In Pictures: 20 Must-Download Utilities For Windows 7

[exfileme]

We like Windows 7 a lot more than Vista, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. These 20 lightweight tools go a long way to improve upon Microsoft's latest operating system. Best of all, we've only picked apps that are available in some form for free.

In Pictures: 20 Must-Download Utilities For Windows 7 : Read more

 

[killerclick]

You forgot IrfanView and MyDefrag, otherwise good list.

 

[cashews]

I find features like these, "go to 20 different pages to read one article", to be quite annoying and irritating. I take it you guys need to do this to get page impressions for your ads or something.

 

[Guest]

Suggesting VLC over MPC-HC? Something is very wrong here.

 

[darthvidor]

I like fences and switcher, thanks!

 

[johnyeah]

Fences is nice, but it significantly slows down Windows boot time. I used to use it for organization, until I restructured my desktop and used other taskbar pins and start menu instead.

 

[Guest]

thats awesome list, love you tom's

 

[Stardude82]

Ooo Steam. It should be mentioned that there are a dozen or so pretty decent free games you can get in addition to many demos. Sometime they give games away for free. Also, ask a friend if they have an extra copy of Half-Life 2 to give you and enjoy all the mods!

 

[mitch074]

A few remarks...
- CCleaner is good (in fact, VERY good) at removing crap. But it's not completely crapware-free: it installs the Yahoo toolbar by default. However, you can un-check that option at install, so don't go clicking 'next-next-next' too fast. Then, true, it's damn good.
- 7-zip can unpack anything that is zipped; if a ZIP file fails, then it wasn't a ZIP file... Or it was corrupted.
- The GIMP accepts what you say, and more: current stable version can deal with CMYK data, colour profiles, and can even delegate some work to the graphics card. And, yes, it provides some HDR effects.
- Scribus and Ghostscript are separated for one very simple reason: Ghostscript being THE reference implementation of Postscript in the Free Software world, it is very often updated - and it is very nice to be able to update said reference without having to update the whole stack. This may be a drawback on first install (you need to install two packages), it's a boon on prolonged use: no need to download the whole shebang every time Ghostscript is updated...
- I wonder about Trillian: why not Pidgin? It does the same thing Trillian does (for the free version), on more networks, and sound/video chat are being added little by little.

 

[Stardude82]

Oh yeah, having an Nvidia or ATI video card gets you on Steam HL2: Deathmatch, but that won't get you access to mods it turns out. You can buying it for $5 should work.

 

[jimishtar]

CCCP should definitely be on that list.

 

[americanbrian]

I have found that mediacoder is the fastest solution for re-encoding videos on my computer. It is FEATURE FILLED.

 

[luke904]

[citation][nom]johnyeah[/nom]Fences is nice, but it significantly slows down Windows boot time. I used to use it for organization, until I restructured my desktop and used other taskbar pins and start menu instead.[/citation]
i agree, i used to organize it manually by just dragging them into certain groups. but sometimes a game will glitch and will not change back to my desktop resolution when they exit or something like that and everything will get messed up. Fences keeps that from happening, and so its worth the 5 extra seconds of boot and 20-30 megs of ram usage

 

[Mark Heath]

Suggesting VLC over MPC-HC? Something is very wrong here.

Never actually used that, but I've heard good things. What makes it so good though?

 

[Guest]

I like Fences but running on XP SP3 is causing too many headaches.. it frequently causes the desktop and freeze and I need to restart explorer shell.

 

[porschedream]

sending or receiving a file with trillian is just not possible

 

[luke904]

[citation][nom]BBB2010[/nom]I like Fences but running on XP SP3 is causing too many headaches.. it frequently causes the desktop and freeze and I need to restart explorer shell.[/citation]
never freezes on me

 

[mejobloggs]

[citation][nom]gyves[/nom]Suggesting VLC over MPC-HC? Something is very wrong here.[/citation]
[citation][nom]cashews[/nom]I find features like these, "go to 20 different pages to read one article", to be quite annoying and irritating. I take it you guys need to do this to get page impressions for your ads or something.[/citation]
agreed

 

[Franklin Hennersdorfer]

Was a bit surprised to not see 'Windows Classic Shell', available on Sourceforge, in this list, as it makes the virtually useless Windows Explorer, with it's hidden menus, unlinked left/right panes (leading to mistakes like deleting a whole folder that is selected in the left pane instead of the file you selected in the right pane), the useless 'Status Bar' will display full file info AND free disk space if you just click a drive as it should, not as MS has it doing now.

Windows Classic Shell is quite simply not only brilliant, but it actually makes Windows Explorer work like it SHOULD have by default.

 

[DjEaZy]

... use 15 from 20...

 

[shadow187]

If you don't like 20 page articles, no one is forcing you to read them.

However, thanks, Tom's. 7stack is sort of what I needed.

 

[Guest]

About mpc-hc, is good all works well but vlc can join advanced functions (like streaming video over the net) and functions for a simple player clean and fast. You need only to play movie or sound mpc is good, but if you need more vlc is better (imho).
I am agree for vlc.
bye

 

[hari_41]

thanks...its nice

 

[Guest]

What about ImgBurn and uTorrent?

And VLC is at least regular as a audio player?

 

[blmage]

I find features like these, "go to 20 different pages to read one article", to be quite annoying and irritating. I take it you guys need to do this to get page impressions for your ads or something.

Firefox + Autopager addon

Just keep scrolling down and it loads the next page automatically. Great for Google, eBay, Manga reading, many many forums, articles (of course)... not entirely perfect however quite "tweakable" to get what you want, basically if there's a "next" button it finds it and auto "pages" the next.