer users who don't modify their hardware in unsupported ways or game - and even those that do play games might not even need it)

You see the problem?
I've written a lot about this now... but you might possibly disagree.
You just cannot create a "must-have" list.

 

What for? Just leave System Restore on.

ISO program? ISO support is built into the OS, unless you have something specific in mind.

Not needed.

What for? My system takes care of itself, why would I waste my time or attention looking at various temperatures? If you use your computer as a tool, then there's no need to worry about stuff like that. Even if it's just a game machine, you wouldn't be monitoring that kind of cr@p on a PS3 either... Of course, if the computer itself is a toy to play with, then feel free no knock yourself out. Mind you, I am not judging here, everybody can use their computer in whatever wat they like. I am just questioning your "most people" statement above. As a matter of fact, most people have no need nor interest in anything other than the plain OS and maybe MS Office on their computer.

 

honestly your being quite ignorant. There are many things you can do to speed up a computer/good programs to have on hand that most people could use. Also what i had in mind was a good basic installer/driver guiode that kept most important drivers that windows does not update on its own.

nTune.

Using this batch file to activate this windows service
http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...92-defragmenting-boot-files-under-win7-4.html

The newest intel rapid storage drivers. It has greatly increased the boot times and SSD performance. It has even helped hardrives.

There was a thread about how to improve the i7 performance. I think it also affected the i5 too....i think. I cant remember exactly. Granted that only affects people with i7 or i5 cpus but it is a very useful "tweak" or whatever you want to call it.

I could come up with many more that most anyone should have but i see you dont give two s so whatever....

EDIT:anyways i am going to just work on it on my own so whatever agree or not whatever

 

Boot files will be defragmented automatically, just let your computer idle.
And on a SSD - who cares?

The drivers - they don't really improve anything - at least nothing I can see or measure, but then the 10 series are BETA drivers too. - Having the newest driver immediately after it's release is not always ideal - wait a bit and see if people report problems.

And the processor you mention - what is it exactly? Sources + exact description.
(On that note - you need an i7/i5 for that first - I don't have one, and heck, I might never have one if they start renaming the processors within 1-2years... I don't know what the future brings, so it's no definite)

So what have you come up with? Ehm... nothing?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...rmance-boosts-solid-programs.html#post6745839


thats the thread i am working on. If you got suggestionz plz recommend them. It has links to the new IRST drivers. They have improved boot times by 1-2 seconds if i remember and 4k speeds by a couple MBs i think. There is a feature too where you can enable on some Core2 dues that greatly improve performance. I haven't had time to search for the threads yet but i'll do that later. I am at work and have to get going ^^

 

The 1-2s improvement is something I'm not sure about - my boot times can oscillate by +/- 5s or more at times - if you think it has changed...

The i7 "thing" - I followed the link in your thread - so you are changing a powersaving feature? - Not ideal for laptop users... on that note, I wonder what kind of powersaver makes a laptop feel sluggish if I am fine with my Core2Duo clocked down to 1,6GHz in PowerSaver mode on my laptop...

And 4K speeds - mine have stayed the same... on a Intel X25-M 160GB
My queued speeds actually decreased ever so slightly (but that could be due to other software too)
I suppose I'd have to compare them in SafeMode and I can't be bothered.

 

yes but if its plugged in and you want extra performance and dont need battery..since its plugged in no need to worry about battery ^^ There is many ways to boost performance that many people want. For me i am stuck in a crappy barracks so i only have a laptop and i play games on it so squezzing out performance is important. I can play many games at max or close to max because of the ways i have boosted my performance. Though my laptop i have too mod since asus is a cheap . My laptop runs at insanely high temps...hence why i always have temp monitor running and i check it in middle of games because i don't want to fry it :/ I need to still do forges mod to mine with copper heat sinks and drilling through my bottom plate. Which remind me i can add that to it too ^^ Unfortantly Asus doesnst have any bottom plates in stock so i dont want to start drilling ^^ Also i am still looking for the core 2 duo thread. there is a feature where you can enable it and it sets it alot faster. I forgot what its called. It has to due with enabling like turbo boost on each core....or something like that.


EDIT:those boot times too were decreased concitantly. they use boottimer and the overal average for several people was 1-2s

 

You know, it would be interesting to compare your laptop now to an equal machine with a clean install/cleaned up recovery - and then compare the actual performance.
I'd not be surprised if there were no difference - or if the difference were very small.

 

i just reinstalled windows. with over clocks and everything i go from 10k soemthing to 11k in 3dmark 06. Also asus set my defaults at an underlocked setting because they put a crappy heatsink on my laptop to help keep it at lower temps. also my computer has terrible throttling too because they were trying to limit its heat output that way too. it has like a 90-100watt throttle :/. Luckily uncle webb and thalanix and allurgrocies were able to find a way to work around the throttling. Read the 2 threads in my sig on the issues this thing had when i bought it lol. But all are fixed. I got it for a great price a year ago but it required alot of work for it to perform well lol. Its defaults were like 500 800 1250 i think. I can overclock it to 585 975 and 1375 stablily. Plus it came with this little app that allows you to slightly increase the cpu frequances too. I havent tried the cpu overlocks or the i7 sluggishness fix yet. I wont overclock the cpu at all until i get the case modded. Playing games at I push 92-95C easy for gpu and 70-80c for cpu :/ With all stock clocks(gpu is underclocked at that point) if i run prime95 and furmark i hit 105C on gpu in liek 40s....thats why I wont overclock anything further until i mod my case. 85-90c for gpu playing games is bad enough...too high in my book.

EDIT:i apologize for my bad spelling. I suck at spelling and the gov computers dont have firefox so no spell check ^^

 

You know... I never tried to overclock a computer and have been fine.

I love Intel graphics too (-> longer battery life )

If you need more performance you should buy a better computer.
I have a feeling you got something that's not powerful enough and now you are trying to convince yourself that it's fine.

And on the temps - my CPU load on 100% will get to around 60°C

 

"Honestly"? You are crossing a line here, my friend. You know nothing about me, and you are certainly in no position to present any kind of assessment of my "ignorance" or lack thereof. I'll just note that it might well turn out that I know a lot more about your subject than you do. Finally, you might want to re-read what I wrote. It looks like you did not understand what I wrote.

 

i bought something plunty fast enough. I am just going to squeeze more out of it ^^

EDIT: its easy to turn on and off all my settings when i want battery or power....granted i got very bad battery life lol. an i7 720QM and GTX 260m and 2 7200rpm hardrives has nothing to do with being efficient ^^ plus i got this for 1400 bucks a year ago with a bunch of free stuff.


also this is what i was talking about with modding my laptop. The case for out laptop was never ment to house hardware that draws this much energy.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/414147-grab-copper-drill-now.html

 

Well if you say that you need to squeeze more out of it then it apparently isn't fast enough...
(Considering 1 year isn't too old - my laptop is 2 years old)

 

did i say need? no but there is no reason to not squeeze more out of it. If i can get my laptop to get benchmarks close to the 460m stock why not? I got like 11500 something i think and the 460m got 12126ish in a review i saw. I got another 1k out of my stock clocks.

 

Actually there is greater wear - for example on the battery which doesn't like heat... although on that note... it's not something you possibly care about.
I still get about close to 4 hours out of 80% in battery saver mode.
(Battery might be the only part... although, maybe the fan if it needs to spin at high speeds all the time the bearing can break sooner)

I will possibly never understand why people try to "overclock" their poor computers...

 

and i will never understand why you dont want to get the most out of your laptop ^^ Anyways best battery life i get with a 6 cell is 1 hour and 20 mins lol with min brightness and everything at lowest speed settings lol. If i play a game on my computer i get like 35-45mins ^^ Some people have bricked their psus lol...its a 120watt psu with liek class 7 effiency i think(laptop not on me). The thing easily needs a 150watt psu lol. The TDP alone for the cpu and gpu is 110 watts lol and we all know the i7 720QM uses far more than 45watts lol

 

I am getting the most out of it

Good battery life + all the performance that I need.

Heck, I never use the NVidia GPU I have... (8400m GS) because A) it will fail eventually and B) it's useless/pointless to use.
(I don't game as you might have noticed)

 

I can tell....lets just say i like games...don't have alot of time but i love to play them. My steam account is 165gig ^^ 45ish games. Anyways i will stop cluttering your thread with off topic stuff ^^. nm scratch what i said you had it but different version ^^

EDIT: you can add media coder NT...its a very nerf encoder but it has cuda capabilities.

 

MPC-HC tends to be better than VLC Slightly better compatibility, and sometimes subs etc are coded with it in mind.
There's some pretty funny pictures out there comparing subbed shows on various players/codecs. MPC is usually the better out of them.

 

Anyone know of a free program for detecting and removing duplicate files? I tried Easy Duplicate Finder, which found tons of dupes, but it only let me remove 10 of them. And I don't really want to go through and do it manually.

 

The free version is quite adequate.

DoubleKiller - find and remove duplicate files (Big Bang enterprises)

 

I found this installer for installing many free programs at once, without clicks or toolbars. Ninite. I just used it for the first time. It installed 10 programs I needed completely by itself.

Great software.

 

Ninite is GREAT! I use it all the time, so simple to use!

 

This seems to be a pretty nifty program...

Image Resizer Powertoy Clone for Windows - this is a clone of the Image Resizer Powertoy for Windows XP -- a PowerToy that allows you to right-click on one or more image files in Windows Explorer to resize them. It was created (by me) to extend support to non-XP and 64-bit versions of Windows (including 2000, Vista & 7).

also checkout the htc weather widget for windows...

HTC Home for Windows - HTC Home is a widget that shows nice animated clock with weather like on HTC phones. It's written in C# + WPF in Visual Studio 2010. There is a video on the webpage. Supports different weather providers (as plugins).

 

Tried it, doesn't work at all, on my Win7 x64 machine.
Crashes when I try to start it.

P.S.: Eventlog says "System.UnauthorizedAccess", so this seems to be one of those hobby-programmer toys that think they can write their settings all over the file system, including its installation folder. Thanks, but no thanks...

 

Works great on mine. There is no installation. Just double click the HTCHome (x64) and it starts right up.

 

Sure, there are other clock and weather gadgets, but the HTC gadget it really slick. Runs fine for me on W7x64.

 

Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 via Lifehacker

<width='425' height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/T_TGSlZC67Y?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/T_TGSlZC67Y?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width='425' height="344"></embed></object>

 

Battery Eater

 

oops wrong thread

 

Anyone know of a hotkey program that will let me reprogram the three buttons above my keyboard that by default launch Silent Mode, my browser, and Outlook? Specifically, I never use Outlook so I'd like to reprogram that to launch a different app. I've tried a couple different hotkey programs but neither of them recognized those buttons, only keyboard keys.

 

Not sure if this is on here - possibly not.

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer
Baseline Security Analyzer 2.2 - Download FAQ Resources | TechNet

It will give rather detailed and technical information - but it can be useful for non-IT professionals too - at least in terms of getting the essence as to where security holes exist.

 

try this hotkey app at sager's page

Software Upgrade

 

splayer

An alternative to windows media player.
http://www.splayer.org/index.en.html

 

I posted that long back
Its the best Player i would say

 

Easymon
http://www.codessentials.com/products/easymon.html

 

I seriously recommend liberkey. You have to try it to see its genius.

LiberKey - Portable Applications

 

Truecrypt

 

That's a good one. Thanks

 

Seriousbit

 

Not free...$29.95... https://www.plimus.com/jsp/buynow.jsp?contractId=2578692

 

wrong post,sorry.

 

Anyone else try out liberkey yet?

 

true..but there is still a free version you can download (just doesn't come with some of the bells and whistles as the paid version of course)
where it says "download free version"

 

Monitor Asset Manager 2.5

Monitor Asset Manager is a Plug and Play monitor information utility that works under all 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. It is fully multi-monitor-capable, and unlike similar reporting utilities queries the monitor directly rather than relying on potentially dubious information stored in the registry. In addition to providing detailed information on monitor color and timing characteristics, this compact utility (~400kb) is the only program of its type to accomplish this under every Microsoft OS from NT 4.0 to Windows 7, providing corporate IS managers with a simple tool to track monitor inventory by serial number.

Reports generated by Monitor Asset Manager provide detailed technical information about the target display device and its capabilities. Corporate licensed versions of this lightweight utility can be set to run periodically in the background where it can silently save reports in industry-compliant MIF file format to designated locations at pre-specified intervals. An IS manager wishing to implement industry-compliant asset management and inventory practices will find that Monitor Asset Manager is the perfect tool to compliment existing management capabilities.

Moreover, end users puzzled by the way Windows treats their monitors and high-definition display devices can gain insight into exactly what Plug-and-Play means: all the information provided by the display to the system is displayed in readable format, including DPM and GTF/CVT support, color chromaticity values, native and recommended resolutions with exact timing parameters, as well as device minimum requirements and maximum limits. The latest version also supports DisplayID structures, extracts and decodes EIA/CEA-861 extension data for consumer electronics devices like HDTVs, builds EDID override INF files, allows simple editing of key EDID data fields, and queries for basic Monitor Command and Control (MCCS) information from next-generation DisplayPort and DDC/CI compliant displays.

Monitor Asset Manager is free for personal use only.

EnTech Taiwan | Utilities | Monitor Asset Manager

Also

MultiRes 1.58

MultiRes works very much like a 32-bit version of the venerable Microsoft QuickRes 16-bit applet for Windows 95, with administrative scripting facilities and extended capabilities to handle ClearType, refresh rates and multiple monitors. Supported resolution and refresh rates are accessible from the command-line or from a simple menu that pops up from the system tray. An optional timed confirmation prompt – enabled by default in the program About box – ensures that any changes you make can be reversed safely, without fuss. While MultiRes - unlike EnTech’s PowerStrip - does not allow you to define new display settings, it does give you quick and easy access to the ones the driver makes available – in a simple, compact and conservative package.
Scripting examples

• Applying display settings to multiple monitors:

multires.exe /1:800,600,32,75 /2:1024,768,16,60 /3:640,480,8,85

where the first set of display settings (800,600,32,75) is applied to monitor number 1, the second set (1024,768,16,60) is applied to monitor number 2, and the third set of display settings (640,480,8,85) is applied to monitor number 3.

• Changing the ClearType settings under Windows XP:

multires.exe /ClearType=1600

where the 1600 instructs MultiRes to enable ClearType font smoothing and set the contrast value to 1600

• Restoring previous display settings:

multires.exe /restore

MultiRes always stores current display settings prior to making any changes, so that they can be easily restored on demand. This faciliates batch file processing, where it is desireable to run a specific application at a specific color depth and/or resolution, and then restore normal display settings when the application is closed. In the example below, assume the system is normally run at 1024,768,16 but it is desireable to run Internet Explorer at 800,600,32.

: batch file
multires.exe /800,600,32
start /w iexplore.exe
multires.exe /restore

For more examples and explanations, please refer to the documentation included with MultiRes.

http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/multires.shtm

 

iRotate

iRotate is free for personal use only.

iRotate provides convenient access to the native rotation capabilities present in contemporary display drivers, via a popup menu accessible from the system tray and optional system-wide hotkeys. It's no longer necessary to resort to bloated Windows hacks, additional software layers or phantom drivers to achieve content rotation. In most instances, support is now available directly from the graphics chip manufacturers, who continuously improve and apply quality assurance to their drivers.

By leveraging the native rotation capabilities now provided by ATI, nVidia, Intel, Matrox, S3, XGI and others, iRotate offers exceptional speed and efficiency, with minimal impact on scarce system resources - the entire iRotate package, including installation, documentation, and native language support in all the major European and Asian languages, weighs in at only 125kb. And like all EnTech graphics utilities, iRotate supports multiple graphics cards from various vendors, simultaneously, under every multi-monitor enabled operating system from Windows 98 to Vista.

http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/irotate.shtm

 

shrink pic automaticly shrinks pictures for you when you upload them to a website or messenger. you can choose which type of images and there a few choices for compression preset but and can enable or disable the feature very easy and fast.