System Related

Winhance

Winhance is a Windows customizer. It debloats windows by helping to automatically remove all of the pre-installed crap that comes on new (or old) PCs that just hog up system resource sand at best make your computer run slower (at worst, do malicious things). It will also help to automatically install many of the apps on this list. So if you were going to start anywhere – this is the one. It is of course, FREE and Open Source.

Winaero Tweaker

Winaero Tweaker – dozens of options for fine-grained tuning of various Windows settings and features. This tool can actually be dangerous, so it’s really for advanced users who want to tweak and optimize every little function that can be controlled.

Sysinternals (From Microsoft)

Sysinternals is a huge library of very technical tools that Microsoft developed for system administration. These are advanced tools that can really mess up your system, but some, like Autoruns, will help you minimize the number of things that auto-start when you boot Windows. You can easily share screenshots of what it reports to an AI and ask it what you can safely disable to speed up your system.

7Zip

7Zip is a compressed file utility like WinZip, only WAY better and totally free! Install this app to manage all compressed file formats on your computer. As a bonus, the built in file viewer can even do some things that Windows Explorer can’t! For example, if you end up with a pesky file that just won’t let you delete it, you can view it from within 7Zip and change the name, then you’ll be able to delete it! This is because of the way 7Zip access files. It’s different and even more powerful than Windows own Explorer.

Monitorian

Monitorian adds the ability to control the brightness of your desktop monitor just like you can do for a laptop monitor. That way you don’t have to be finding the little buttons or working through a menu on your monitor to change the brightness. Your eyes will thank you.

O&O DeskInfo

O&O DeskInfo, in my opinion, is indispensable. Have you ever asked your computer to do something and it just sits there forever and you’re not sure if it’s just being slow, or if it’s working, or what? Well, this app will do two things for you:

1. It puts a little icon in your system tray that you can hover your mouse over to tell you what’s going on with your CPU, RAM and bandwidth.
2. It will put a whole information block right on your desktop so you can see ALL sorts of info about your system.

O&O ShutUp10++

O&O ShutUp 10++ is a privacy app that allows you to disable every possible way that Microsoft spys on you.

Handy

Handy is great for voice dictation on your desktop. I use voice on my phone all the time instead of the keyboard, and you get spoiled! So add it to your windows machine and call it a day.

Storage Related

When it comes to storage, I think it’s important to visually inspect what’s taking up all of the space on your drives, and then use tools to automatically “clean up” unnecessary items or duplicated hogging space.

Filelight – What’s Taking Up Space

Filelight scans your drive or a directory to give you a visual representation of how folders are using space. If you click on the colored slices it will drill down to the individual files. You can quickly spot massive files hogging space. It’s available on the Microsoft Store.

​​​BleachBit

BleachBit is a system disk space cleaner, privacy manager, and system optimizer. This is a super Geek app, so if you don’t understand what it’s gonna do, skip it. But if you’re like me and you want to tweak things like crazy, you can download the Windows installer or the portable tool.

dupeGuru

dupeGuru is available for Windows, Ubuntu and Mac. The concept here is to run the app and point it at a directory where you have a bunch of files. It will search for and highlight duplicates so that you can remove them to free up space. This is especially great for large media folders like images, videos or songs where you might have duplicates lurking around. You can free up a LOT of space this way.

Media Related

ShareX – Screen Captures and Screen Recording

ShareX is one of the most useful and impressive pieces of software I’ve ever used. It should be on every machine in the world. It allows you to take screen captures, but it’s not just a replacement for the native screen capture tool. It allows you to take scrolling captures (like the entire length of a web page, not just the part on the screen), screen recordings, set up automations for after you capture (like copying the image to clipboard) or even automate uploading to an image sharing site so you can grab your screen captures from another computer altogether!

Faststone Image Viewer – Fast Image Viewing

Faststone is the fastest, lightest image viewer and editor that I know of. I’ve been using it for probably 20 years. This will replace Windows slow ass launch of built in apps, and also give you a full featured image viewer complete with batch renaming, resizing, and some editing functionality. Just get it! And then in the Settings make sure and choose to make it the default viewer on your machine for all supported image types.

Quicklook

Technically, Quicklook isn’t only for media. But I find it most useful for that purpose. It’s as simple as selecting an icon and then pressing the spacebar. You’ll have a very fast preview of that item pop open, whether it’s a document, media file, or whatever type the little app can handle.

This is a feature that Macintosh has had for a very long time, but Windows doesn’t natively have it even though it should!

Internet

WinSCP

WinSCP is used for FTP or SFTP transfers. If you work on websites, this is a must. Otherwise, you might use it for large file transfers. If you need it, you probably already know it.

Chrome

Need I really even describe Chrome?