Here is a list of useful programs and utilities that we recommend.

Note that all of these are free at the time of writing this article

MEDIA TOOLS

Irfanview is a powerful image viewer and manipulation package that every PC should have installed. It can convert almost any image to another format. Check out the link for further details: https://www.irfanview.com/

For those that are in to serious graphics manipulation and drawing the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an amazing package. You can follow the link to the website here: https://www.gimp.org/

VLC player is the best media player that any PC could have installed on it. It can convert different video formats, capture your screen, stream and much much more. Check out the link for further details: https://www.videolan.org/

EDITORS AND OFFICE ALTERNATIVE

OpenOffice is a free alternative to MS Office and is packed with powerful features. It comes with Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base and Math and has an extensive support community on its website. You can check it out here: https://www.openoffice.org/

Notepad++ is a must have for your PC as an alternative to the default editor that comes with Windows. It has built in features for programming in many languages and incredible text manipulation support. Link is here: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/

Sublime Text is also a very powerful text editor mainly focused on programming. You can check it out here: https://www.sublimetext.com/

WEB AND NETWORKING

XAMPP is a complete web hosting package that runs locally on your PC for web development. It comes with Apache (the webserver), MariaDB (SQL server), PHP and Perl all built in. It is ideal for anyone planning to get in to web development. Link is here: https://www.apachefriends.org/

WinSCP is an extremely powerful utility for copying files to and from an FTP server. It includes support for SFTP and several other protocols. Find the link here: https://winscp.net/eng/index.php

Putty is an incredible must have utility to log on to servers via SSH, Telnet, Rlogin and Serial connections. Follow the link here: https://www.putty.org/

MISCELLANEOUS 

7Zip is a powerful compression and decompression program that supports many different formats that the built in Windows Zip function doesn’t. You can find it here: https://www.7-zip.org/

WinDirStat is an amazing utility to see how the space on your hard drive or directory is being used and where to find loads of junk files. It has a comprehensive tree map that shows you exactly where that space goes to. Check it out here: https://windirstat.net/

Trinity Rescue Kit is a bootable Linux distribution packed full of features including resetting Windows passwords, Virus detection, Data recovery and much much more. You can get a copy of it here: https://trinityhome.org/