In Pictures: 20 Must-Download Utilities For Windows 7

[Guest]

Malwarebytes is better

 

[pluripotent]

registry cleanser are like homeopathy. They are worthless pseudotech that can't do anything for your computer except delete a few bytes at random (yes, random). It's only a matter of time until they delete something important. Tech writers should know better than to promote this stuff.

 

[gm0n3y]

Love the Civ 2 in #17.

 

[gm0n3y]

I've been using Daemon Tools for a long time now, but I used to use Alcohol 120%. Is that still around?

 

[roadrunner343]

Alcohol 120% is where it's at.

 

[angela1130]

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.

I agree cashews that it would look so much better in a single page that you have to scroll down and down and down. /sarcasm.

 

[bourgeoisdude]

[citation][nom]gm0n3y[/nom]I've been using Daemon Tools for a long time now, but I used to use Alcohol 120%. Is that still around?[/citation]

Yep, but it costs $$$.

 

[angelraiter]

As far as desktop customization for Win7, I use RainMeter running a set of my own & 3rd party custom skins. I have everything in there from my email inbox to system resources, time, weather in 2 different cities, a music player, a simple documents explorer and an rss feed. The great thing is that my desktop is 100% free of icons, I have RocketDock on autohide with the programs and folders I access the most and then the Start Bar on autohide with its regular stuff on there. It's so organized and seamless! Oh, and it looks really really great too, futuristic even!

 

[tom thumb]

Best of all, the program contains no spyware, ads, and doesn't track user habits.

Ok, why would you even mention that? Shouldn't that be an obvious requirement?

 

[mikem_90]

[citation][nom]marraco[/nom]"...the software looks to promote piracy. After all, it can install virtual optical drives in My Computer and allow users to "mount" burned..."Mounting images allows to load CDs much faster, and avoid natural attrition caused by handling the crappy optical media, so prone to scratchs and data loosing.[/citation]

It is also a boon when you want to go on vacation, trip, etc...take your laptop along with and not carry a giant book of game CDs.

 

[ravewulf]

[citation][nom]americanbrian[/nom]I have found that mediacoder is the fastest solution for re-encoding videos on my computer. It is FEATURE FILLED.[/citation]
It does have tons of awesome features and support for every format I can think of, but I have some criticisms. Decoders/encoders/muxers don't always play nicely together. Quite a few times I have gotten notifications that ffdmpeg crashed (I also have the regular ffmpeg CLI and it works fine). The homepage is filled with annoying ads and the program automatically opens the site's homepage in your browser on opening the program after each install/upgrade and you have to disable it each time. Other than that, I love the extensive features it has!

 

[fulle]

The only one I'd actually discourage using is SpyBot... which sucks lately. Poor detection/removal rates, incompatibility issues with other software, etc. There's better options, trust me.

Good to see Fences make an appearance. I've been using that at work (where my desktop gets just horribly cluttered), and it helps keep things organized surprisingly well.

 

[firedust]

Isn't "cleaning" the registry an unnecessary and horrible idea? After all it makes no difference in terms of speed, and can pretty much destroy your computer.

 

[dooa]

Registry cleaning is necessary.
As long as Microsoft wants all vendors and programs to dump crap there it will need cleaning. There was a short time when programs would stay in their own folders and be 100% drag and drop. But that went by the wayside and we need cleaners, both disk and registry.

 

[buckinbottoms]

registry cleaners are complete garbage

 

[gm0n3y]

[citation][nom]bourgeoisdude[/nom]Yep, but it costs $$$.[/citation]
Fair enough, though considering that drive mounting software is often used for software piracy, having to pay for the program might not be that much of a deterrent.

 

[Proximon]

Just wanted to add that, last I checked, Gimp was not compatible with Win 7 64-bit.

 

[Guest]

Virtual Clonedrive is a better choice than using Daemon Tools. That being the case, there is a program called "ISORecorderV3" that is probably even better since its even more lightweight.

 

[navilor]

You missed meGUI:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/megui/

Massive control over DVD to MP4 conversion and even has triple pass encoding.

 

[Guest]

Gimp (current stable version) works 100% fine for on Win 7 64bit. Don't know why anyone would claim otherwise.

 

[singhisoumya]

I am surprised I do not see
Windows Live Sync - A free tool to sync files between multiple machines and web. You can even remote login to your other machines. Great tool to troubleshoot on a remote box or even manage parent's machine.

Windows Live Photo Gallery - this is a must have tool to manage pictures. It is fast, efficient and works great. You can create movies of your picture, tag people, upload photos to flickr, picasaweb and most importantly skydrive.live.com where you get 25 GB yeah GB of free space to upload pictures and create/edit office documents.

Windows Live Movie Maker - Another great tool to movies for home use.

 

[mrecio]

You know one no one has mentioned yet that I cant go without is LogMeIn Free, great program for accessing my machine anywhere (even from my phone) they have a paid version which you can transfer files (no need for FTP for file transfers this way) I have it setup on a lost of family machines too so I can service them remotely.


There are a lot of good programs on this list and then there are a lot that has me scratching my head.

 

[Guest]

what about "FastStone Image Viewer" it is great for e-mailing photos

 

[bv90andy]

That Fences app is pretty sweet. I remember when I was younger I edited a wallpaper to make it with titled boxes like games internet documents... mainly for my parrents but it was good for me too.

 

[Guest]

thank a lots