My Top 10 Must-Have Windows Applications

Tweet

Pin It

I know all of us have our own lists of Windows applications we can't live without. I actually have more than 10 of them but I'll give you the list of Windows Applications that I believe you'll also find useful. They're all very helpful to me and wherever I go, I can't seem to work well without them installed.

Most of you might not have heard of these applications so you might want to check them out. Some of them, I use as a graphics designer, some as a blogger and the rest are for personal use. If you have other Windows applications that you can't live without, feel free to share it with me here so I can also try them out.

 

My Top 10 Must-Have / Useful Windows Applications

 

#10: Calibrize

I design and print photos, graphics, invitations and scrapbook pages so it's very important for me to calibrate the colors on my monitor to how the printer interprets and prints them out. This way, I can make sure that my designs were not too red, too dark or too bright, among other things. And since digital photo printing is one of our services at our internet cafe, calibration was a necessity. However, I cannot afford the popular hardware calibrators for Windows.

Good thing I found Calibrize. It helps you adjust the color profile of your computer so it can match the print colors. It also adjusts the brightness and contrast of your monitor. Very useful for designers like me. It was pretty easy to use this application and just make sure you save your profile and let it load everytime Windows starts.

Calibrize can be downloaded for FREE from their website. Click here.

 

 

#9: Anatoli Klassen Font Viewer (akFontViewer)

Another very useful tool for me as a designer is Anatoli Klassen Font Viewer from akSoft. I have a lot of fonts installed. I'm addicted to fonts. I need to address that addiction of downloading things that I find might be useful but I don't really need as of the moment but that's for another blog post. Hehehe.

Anyway, if you're like me who's got a lot of fonts installed, akSoft Font Viewer would be extremely helpful to you so you can easily find the font you need for a certain project (report, scrapbook, etc). Just type in the word you need and it'll show you how the word would look like for each font you have. You can even adjust the weight of the font (bold or normal), or resize it. It even has a character map at the bottom so you'd see all the characters available for each font.

The best thing about this software is it's FREE! You can download akFontViewer here.

 

 

#8: Firefox + FireGestures and Down Them All Plugins

Mozilla Firefox is my preferred browser because of its ease of use, it's open source and it's safer than any browser I've tried. Although most of the time, it hogs memory or resources, it's still my choice of browser because of its functionalities. Anyway, there are a lot of Firefox settings that you can play with to make it load faster and set it up to work for your needs. I'll post that next.

There are a lot of plug-ins and extensions out there that you can use with your Firefox browser but I have 2 that I cannot live without - Fire Gestures and Down Them All.

Fire Gestures is a Firefox extension that enables you to do things that you usually need a keyboard or various mouse clicks to do. All you need to do is to drag your mouse to perform commands like opening a link in a new tab, in a new window, closing a tab or move to the next or previous tab. Fire Gestures helps me in my daily clicking routine on my Paid to Click sites and when I'm browsing. Because of it, it's hard to use another browser 'coz I already got used to just dragging my mouse here and there to perform certain commands. This extension is very easy to setup to your liking. If you want to try it out, download it from Mozilla's Add-ons site for Firefox.

Down Them All is another Firefox extension that adds advanced download capabilities to your Firefox browser. It claims to increase the download speed up to 40% so it's a very useful download manager for me. You can pause and resume your downloads. You can even download a whole web page, including the images, using Down Them All. You can also copy and paste URLs or download links easily into the Down Them All interface. Very easy to use, indeed, and one of my must-haves if you're a Firefox user. To install, download Down them All from Mozilla's Add-ons site.

 

 

#7: Video Lan VLC Media Player

I used to play media files using Winamp and Windows Media Player but I find that they eat system resources/memory too much that my computer usually freezes or hangs while I'm watching my favorite movies or tv series on them. So, I had to look for a light-weight media player. And I found VLC Media Player.

It's truly light-weight. It's capable of reading/playing almost all audio and video formats, including DVD and Audio/Video CDs. It's very easy to use and there are a lot of settings that you can play with like the equalizer and aspect ratio to satisfy your entertainment/media viewing needs.

Download VLC media player from VideoLAN's website. It's for FREE so try it!

 

 

 

#6: Moso Force Delete

Have you ever experienced having a computer virus that you can't seem to get rid of because Windows won't allow you to delete a file that's linked to it? If you've had experience with the Conficker virus (click here to check if your computer's infected), you'd know what I mean.

Good thing I found Moatsoft's Force Delete utility. This app allows you to delete files that are locked by Windows because it's being used by a program, write-protected or there's a sharing violation. It helps you delete trojan files that cannot be deleted or cleaned by your chosen anti-virus or anti-spyware programs.

Be careful, though, when you're using this program as it PERMANENTLY deletes the files you ask it to delete. So, ensure that the files you really wanted to delete are the ones you dragged or added to the list 'coz you won't be able to access the files again.

Download MoSo Force Delete from their site. It's also for FREE!

 

 

 

#5: Tweak UI - Microsoft Power Toy for Windows XP

Mai and I needed to disable auto-play and access to USB drives on our client computers at our internet cafe to ensure that viruses won't be transferred to them from customers USB drives. I couldn't find an external application that worked the way I wanted it 'til I found this Power Toy directly from Microsoft.

Tweak UI allows you to access system settings in Windows XP that you cannot configure using Control Panel. This application enabled me to disable all auto-play functions on all DVD and USB drives. Most viruses today use the auto-run function to infect computers so it was extremely important for us to have that disabled. With Tweak UI, we didn't need to change anything manually on the registry. It's very user-friendly and easy to use.

Download Tweak UI from Microsoft directly. You can also check out the list of Power Toys and add-ons for Windows XP here.

 

 

#4: Windows Live Writer

Of course, I cannot forget to mention Windows Live Writer. I absolutely love this application. It makes blogging easy and fun for me. If you're blog is hosted by Blogger, Windows Live, Wordpress, LiveJournal or Typepad, then, Windows Live Writer is definitely a must-have app for you.

What I love about Windows Live Writer is that it inherits the template or theme of your blog so that when you're composing or writing your blog post, the fonts and colors of your blog's theme is used so you can already see how it would look like when you post it. There's even a Preview function that enables you to see how your post would appear once you publish it.

Another thing that I love about this app is that it makes adding and adjusting images and videos easy. You can drag and resize images quickly and you won't even have to worry about manually editing HTML codes.

Lastly, you can save your blog posts locally - to your computer. This way, you can ensure that you have a safe copy of your blog drafts before you publish it to the world.

Trust me, especially if your blog is with Blogger, YOU HAVE TO DOWNLOAD and use Windows Live Writer. It's for FREE anyway! Download it here directly from Microsoft.

 

 

#3: IrfanView Image Viewer/Editor

Irfanview has got to be the best compact graphics viewer and editor out there. It's a must-have for me when viewing images because it's very lightweight. It also allows you to make adjustments to your images without the hassle of worrying about memory or resource hog.

I use IrfanView to resize high resolution images/photos so it'll be easier for me to import it to Adobe Photoshop. You know that Photoshop usually takes time to resize large or high-res images so I do this in Irfanview instead.

It even has photo editing functions like image sharpening, color adjustments, etc. I even use Irfanview to decrease the file sizes of my images before I publish them on the web. This way, they would load faster on my blog posts or web pages.

Download Irfanview for FREE directly from their site.

 

 

#2: Adobe Photoshop

Of course, Photoshop is a must-have for designers like me. I know it's an important part of photography, too, which I'll be venturing in a couple of months (really busy with a lot of things). All that post-processing can be done easily in Photoshop.

I've been using Photoshop 7 because it's all I needed for all the photo edits and graphics designs that I have and will be doing. It's also pretty lightweight compared to CS4, the latest. So, whenever I need to edit high-resolution images or design TARPS (I need to design them in their actual size - usually 3 feet by 6), I use my Photoshop 7.

The only problem I have is that most plug-ins available today are designed for newer versions of Photoshop. But, I find that I don't really need the new plug-ins. I just work around them or try to imitate their results so I can just stick with Photoshop 7. CS4 is just too overrated for me. LOL.

Photoshop is not free so you'd have to purchase it if you want to use it for your graphics design projects. OR, you can use free apps that work like it. For instance, there's GIMP. I don't like it, though. I got Photoshop 7 free as a gift from a friend so I'm sticking with it.

 

 

#1: Unlocker

I ranked Unlocker as my #1 Windows application because of it's simple yet powerful functionality - it unlocks or removes the access restrictions on a certain file, folder or even drive so you can move, delete or rename it.

My usual problem is whenever I access a USB drive or our digital camera to copy files from it. Windows, most of the time, has this delay in enabling me to safely remove the USB drive or digicam because of the error that the drive is still being used when I've already made sure all Explorer windows or apps linked to it are closed. I simply right-click on the drive and click on Unlocker and it'll give me a list of options and tasks that I can do once it's unlocked.

It's my #1 Windows app that I can't live without. Everywhere I go, I make sure it's installed in my system so I can work efficiently. I work quickly and most of the time, my computer and Windows can't keep up with me so I really need Unlocker. I won't have to worry about restarting my computer just to move, rename or delete files/folders.

Download Unlocker for FREE from their site.

 

That's my Top 10 Must-Have Windows applications. I hope you find them all useful. If you have an app that I didn't mention here and you want to share the info with me, leave a comment here and I'll check the software out. I prefer FREEwares so... *grin*