Top 50 Windows software: Software you cannot do without

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1. MS Office Suite 2010

Let’s face it, this one thing where Microsoft really knows what it’s doing. Whether it’s the simplicity of Word or the complex pivot tables, look-ups, and macros you can run in Excel or even the impressive fluidity of PowerPoint, we all seem to love this productivity tool. Also, it’s not really a surprise that a productivity suite is at the top of this countdown right? After all you use a PC most often for productivity. The office suite figured amongst the top three for each of the Digit team member without exception.
2. Google Chrome

Google’s philosophy – that the browser is going to be our gateway to personal computing in the future – seems to be directly reflected in this ranking. After a productivity suite the first category of software to get featured was a browser and what a co-incidence that it’s Google Chrome. Chrome has come a long way from the buggy, crash happy little infuriating !#%^& it used to be. Now with extension support, the newly launched app store (which we’re still skeptical is just a jazzed up speed dial) and more stable releases, it seems to the favorite browser overall.
3. Irfan View

Irfan View has been and maybe will remain the primary tool for all of us when it comes to batch processing, editing, and resizing images.

4. uTorrent

Just 314.8 KB? “OMG” is how most users react when they first encounter uTorrent. This small client is easy on resources, has a great looking interface and awesome features. Feature set even includes a Web UI.
5. Winamp

Winamp is primarily well known as a music player than a full fledged media player. The look and feel, minute features like auto-tagging with accuracy, pluggins, visualization, sorting, shortcuts, and tons of other things make this a favorite of a lot of people. Flaws? Sure, it’s heavy on ram usage, but there are workarounds.

6. Firefox

Firefox is again one of the most successful open source projects of all time-built by geeks and for geeks. The browser was at one time the most customizable, secure and fast browser. Hence the loyal fan following even today. It’s slowly losing ground to other browsers such as Google Chrome and Opera.

7. Opera

Opera seems to be doing something right if it repeatedly out performs other browsers in most tests including the one which conducted recently on thinkdigit.com. With many of the features of other browsers being built in, it offers a stable browsing environment, Definitely a browser of choice for most of the Team Digit members.

8. VLC

Despite media players such as KMPlayer and Media player Classic, VLC still remains the last line of defense against a stubbornly unplayable video file. If not very factual, this still remains the perception amongst most users. Most people still have VLC on their systems, even if not as the default player, it’s still there, which is why the high rating on this listing.

9. Nero Suite

Burning DVDs at one point used to be synonymous with the aptly named Nero. Although most people only use the Nero Burning Rom component, the Suite is feature rich. Only now people have started looking beyond Nero for their DVD writing needs.

10. CCleaner

Finally a system And CCleaner is one of the best. Be it tweaking registry, optimizing start up for quicker booting, or simply removing temporary files enmass, there’s nothing as user-friendly as CCleaner.

11. Adobe Creative Suite

Adobe Creative Suite is a collection of apps equipped to tackle every task from photo editing to building websites to Flash and even cross compatibility between applications.

12. Foxit Reader

Foxit can open PDFs in a jiffy, search PDFs in entire folders, allows tabbed file access, and minor annotation features. Phew. What’s not to like? Well there are some niggles too – version after version, Foxit is inching its way towards bloatware. At 12 we can easily say its one of the most appreciated software.

13. WinRAR

The good old giant of the compression world still rules the roost. Perhaps people are still habituated or many like the .rar format that WinRAR can natively compress and archive in.

14. 7-Zip

7-Zip has been one of our essential software on the DVD for quite some time now and many consider it to be a superior compression and achieving program.

15. Daemon Tools

Daemon tools is one of the best ISO mounting and creation tools out there. With Daemon tools you can compress, split images while also managing your countless images. It associates with image files for quick access and has a system tray menu to help ease the process.

16. K-Lite Mega Codec Pack

Here we’re considering the codecs as well as Media Player Classic that comes bundles in the package. Some might say it’s a little bloated. Yet the best part about it that once you install the pack, there will seldom be a time when a media file won’t work.

17. Adobe Reader

Despite Foxit scoring so high in this list, there’s no escaping Adobe Reader it seems. No compatibility issues was the most cited reason why people still prefer Adobe Reader Throw any PDF at it and it will open, was the contention.

18. Skype

Perhaps the worlds most popular VoIP application, it has found many takers across continents Skype does a good job at reducing international calling costs for people. Even the conference call feature has been well accepted.

19. Notepad++

Don’t be fooled by the nondescript name. Apart from being a powerful source code editing tool, Notepad++ is also a Notepad enhancement. Anyone getting their hands dirty with code appreciates the value of this little tool. It seemingly supports just about any language written, and has awesome feature such as line numbering, syntax highlighting, syntax folding, powerful search and colour coded printing.
20. Audacity

Audacity is, from our experience, the most appreciated free audio editor around. The software features a clean interface, multi-track editing, and a robust set of effects, wide file support and even pluggins all in a 2.13 MB package. There’s very little it can’t do.

21. MS Paint

Some of you might be nodding your head right now while some may be more than a little surprised. Why Paint? But the point is that this innocuous little software has got us out of so many jams every now and then. Besides, wasn’t it and isn’t it still fun to much around on a blank canvas for fun?

22. Windows movie Maker

Sure you have movie editors like Premiere Pro and the like, but can everyone use them? For newbie’s, Windows Movie Maker seems to provide the best combination between features and usability. If you don’t want to compete with the likes of Steven Spielberg and just want to make nice looking home videos that don’t require a hell of a lot of hardcore editing, Movie Maker will suffice.

23. AVG

Back when AVG first started spreading through word of mouth, it was perhaps the only free line of defence anyone against viruses anyone had heard of. No wonder then that it showed up on our list at such a high ranking. The anti-virus suite is simple to use, and what’s great about it is that the basic version, which supports all updates and latest virus definitions is free to use.
24. Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player may not be the first option of media playback for most users, but after clean install when you want to play any file this is the best and perhaps only player available. Besides, the latest versions are not as bad.

25. Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer is regarded as the browser you use to download a better browser. This clearly reflects in the ranking it has received amongst the other browsers in the list. We still like to keep it around as a failsafe right? When a particularly prickly website refuses to open in Chrome, who do you turn to good old (or bad old) Internet Explorer.

26. Free Download Manager

Extensions like DownThemAll have arrived, and besides those days of downloading large files via http on slow connections have long gone. Yet a lot of people still use download managers even today. Features such as finding mirrors, or the ability to make multiple connections to a server are much appreciated.

27. Open/Libre Office

It may not be all visual splendor and productivity glory like MS Office, but its still is a commendable work-in-progress. While there is a long way to go before the project comes anywhere close to acceptable, it is still the best free option out there.
28. VirtualBox

Anytime you want to run something from a different platform a quick way is to configure a virtual machine. While initially VMWare was an often opted for option, Sun Microsystems VirtualBox seems to have overtaken the former virtualization wizard. It’s installed on almost all of our systems.

29. foobar2000

If you like your music served in a clutter-free, distracting less manner, the ultra-lite player foobar2000 is your best bet. Beneath its Plain Jane looks lies a powerful media library organizer, Audio CD ripper, music format converter and music support for numerous plug-ins developed on its free-for-all SDK by a dedicated community. All in all a neat little 3.1MB package.

30. Google Talk

Like Yahoo! Messenger of yesteryear, Google talk too seems to be clinging on for a place in today’s world of website integrated and all in one messenger. Gtalk faces its biggest competition from the web UI integrated chat found in Gmail itself. Still for those who have the installed app. Have rated it decently high amongst messengers.

31. Spybot Search and Destroy

There is enough awareness these days about malware and people do install an antivirus but when it comes to spyware, most are still cluless. Spybot is a specialized product that aims at protecting users privacy from malicious data gathering programs known as spyware. It even blocks adware programs along with cleaning usage tracks – an interesting feature if you use a machine that’s shared by other users.

32. Picasa

Picasa is a photo editing cum photo management hybrid that is a favorites amongst most people – from your regular Joe to even techies. The application comes with some really nice and unique features which include, web gallery integration, face detection, and geo-tagging images. We like it for its simplicity.

33. Thunderbird

Thunderbird is one of the biggest open source success stories in the world today. A robust cross platform mail client such as Thunderbird has rarely been seen even in the commercial Space. It’s easy to set-up, customizable, and has a lovely UI. What more would you want?

34. Recuva

From the creators of CCleaner comes a guardian angel software of sorts for those ‘oops’ moments when you delete a file and suddenly realize it was the wrong one. And we’re not talking of the soft deletes that can be recovered from the recycle bin. Recuva is also good at recovering data from crashed hard drives.

35. Avast

Generally we refrain from playing favorites with antivirus suites based on detection rates and performance. The reason is the ever-changing malware landscape which results in a constant battle wherein AV makers are always trying to keep ahead of malicious coders. Avast over the years has proven itself in actual deployment scenarios and hence finds a place in our list based on the votes received.

36. Speedfan

Being gamers, overclockers, and in general performance enthusiasts, we need to keep an eye on our computer’s vitals like our life depended on it. Since system temperature is the most important measure to keep track of, SpeedFan is an important utility. SpeedFan is a hardware monitoring software that monitors voltages, fan speeds and temperatures in your PC. It can access S.M.A.R.T. info and show hard disk temperatures too and even dynamically change fan speeds accordingly, thus reducing noise.

37. Wordweb

We’re all of course fans of the written word, and when it comes to this subject, no other software is an English Nerd’s friend like Wordweb. It’s a instant dictionary and thesaurus. Simply hit [CTRL] + [ALT] + [W] after selecting a word from any app and it’ll give you meanings, alternative words and many other options. We would recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in writing better, increasing their vocabulary, and knowing correct pronunciations.
38. TeraCopy

TeraCopy is a file copy utility that goes beyond the regular windows cop-paste dialog box. It works a little faster and has features like pausing and resuming copying tasks.

39. Process Explorer

We’ve been using this little nugget from Microsoft for ages. The application makes tracking down processes so much easier than Windows Task Manager. It displays all information relating to a process in a neat tree structure with application icons.

40. CPU-Z

Ever wonder what the latency of your memory is? Or simpler still, what chipset your motherboard belongs to? If you didn’t wonder, then you probably already have this software. It’s the one stop shop for extracting any and all sorts of system details at a glance.

41. CD Burner XP

While Nero burning Rom and in fact the entire Nero Suite feature somewhere in the top 10s, this little software is perhaps the best free burning software out there. (P.S. before shooting of hate mails, please read the how we tested box). It has all the features you would need from a CD/DVD burning tool verification, ISO support and more.

42. Virtual DUB

A tiny application that with the right codecs can transcode videos from one format to another. It includes a fair bit of editing features too. Pretty powerful for its size and features pluggin support. Hence the well deserved place on this list.

43. Yahoo!

In a world ruled by Gmail and Facebook web based chat and multiprotocol messengers, not many people may use Yahoo messenger. Yet a few years ago Yahoo! Messenger was perhaps the only form of instant communication between users. This one ranks 43 for its usability and nostalgic value.

44. Fences

A fence was a recent discovery and so is fresh on all of our minds. The only desktop customization tool to feature on this list, it neatly sorts icons on your desktop into demarcated sections, which have a nice transparent background colour.

45. Norton Ghost

Backup and recovery software seem to have faded in importance lately. Norton Ghost is the only one of its kind that made it to our list, based on scores. Back when we used to use it frequently Ghost was robust software that would take system image backups and an instant restore point, complete with settings and preferences, should your system become unstable.

46. FileZilla

When it comes to FTP clients, only a handful of names can be thrown around in the same breath as FileZilla. A free open source tool, FileZilla makes for the easiest way to upload and download to and from your hosted website. The interface is very easy to use.

47. Team viewer

Team Viewer nudged out the other remote desktop utility Logmein out of our list by a small margin. With this software you can log into your or anyone else’s PC from a different location. Effectively controlling it as if you were right there in front of it. A great tool for trouble shooting or keeping track of what’s going on with your PC while on the move.

48. Lightroom

Lightroom can be thought of as a stripped down version of Photoshop. Many users prefer the over other photo management and editing tools. It helps you in organizing your photographs and do post processing work like adjusting exposures, tonal adjustments etc. it also allows you to showcase your work in the form of slide shows, web galleries as well as on popular photo sharing sites.

49. Digsby

Digsby integrates Instant messaging, email, and social networking into one neat bundle. The software of late, seems to have the potential of becoming your one stop communication dashboard. It’s little irritating to integrate into Facebook with all its ‘Allows’ requests and autoposting updates, still, deserves to be in the top 50.

50. Media Monkey

Media Monkey sneaks into our top 50 mainly for its nostalgia value. A solid music player nonetheless, it is more recognized for its sorting ability. If you’ve got one of those large all in one dump folders and want to organize your collection. MediaMoney is the software of choice. The JukeBox and Auto-DJ features are fun for playing music without much supervision.

Source: thinkdigit magazine