Most Important Software For Pc Free Download
The best free PC software programs aren't about the cost (lack thereof), they’re about a fresh opportunity—collections of code that puts the dumb hardware in your computer to smart use, tools that could accomplish anything from balancing your household budget to helping to cure cancer. Stocking your PC is an intensely personal task. Even still, some programs are so helpful, so handy, so useful across the board that we heartily recommend them to everybody.
These free PC programs—a mix of must-haves and delightful auxiliary apps—have earned a place on almost any computer. Makes loading up a new computer a breeze. Simply head to the Ninite website, select which free software you’d like to install on your PC—it offers dozens of options, including many of the programs named here—and click Get Installer to receive a single, custom.exe file containing the installers for those programs. Run the executable, and Ninite installs all of them in turn, and it automatically declines the offers for bundled bloatware so many free apps try to sneak in.
The Best Free Downloads app downloads for Windows. Windows Software. Clean your PC. The Best Free Downloads app downloads. Clean your PC. This software is available to download from the publisher site.
No muss, no fuss, no hassle. It’s wonderful. The enabled by default in Windows 10 provides solid protection for most users, but no single antivirus utility offers bulletproof protection, especially against the latest and most clever threats. Was designed specifically to find and eliminate those cutting-edge “zero day” vulnerabilites.
You can’t schedule scans or even use it as a regular antivirus program, but it’s invaluable when you think that something nasty has slipped by your primary antivirus utility. Premium antivirus options strike a balance between excellent protection, a worthwhile selection of features, and minimal impact on your PC’s performance. PCWorld's guide to can walk you through your options. Most boxed PCs come chock-full of bloatware intended to make dough for the PC makers, and you probably don’t need (or want) most of it clogging up your system resources. That’s where comes in. This pint-size wonder program scans your PC, brings up a checklist of the bloatware installed on your machine, and helps you wipe ’em all away in one fell swoop.
A secondary screen lists all of your programs if you want to nuke even more. Ignore it, or just be careful to avoid erasing something important. Microsoft introduced its own tool to, but it involves performing a complete reinstallation of the operating system. Don’t mess around with it unless you know what you’re doing.
On the surface, is a simple app launcher, and that’s swell all on its own! App launchers let you activate software far faster than navigating Windows, even if you use the Windows key and search for an app by name. But Launchy can do much, much more: open any file or folder in mere seconds, shut down your PC, or even kill processes and perform math calculations with the right. Read superb tutorial and forget about your Start menu. Launchy is donationware, so you can snag if for free, but we highly recommend tossing the developers a few dollars for this excellent program.
Another must-have system tool:. It does all the dirty work required to keep your PC running in tip-top shape, including ditching unwanted cookies, wiping your browser history, deleting unnecessary files, and keeping your Windows Registry sparkling clean. Note: CCleaner recently got mud in its eye when for the purposes of industrial espionage. Piriform now has a safe version of the program available to download from its site. CCleaner is powerful, but even better, it’s free! Video Watching Software For Pc Free Download. (A $25 Professional version with premium support, scheduled cleanings, and automatic updates is also available.). But what if you want to bring a deleted file back to the realm of the living?
Is a clean, simple undelete program from Piriform, the makers of CCleaner. Be warned: Recuva won't be able to recover all deleted files, and the odds are even lower if you erased a program with a secure delete tool like (another top-notch free program). Even still, Recuva has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.
A $20 pro upgrade adds automatic updates, premium customer service access, and support for virtual hard drives. Adobe Reader may be the go-to PDF reader for many people, but it’s by malware peddlers. Prezi Software Free Download For Windows 8. If you need only basic functionality, go with instead. Sumatra lacks the fancy extras found in many full-featured PDF readers, but when it comes to straight-up reading Portable Document Format files, Sumatra PDF is blazing-fast and completely accurate.
Oh, and since it’s less ubiquitous than Adobe’s offering, hackers tend to stay away from Sumatra PDF. If you’re willing to pay for more advanced features, check out PCWorld’s guide to. Sometimes, blasting tunes is the only thing that makes slogging through a spreadsheet or a stuffed inbox even remotely tolerable. The exact music client you’ll want will depend on whether you’ve already bought into a service, naturally. For musical neophytes I recommend two programs: and. The iTunes Windows client notoriously sucks, but it gets the job done—and that job includes giving you access to a vast universe of premium music downloads and keeping your iPhone’s music library synced with your PC. Spotify, meanwhile, is an all-you-can-eat streaming service with millions of top-tier tunes available, all for free if you don’t mind listening to a few ads.
The of the past few years have driven the point home: You need strong passwords, and you need a different password for each site you visit. Rather than juggling dozens of alphanumeric codes in your noggin, download a password manager. There are several options available, but our favorite is, a cloud-based password manager that generates strong, random passwords and keeps track of your credentials across all your devices for free. Is another stellar option, but the free version is limited to a single device. PCWorld’s guide to can help walk you through all the available options.
PCs excel at helping you Get Things Done—but few of them ship with a productivity suite installed. Fix that, stat! Even if you don’t plan to use a productivity suite regularly, it’s smart to have basic editing capabilities available on your computer. Legions of people swear by Microsoft’s legendary Office; I do, too. But you don’t have to drop big dollars on Office if you don’t need its myriad bells and whistles. Free—and good—alternatives abound, with (pictured) being the flagship free-and-open-source option. The online-only also rocks.
PCWorld's guide to explains your various options. Browsing websites and sending private data over open Wi-Fi hotspots is just begging for hackers to capture the details. Virtual private networks secure your connection. If you need to log into your work website or email at Starbucks, use to keep your data safe.
It’s fast, easy to use, and has a straightforward privacy policy, unlike many VPNs. The free version is limited to just 500MB of data per month, though. If you need more data or want to use a VPN to stream video from overseas, PCWorld’s guide to can walk you through premium options. All work and no play makes! Valve’s outstanding PC game marketplace,, makes it easy to shrug off the stress of the workday and blow off some.
Well, you know. You’ll find tons of free games available on Steam, and games are frequently given away free for a limited time.
EA’s rival Origin service also has an On the House program that often provides games for free-as-in-beer free. Those aren’t your only options though. Check out PCWorld’s guide to for more options than you’ll ever be able to actually play.
PCMag reviews products, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page.. I'm staying focused on my recent theme of best and worst this week. This column is devoted to identifying the top 10 software programs that were either the most successful or the most innovative in the modern era of desktop computing (1976 to the present).
All of my thoughts here are debatable and if anyone wants to post an alternate list (with a rationale) using my basic criteria I'd be interested, and I'll try to link to all of the ideas on my Web log. This list primarily highlights shrink wraptype software rather than important protocols such as TCP/IP, Ethernet code or Postscript. The list also does not include ideas or concepts such as the Web or the Internet itself. I'm also not including embedded software sitting inside, say, a Cisco router. This sort of software will be discussed in a future top ten (or bottom 10) list. And finally, programming languages such as Fortran are not on the list since they predate what I consider modern computing and had no serious influence on the direction modern computing has taken.
The only glaring omission might be AutoCAD. I left it off because AutoCAD, a professional LISP-centric tool, was never marketed in the spirit of the desktop revolution, but was sold as a very expensive design tool that just so happened to run on cheap computers. Its influence on the scene is negligible, so it's not listed.
Here's the list. See what you think: 10. Microsoft BASIC (1976)--This was Microsoft's one true innovation that worked. Unlike its competitor of that era, Northstar BASIC, which was probably better-quality software, Microsoft sold its BASIC unbundled, and it was one of the first standalone boxed programming languages, if not the first. This software triggered the modern programming era and popularized the idea of shrink-wrap languages. Sendmail (circa 1983)--This is the one criteria-challenged pick of this list, since it's kind of a protocol, but it's also a system supported by a company, Sendmail Inc., and is sort of a shrink-wrapped product without the shrink wrap.
I had to include it on the list. Today's e-mail boom stems from the invention of this code. Aldus Pagemaker (1985)--This is the program that sealed the deal for desktop publishing and the concept of WYSIWYG. It's the granddad of much of today's layout and design software.
I'll also lump in its drawing partners Illustrator and Freehand. DBASE II (1980)--A remarkable product in its day, and its influence lives on in all low-end commercial database software.
It popularized the concept of a relational database manager, although it didn't quite follow all the parameters. Photoshop (1990)--Over time the importance of this program to the development of small computers will increase. Used by professionals and amateurs alike, this software has influenced all its competition and has become very desirable. The Mac OS (1984)This OS and its Intel processor variant Windows 95 have to be on the list. The modern implementation of the graphical user interface was invented by Xerox, refined by Apple, and adopted by Microsoft. While Microsoft gets chided by me and others for copying the Apple/Xerox idea, there was probably no idea more worthy of being copied. The Mosaic browser (1993)--This is the code that triggered the second desktop revolution, in combination with the World Wide Web.
All modern browsers are based on many of the principles developed by Mosaic. Apache (1995)Apache and software from the open-source movement, including Linux and other initiatives, have to be included. This is a vague category where products are intermixed in a complex scene that encompasses the Internet and its transports. The fact is we would not be where we are today if it were not for the Linux/Apache Web servers. This powerful combination is now evolving into what users call LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP), which seems to be a movement that will undermine the Microsoft.NET strategy. None of this could have happened without the Apache Web server software, which proved that open-source software can be reliable, stable, free, and definitive.
WordStar (1978-1979)WordStar and its predecessor the Electric Pencil, as well as descendants such as Microsoft Word for Windows, have to be included. WordPerfect also deserves a mention here. But it was WordStar that really triggered things and became the first word processing killer app, dominating word processing for over a decade beginning with its release in the late 1970s. You would not be reading this column if it wasn't for WordStar. VisiCalc (1979)VisiCalc and its descendants, including Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel, were standout products. While fundamentally not as important as word processing, the modern spreadsheet, initially implemented on the Apple II, became the triggering mechanism that brought what was then called a microcomputer into the office.
Almost all of the history of desktop computing stems from this invention. If you have other opinions, they are welcome in the forum. Next week we take on the ten worst products. Discuss this article in the forums.