MajorGeeks Top Freeware Picks
By Timothy Tibbetts |
MajorGeeks.Com takes pride in hand-selecting the best freeware, shareware, Freemium, and Open Source software. However, in our 15,000 plus listings, you can find the cream of the crop, or as we call it, the top 1%. These are the apps that most geeks would recommend to you in their respective categories. There are now (very) few freemium listings included that we could not avoid. For example, Malwarebytes, a household name, is included. You can scan for free, but real-time protection requires a license.
Categories include:
[ All-In-One Tweakers - Anti-Spyware & Anti-Malware - Anti-Virus Protection - Backup - Browsers - Data Recovery - Diagnostics - Drive Cleaners - Driver Updaters - Flash Drives - File Compression - Flash or Thimb Drives - Graphics - Multimedia - Microsoft Office Alternatives - Partitioning - Password Managers & Recovery - PDF Alternatives - Text Editors - Uninstallers ]
We want to hear YOUR opinion. Leave a comment below if you think we forgot something.
All-In-One Tweakers
Simple System Tweaker: A handful of safe, tested tweaks most geeks will apply to a computer. This does it for you and saves potentially hours.
Advanced SystemCare: ASC is an all-in-one suite to keep your computer running fine and forget about it. We like Driver Booster from them, as well.
Wise Care 365: We have used Wise Care 365 over the years, and it's a solid, all-in-one suite that pretty much does it all. There's a video on the download page, so check that out as well.
Glary Utilities:Glary Utilities has a Disk cleaner, registry cleaner, startup manager, file shredder, process manager, shortcuts to Windows tools, memory optimizer, and much more.
X-Setup (Older):X-Setup was a pretty hardcore tweaking program but was abandoned in 2002. The author agreed to provide the key to Majorgeeks to live on.
JetClean:JetClean is rarely updated anymore, yet it has a cult following.
Anti-Spyware & Anti-Malware
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware
Malwarebytes is one of our all-time top downloads for a good reason. It's simple, fast, and effective. You can purchase full-time protection, so you don't get infected again.
IObit Malware Fighter
IObit Malware Fighter is the biggest competitor to Malwarebytes. They have a long history and hate each other, but that's good for you.
SpywareBlaster
Not a removal tool but a proactive program to block known rogue websites that install hijackers and more. Install it once and forget it.
Anti-Virus Protection
Windows Security - Windows Defender
The antivirus section has massively changed in the past years. Most free antivirus programs are rarely free and often bloated. We recommend you uninstall your antivirus. Once uninstalled, Windows Defender will take over. We're having difficulty recommending any other freeware antivirus app due to bloat, poor performance, and hard-sell tactics. BitDefender, one of the last and best freeware antivirus apps, ceased making it available at the end of 2021. Game over.
Backup
Reset This PC is part of Windows and makes resetting your Windows 10 or 11 to factory settings, without losing your files, easy for anyone. We stopped using drive cloning software thanks to Reset This PC.
FBackup
FBackup is a free, lightweight automated backup program that can effectively help protect your important files and folders from being lost.
Cobian Reflector
Cobian is a backup tool designed to back up files on your computer or network on a schedule. It also can FTP. It uses little resources and can compress files it backs up.
Clonezilla
Clonezilla is an Open Source partition, disk imaging, and cloning program similar to True Image or Norton Ghost. It's an all-in-one disk management suite. You won't find anything like this for free or Open Source.
XXCLONE
XXCLONE clones your hard drive to another hard drive with the system files, installed applications, and all of your data files. Not updated since 2017, but it still works in a category where there are very few free apps.
Macrium Reflect FREE Edition
Make an accurate and reliable image of your HDD for free.
Karen's Replicator
Karen has been around for years, and we love it. Karen Kenworthy passed away on April 12, 2011, and in 2019, someone began updating her apps again. Karen was one of those who made software to help people for free.
Browsers
Microsoft Edge
We've had so much fun picking on Microsoft Edge that we were surprised when Microsoft moved Edge to Chromium-based. Since you see it here in MajorGeeks Top Freeware Picks, yeah, it's good.
Google Chrome
Google Chrome has become the market dominator yet tends to use a lot of memory. Still, Chrome remains one of the best browsers.
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is one of the most popular browsers out there, and for a good reason. It is fast, stable, and offers enough add-ons to make sure it works as you prefer.
Opera
Opera Web Browser is a free web browser that originally started as a research project back in 1995 and today continues to be a fast, safe, and secure web browser.
Brave
Brave is a Chromium-based web browser focused on speed, privacy, and security.
Data Recovery
Recuva Portable
For free, Recuva is an excellent choice. It's fast, easy to use, and can even recover lost emails, deleted music, and Microsoft Word documents or temporary files.
Wise Data Recovery
Wise is another tool that is part of an entire suite of tools. Often overlooked, you would be mistaken to do so.
FreeUndelete
Free undelete hasn't been updated since 2001, but the same recovery methods apply to this day.
PC INSPECTOR Smart Recovery
Bad news? It hasn't been updated since 2006. Good news? It is designed to recover photos from digital cameras, including memory cards, so only get it for that.
TestDisk & PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents, and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures
Diagnostics
Tweaking.com Windows Repair
Are you getting errors from your computer? Windows Repair will go through your system and reset and repair any potential problems with your computer. Easily the best repair tool on MajorGeeks that's free.
Windows Repair Toolbox
Windows Repair Toolbox includes most third-party applications and utilities you might need to repair any Windows problems in one small application. Video tutorial available.
Sergei Strelec's WinPE
Sergei Strelec's WinPE creates a bootable DVD or thumb drive for the computer maintenance, partitioning, backup, restore, diagnostics, data recovery, and more.
Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD)
With Ultimate Boot CD, you can boot your computer from the CDDVD drive to run tools. This is especially useful if you have a computer that will not start at all.
Drive Cleaners
Privazer
Privazer takes the traditional drive cleaner approach and focuses on security. PrivaZer is currently our pick of picks in this category.
CCleaner
CCleaner has been around and highly rated for many years but has moved to the dark side a bit since the acquisition by Avast. We still use it for the startup manager and registry cleaner.
Wise Disk Cleaner
Do you find CCleaner too conservative? Wise Disk Cleaner can often free up an additional gigabyte or more removing files CCleaner won't touch. I happen to love it personally.
HDCleaner
HDCleaner is designed to completely clean your Windows PC, including registry and backup, encrypting data, splitting files, removing traces, and more.
Driver Updaters
Driver Booster
I've used this one for years, and it works great. They offer a premium version and typically a third-party app during installation, so watch for that.
Snappy Driver Installer Origin
Snappy Driver Installer Origin is an Open Source fork of Snappy Driver Installer designed by a former contributing developer and build master who felt that the project had gone astray.
Snappy Driver Installer
Snappy Driver Installer is a driver updater geared toward geeks and techs alike. Video tutorial available.
NVIDIA GeForce Experience
GeForce Experience comes with NVIDIA driver installations and watches for new drivers. Windows 10 & 11 manage most drivers well, but not video drivers.
AMD Auto-Detect and Install Radeon Graphics Drivers
AMD Auto-Detect and Install Radeon Graphics Drivers detect your graphics card and operating system and tell you if a new driver is available.
Intel Driver & Support Assistant
Intel Driver & Support Assistant quickly scans your machine for the latest up-to-date drivers currently available from Intel.
File Compression
7-Zip
The list of what we would consider excellent compression tools is pretty short, so your choices are easy. 7-Zip is simple, portable, and easy to use.
PeaZip
The list of what we would consider excellent compression tools is pretty short, so your choices are easy. This one or the other one :) PeaZip is open source and has many additional options if you want more control.
Explzh
Explzh is a freeware compression tool capable of creating and extracting file archives.
Flash or Thumb Drives
Rufus
Rufus is a small Open Source utility that helps quickly format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB keys/pen drives, memory sticks, etc.
Ventoy
Ventoy is an Open Source tool to create a bootable USB drive for Windows and Linux ISO files.
YUMI
YUMI helps create a multiboot USB flash drive containing multiple operating systems, antivirus utilities, diagnostic tools, disc cloning, and more.
balenaEtcher
balenaEtcher provides you with a useful Open Source cross-platform image burner for SD cards and USB drives.
Graphics
FastStone Image Viewer
Don't be fooled by the word viewer here. They should have called it "Faststone Image Viewer, Editor, Converter and More," but I guess that would be a bit long.
Krita Studio
Krita Studio is an Open-source, all-in-one painting application geared for professional artists, VFX, and game studios.
XnView
Photoshop is expensive. Sometimes you need those features but not a full-blown, pricey suite. XnView might fill in the gap.
IrfanView
You can apply everything written about XnView (above) and apply it to IrfanView. Both have a very long history. One neat advantage to IrfanView is the IrfanView Plugins.
Paint.net
Paint.net was designed to replace the old Microsoft Paint that came with Windows that grew into an excellent program offering features that make it as good as IrfanView and XnView.
The Gimp
Gimp can be used for many different photo management purposes, but its real power lies in photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring.
Inkscape Portable
Inscape aims to be an open-source editor to replace Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X. It won't replace all of those but does come close.
PicPick
PicPick is an all-in-one screen capture tool that includes an intuitive image editor, color picker, color palette, pixel ruler, protractor, crosshair, whiteboard, and more.
Wildbit Viewer
WildBit Viewer is a compact & fast image viewer with a slide show and editor.
Multimedia
VLC Media Player
Multimedia player for various audio and video formats and DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server.
foobar2000
foobar2000 intends to be a small footprint audio player for Windows. Simple, customizable colors and gets the job done. The installation offers to install it or use it as a portable app.
PotPlayer
PotPlayer is a comprehensive video and audio player that supports TV channels, subtitles, and skins.
Kodi
Kodi (formerly XBMC) is a free and Open Source software media player and digital media entertainment hub.
Universal Media Server
Universal Media Server is a DLNA-compliant UPnP Media Server based on the PS3 Media Server by shagrath.
Media Player Classic Black Edition (MPC-BE)
An often overlooked, 5-star app based on the original "Media Player Classic" project and "Media Player Classic Home Cinema" project.
Microsoft Office Alternatives
Apache OpenOffice
Apache OpenOffice For Windows is a free, Open Source MS Office alternative with a Word compatible word processor, a complete Excel compatible spreadsheet program, and more.
LibreOffice
LibreOffice is a powerful all-in-one office suite that combines pretty much everything you need to increase workflow productivity.
SSuite Office
SSuite Office - Excalibur office suite provides you with a stable and robust way to improve your productivity and document format compatibility.
SSuite Office - Premium HD
SSuite Office - Premium HD is a feature-rich office suite that works better on HD and larger monitors.
Partitioning
Parted Magic
The Parted Magic employs GParted and Parted core programs to handle partitioning tasks while featuring other useful programs easily.
Partition Logic
Create, delete, erase, format, defragment, resize, copy, and move partitions and modify their attributes. As a bonus, it can copy entire hard disks from one to another. It has a few limitations (see description) but should do what you need.
GParted Live
GParted is a large (over 210 MB) program but runs as a bootable live cd. It's a good program to use if you cannot make changes with other programs. It is a powerful, open-source program.
Super Fdisk
Super Fdisk is a driven disk partition manager. With Super Fdisk, you can quickly and easily create, delete, format partitions on IDE/ATA/SATA/SCSI hard disk drives without destroying data.
Password Managers & Recovery
KeePass Password Safe
KeePass Password Safe is an open-source password manager or safe that helps you manage your passwords securely.
KeeWeb
KeeWeb provides you with a free cross-platform password manager that includes full compatibility with KeePass.
LastPass Password Manager
LastPass Password Manager - The last password you'll ever have to remember. This easy-to-use password manager will make your browsing a lot easier and much more secure without having to remember multiple passwords.
Buttercup
Buttercup is a password manager for all your accounts built for your desktop or Google Chrome. Also, we like calling people Buttercup, so that's fun. Buttercup.
Asterisk Key
Asterisk Key shows passwords hidden under asterisks. Video available.
WirelessKeyView
WirelessKeyView recovers all stored wireless network security keys/passwords (WEP/WPA).
ProduKey
ProduKey is an essential utility for retrieving lost ProductIDs and CD-Keys for Microsoft Office, Windows, and more. Video tutorial available.
ShowKeyPlus
ShowKeyPlus is a portable freeware app to retrieve and save your Windows product key if you lose it.
PDF Alternatives
Sumatra PDF
Small, light on resources, and completely portable, this is a nice choice for basic PDF viewing, which is all most people need.
PDF24 Creator
PDF24 Creator can create or convert PDF files into multiple file formats.
Foxit Reader
A PDF reader and writer that supports plug-ins. Some say it seems a little more bloated over time, but many features will do that.
PDF-XChange Viewer
A 16-17 MB alternative to Adobe PDF. Better than Adobe, like all the others listed here.
UnityPDF
UnityPDF is not just a reader but lets you merge, split, divide, rotate, protect PDF files, and a lot more.
System Information
Tweaking.com - System Information
Tweaking.com is the same guy from PCWinTech.com, and all of his utilities are free and 5-star programs, so this is no exception.
SIV (System Information Viewer)
SIV by is an app for displaying useful Windows, network, and hardware info.
Belarc Advisor
Belarc Advisor can be found in use by most techs. It shows all of your system information on a web page.
Speccy
Another solid from the CCleaner guys. It will offer to install Ccleaner so watch for that. A portable version is available.
HWiNFO32
HWINFO is a system information tool but has benchmarking, monitoring, and more. Driver Updates tab in the program is an advertisement, so don't fall for that. 64-bit available, but 32 bit runs just fine.
Open Hardware Monitor
Under one MB, open-source and can report back on your fans, CPU, video card temperatures, and more. If you're looking to see if heat is an issue, this is a good choice—also, an excellent system information tool.
Text Editors (Notepad, Wordpad Alternatives)
QOwnNotes
QOwnNotes is a portable Open Source app that allows you to create notes that can be efficiently sorted, organized, printed, exported, and more.
Notepad++
Microsoft Notepad included with Windows works. That's about it. Notepad++ allows you to have Notepad on steroids. It has a WYSIWYG interface and is handy for programmers, including HTML, Java, PHP, Pascal, Perl, and more.
SynWrite
SynWrite is a free text editor designed mainly as a complete environment for web coders and writers.
CintaNotes
Sometimes you don't need a text editor but simply a note-taking application. This one does the job and keeps it simple. Sync via DropBox and other places across computers. Run from a thumb drive.
RJ TextEd
RJ TextEd Portable is a web development tool plus a text editor with many features, including syntax highlighting advanced column mode and text folding.
Uninstallers
IOBit Uninstaller
IOBit Uninstaller can remove programs and deep scan leftover files, folders, and registry entries. This one does offer to install their Advanced System Care, so watch that at the end.
HiBit Uninstaller
HiBit Uninstaller can completely uninstall Windows programs and features ten more tools, including a drive and registry cleaner, process and startup manager, and more. Video tutorial available.
Revo Uninstaller
While Revo is now only updated as shareware, an older, freeware version is still available. Revo has been listed here for 20 years, and many geeks swear by it.
GeekUninstaller
Simple, small, and portable. Export to HTML, force removal, look up assigned registry keys, and more. Pretty amazing what is packed into this small program.
BCUninstaller
BCUninstaller is a free program uninstaller. It is focused on removing large amounts of applications at once in a small amount of time. Video tutorial available.
Display Driver Uninstaller
Display Driver Uninstaller is a graphics driver removal tool that helps remove all remnants of AMD, Nvidia, and Intel graphics card drivers. Video tutorial available.
Feedback, suggestions, complaints are welcome in the comments below.
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Updates:
12-25-21. Massive overhaul. Categories and individual entries were added and removed as needed. Some grammar fixes. Everything now has fewer spaces and should be easier and more compact to read.
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Categories include:
[ All-In-One Tweakers - Anti-Spyware & Anti-Malware - Anti-Virus Protection - Backup - Browsers - Data Recovery - Diagnostics - Drive Cleaners - Driver Updaters - Flash Drives - File Compression - Flash or Thimb Drives - Graphics - Multimedia - Microsoft Office Alternatives - Partitioning - Password Managers & Recovery - PDF Alternatives - Text Editors - Uninstallers ]
We want to hear YOUR opinion. Leave a comment below if you think we forgot something.
(More in this category)
(More in this category)
Malwarebytes is one of our all-time top downloads for a good reason. It's simple, fast, and effective. You can purchase full-time protection, so you don't get infected again.
IObit Malware Fighter is the biggest competitor to Malwarebytes. They have a long history and hate each other, but that's good for you.
Not a removal tool but a proactive program to block known rogue websites that install hijackers and more. Install it once and forget it.
(More in this category)
The antivirus section has massively changed in the past years. Most free antivirus programs are rarely free and often bloated. We recommend you uninstall your antivirus. Once uninstalled, Windows Defender will take over. We're having difficulty recommending any other freeware antivirus app due to bloat, poor performance, and hard-sell tactics. BitDefender, one of the last and best freeware antivirus apps, ceased making it available at the end of 2021. Game over.
(More in this category)
FBackup is a free, lightweight automated backup program that can effectively help protect your important files and folders from being lost.
Cobian is a backup tool designed to back up files on your computer or network on a schedule. It also can FTP. It uses little resources and can compress files it backs up.
Clonezilla is an Open Source partition, disk imaging, and cloning program similar to True Image or Norton Ghost. It's an all-in-one disk management suite. You won't find anything like this for free or Open Source.
XXCLONE clones your hard drive to another hard drive with the system files, installed applications, and all of your data files. Not updated since 2017, but it still works in a category where there are very few free apps.
Make an accurate and reliable image of your HDD for free.
Karen has been around for years, and we love it. Karen Kenworthy passed away on April 12, 2011, and in 2019, someone began updating her apps again. Karen was one of those who made software to help people for free.
(More in this category)
We've had so much fun picking on Microsoft Edge that we were surprised when Microsoft moved Edge to Chromium-based. Since you see it here in MajorGeeks Top Freeware Picks, yeah, it's good.
Google Chrome has become the market dominator yet tends to use a lot of memory. Still, Chrome remains one of the best browsers.
Mozilla Firefox is one of the most popular browsers out there, and for a good reason. It is fast, stable, and offers enough add-ons to make sure it works as you prefer.
Opera Web Browser is a free web browser that originally started as a research project back in 1995 and today continues to be a fast, safe, and secure web browser.
Brave is a Chromium-based web browser focused on speed, privacy, and security.
(More in this category)
For free, Recuva is an excellent choice. It's fast, easy to use, and can even recover lost emails, deleted music, and Microsoft Word documents or temporary files.
Wise is another tool that is part of an entire suite of tools. Often overlooked, you would be mistaken to do so.
Free undelete hasn't been updated since 2001, but the same recovery methods apply to this day.
Bad news? It hasn't been updated since 2006. Good news? It is designed to recover photos from digital cameras, including memory cards, so only get it for that.
(More in this category)
Are you getting errors from your computer? Windows Repair will go through your system and reset and repair any potential problems with your computer. Easily the best repair tool on MajorGeeks that's free.
Windows Repair Toolbox includes most third-party applications and utilities you might need to repair any Windows problems in one small application. Video tutorial available.
Sergei Strelec's WinPE creates a bootable DVD or thumb drive for the computer maintenance, partitioning, backup, restore, diagnostics, data recovery, and more.
With Ultimate Boot CD, you can boot your computer from the CDDVD drive to run tools. This is especially useful if you have a computer that will not start at all.
(More in this category)
Privazer takes the traditional drive cleaner approach and focuses on security. PrivaZer is currently our pick of picks in this category.
CCleaner has been around and highly rated for many years but has moved to the dark side a bit since the acquisition by Avast. We still use it for the startup manager and registry cleaner.
Do you find CCleaner too conservative? Wise Disk Cleaner can often free up an additional gigabyte or more removing files CCleaner won't touch. I happen to love it personally.
HDCleaner is designed to completely clean your Windows PC, including registry and backup, encrypting data, splitting files, removing traces, and more.
(More in this category)
I've used this one for years, and it works great. They offer a premium version and typically a third-party app during installation, so watch for that.
Snappy Driver Installer Origin is an Open Source fork of Snappy Driver Installer designed by a former contributing developer and build master who felt that the project had gone astray.
Snappy Driver Installer is a driver updater geared toward geeks and techs alike. Video tutorial available.
GeForce Experience comes with NVIDIA driver installations and watches for new drivers. Windows 10 & 11 manage most drivers well, but not video drivers.
AMD Auto-Detect and Install Radeon Graphics Drivers detect your graphics card and operating system and tell you if a new driver is available.
Intel Driver & Support Assistant quickly scans your machine for the latest up-to-date drivers currently available from Intel.
(More in this category)
7-Zip
The list of what we would consider excellent compression tools is pretty short, so your choices are easy. 7-Zip is simple, portable, and easy to use.
PeaZip
The list of what we would consider excellent compression tools is pretty short, so your choices are easy. This one or the other one :) PeaZip is open source and has many additional options if you want more control.
Explzh
Explzh is a freeware compression tool capable of creating and extracting file archives.
(More in this category)
Rufus is a small Open Source utility that helps quickly format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB keys/pen drives, memory sticks, etc.
Ventoy is an Open Source tool to create a bootable USB drive for Windows and Linux ISO files.
YUMI helps create a multiboot USB flash drive containing multiple operating systems, antivirus utilities, diagnostic tools, disc cloning, and more.
balenaEtcher provides you with a useful Open Source cross-platform image burner for SD cards and USB drives.
(More in this category)
Don't be fooled by the word viewer here. They should have called it "Faststone Image Viewer, Editor, Converter and More," but I guess that would be a bit long.
Krita Studio is an Open-source, all-in-one painting application geared for professional artists, VFX, and game studios.
Photoshop is expensive. Sometimes you need those features but not a full-blown, pricey suite. XnView might fill in the gap.
You can apply everything written about XnView (above) and apply it to IrfanView. Both have a very long history. One neat advantage to IrfanView is the IrfanView Plugins.
Paint.net was designed to replace the old Microsoft Paint that came with Windows that grew into an excellent program offering features that make it as good as IrfanView and XnView.
Gimp can be used for many different photo management purposes, but its real power lies in photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring.
Inscape aims to be an open-source editor to replace Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X. It won't replace all of those but does come close.
PicPick is an all-in-one screen capture tool that includes an intuitive image editor, color picker, color palette, pixel ruler, protractor, crosshair, whiteboard, and more.
WildBit Viewer is a compact & fast image viewer with a slide show and editor.
(More in this category)
Multimedia player for various audio and video formats and DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server.
foobar2000 intends to be a small footprint audio player for Windows. Simple, customizable colors and gets the job done. The installation offers to install it or use it as a portable app.
PotPlayer is a comprehensive video and audio player that supports TV channels, subtitles, and skins.
Kodi (formerly XBMC) is a free and Open Source software media player and digital media entertainment hub.
Universal Media Server is a DLNA-compliant UPnP Media Server based on the PS3 Media Server by shagrath.
An often overlooked, 5-star app based on the original "Media Player Classic" project and "Media Player Classic Home Cinema" project.
(More in this category)
Apache OpenOffice For Windows is a free, Open Source MS Office alternative with a Word compatible word processor, a complete Excel compatible spreadsheet program, and more.
LibreOffice is a powerful all-in-one office suite that combines pretty much everything you need to increase workflow productivity.
SSuite Office - Excalibur office suite provides you with a stable and robust way to improve your productivity and document format compatibility.
SSuite Office - Premium HD is a feature-rich office suite that works better on HD and larger monitors.
(More in this category)
The Parted Magic employs GParted and Parted core programs to handle partitioning tasks while featuring other useful programs easily.
Create, delete, erase, format, defragment, resize, copy, and move partitions and modify their attributes. As a bonus, it can copy entire hard disks from one to another. It has a few limitations (see description) but should do what you need.
GParted is a large (over 210 MB) program but runs as a bootable live cd. It's a good program to use if you cannot make changes with other programs. It is a powerful, open-source program.
Super Fdisk is a driven disk partition manager. With Super Fdisk, you can quickly and easily create, delete, format partitions on IDE/ATA/SATA/SCSI hard disk drives without destroying data.
(More in this category)
KeePass Password Safe is an open-source password manager or safe that helps you manage your passwords securely.
KeeWeb provides you with a free cross-platform password manager that includes full compatibility with KeePass.
LastPass Password Manager - The last password you'll ever have to remember. This easy-to-use password manager will make your browsing a lot easier and much more secure without having to remember multiple passwords.
Buttercup is a password manager for all your accounts built for your desktop or Google Chrome. Also, we like calling people Buttercup, so that's fun. Buttercup.
Asterisk Key shows passwords hidden under asterisks. Video available.
WirelessKeyView recovers all stored wireless network security keys/passwords (WEP/WPA).
ProduKey is an essential utility for retrieving lost ProductIDs and CD-Keys for Microsoft Office, Windows, and more. Video tutorial available.
ShowKeyPlus is a portable freeware app to retrieve and save your Windows product key if you lose it.
(More in this category)
Small, light on resources, and completely portable, this is a nice choice for basic PDF viewing, which is all most people need.
PDF24 Creator can create or convert PDF files into multiple file formats.
A PDF reader and writer that supports plug-ins. Some say it seems a little more bloated over time, but many features will do that.
A 16-17 MB alternative to Adobe PDF. Better than Adobe, like all the others listed here.
UnityPDF is not just a reader but lets you merge, split, divide, rotate, protect PDF files, and a lot more.
(More in this category)
Tweaking.com is the same guy from PCWinTech.com, and all of his utilities are free and 5-star programs, so this is no exception.
SIV by is an app for displaying useful Windows, network, and hardware info.
Belarc Advisor can be found in use by most techs. It shows all of your system information on a web page.
Another solid from the CCleaner guys. It will offer to install Ccleaner so watch for that. A portable version is available.
HWINFO is a system information tool but has benchmarking, monitoring, and more. Driver Updates tab in the program is an advertisement, so don't fall for that. 64-bit available, but 32 bit runs just fine.
Under one MB, open-source and can report back on your fans, CPU, video card temperatures, and more. If you're looking to see if heat is an issue, this is a good choice—also, an excellent system information tool.
(More in this category)
QOwnNotes is a portable Open Source app that allows you to create notes that can be efficiently sorted, organized, printed, exported, and more.
Microsoft Notepad included with Windows works. That's about it. Notepad++ allows you to have Notepad on steroids. It has a WYSIWYG interface and is handy for programmers, including HTML, Java, PHP, Pascal, Perl, and more.
SynWrite is a free text editor designed mainly as a complete environment for web coders and writers.
Sometimes you don't need a text editor but simply a note-taking application. This one does the job and keeps it simple. Sync via DropBox and other places across computers. Run from a thumb drive.
RJ TextEd Portable is a web development tool plus a text editor with many features, including syntax highlighting advanced column mode and text folding.
(More in this category)
IOBit Uninstaller can remove programs and deep scan leftover files, folders, and registry entries. This one does offer to install their Advanced System Care, so watch that at the end.
HiBit Uninstaller can completely uninstall Windows programs and features ten more tools, including a drive and registry cleaner, process and startup manager, and more. Video tutorial available.
While Revo is now only updated as shareware, an older, freeware version is still available. Revo has been listed here for 20 years, and many geeks swear by it.
Simple, small, and portable. Export to HTML, force removal, look up assigned registry keys, and more. Pretty amazing what is packed into this small program.
BCUninstaller is a free program uninstaller. It is focused on removing large amounts of applications at once in a small amount of time. Video tutorial available.
Display Driver Uninstaller is a graphics driver removal tool that helps remove all remnants of AMD, Nvidia, and Intel graphics card drivers. Video tutorial available.
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Updates:
12-25-21. Massive overhaul. Categories and individual entries were added and removed as needed. Some grammar fixes. Everything now has fewer spaces and should be easier and more compact to read.
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