The software a new PC actually needs,
straight from the publisher.

The safest default for most people. It runs its own engine instead of Chromium, blocks trackers out of the box, and carries extensions the Chromium side is busy removing. Slightly rougher on a handful of Google properties.

Chrome's speed with the ads and trackers already stripped out. The strongest built-in blocker you can get without installing anything. Its optional crypto features are easy to ignore, and you should ignore them.

For people who want everything at once: tab stacks, side panels, split view, built-in mail and calendar. No telemetry, no ad business. The trade-off is a busy interface you have to set up before it feels good.

Install it only when a work tool refuses to run anywhere else. It is the most compatible and the most invasive: it reports to Google by default and is the engine everyone else is forced to follow.

The first thing to install on any new PC. Unpacks everything, compresses better than WinRAR, and has never shipped a bundled toolbar in twenty-five years. Plain interface, zero nonsense.

Choose this over 7-Zip when you need more formats, a proper file browser, or the same tool on Windows, Mac and Linux. Modern-looking, actively developed, still no adware.

Finds any file on your drives the instant you start typing, because it reads the NTFS index directly instead of crawling folders. Once you have used it, Windows Search becomes unusable. Windows only.

Four file panes in one window, which turns most copy-and-move chores into drag-and-drop. A single small .exe, no install, runs happily from a USB stick.

Ugly, dense, and able to rename ten thousand files by pattern in one pass, with live preview before you commit. If you only rename a few files a year, Windows' own rename tool is enough.

Compares two folders or two text files side by side and highlights exactly what changed. The fastest way to confirm a backup is really a backup.

Plays the file Windows Media Player refuses to. No codec hunting, no third-party packs, no ads. It also handles DVD, network streams and screen capture, which is more than you will ever need.

For people who care about video quality: precise scaling, smooth playback of 4K and high frame rate files, and keyboard control of everything. There is no settings window, which is the point and also the problem.

The standard for screen recording and live streaming, used by everyone from Twitch streamers to university lecturers. Expect one evening of setup before it clicks.

Shrinks video files to a fraction of their size with no visible quality loss, and converts almost anything to MP4. Use the presets until you have a reason not to.

A full multi-track audio editor for free: record, cut, remove noise, normalise, export. Ignore the 2021 ownership scare, the licence is settled and the software is fine.

The best free video editor that can actually replace a paid one, with multi-track timelines, proxies and keyframes. Steeper than CapCut, and it will not watermark your export.

The gentler free editor: native format support, no importing step, and a flatter learning curve than Kdenlive. Pick it if you edit occasionally rather than daily.

Screenshot, annotate, record the screen, then upload and copy a link in one keystroke, with workflows you can script. Far more powerful than Snipping Tool and correspondingly more overwhelming at first.

Blur, highlight and arrow on screen before saving, with a clean and quick interface. The best simple annotating screenshot tool on Windows and the natural choice on Linux.

The lightweight option if you want one fixed hotkey that grabs a region, opens an editor and copies to clipboard. Older and quieter than ShareX, which for many people is exactly right.

The closest thing to a free Photoshop: layers, masks, curves, batch processing, plugin ecosystem. The interface takes a week to stop annoying you. Worth it if you edit photos regularly.

Built for drawing and painting rather than photo editing: brush engines that feel like real media, onion skinning, animation timeline. The best free option for a drawing tablet.

Vector editing for logos, icons and print-ready SVG. If you need to draw shapes that stay sharp at any size, this replaces Illustrator for most real-world jobs.

The sweet spot between Paint and GIMP: layers, selections, effects, and an interface you understand in ten minutes. This is what most people actually want. Windows only.

A complete 3D pipeline and a serious video editor in one download, funded by donations rather than licences. Enormous. Assume a month before you are productive in it.

Opens a 50 megapixel photo before other viewers have finished launching. Also batch-resizes, converts and rotates entire folders. Not free for commercial use, which catches people out.

A photo browser and converter that reads over 500 formats, with tagging and a real database behind it. Use this instead of IrfanView if you also work on a Mac.

A complete office suite with no account, no telemetry and no ribbon. Opens and saves .docx and .xlsx reliably enough for everyday work. Install it even if you own Microsoft Office, as a second opinion on stubborn files.

Choose this over LibreOffice if you exchange files with Word users all day: its rendering of .docx formatting is noticeably closer to Microsoft's. Fewer features, better fidelity.

Opens PDFs in under a second, remembers where you stopped reading, and has exactly no upsell. It also reads epub, mobi and cbz. There is nothing to configure, which is the whole appeal.

The offline alternative to those 'free online PDF tools' that quietly upload your contracts to a stranger's server. Merge, split, compress, OCR, all on your own machine.

An entire e-book library manager: converts between formats, fixes metadata, and can send books straight to most e-readers over USB or email. Deeply unglamorous, extremely capable.

Notes stored as plain Markdown files in a folder you own, linked together into a graph. Nothing is locked in a proprietary database, so you can walk away with everything at any time.

Markdown notes that sync end-to-end encrypted through a folder, Dropbox or your own Nextcloud, with web clipping and no subscription. Pick it over Obsidian if sync is the priority.

One click in the browser saves a paper, its PDF and its citation data together. Then it formats your bibliography in any style you name. If you write anything with references, this is not optional.

The desktop mail client that stopped the argument: handles any IMAP or Exchange account, has a real calendar, and runs your own rules locally. Newer versions are fast again after years of neglect.

The benchmark for private messaging, run by a non-profit and audited repeatedly. Everything is end-to-end encrypted including calls, and the desktop app links to your phone rather than existing on its own.

Where communities actually live: voice rooms, screen sharing and persistent channels. Great for hobby groups and small teams. Assume everything you post there is readable by the platform.

Fast, syncs across devices without needing your phone nearby, and handles very large files. Only private chats are end-to-end encrypted, so treat groups and channels as server-visible.

Install it because other people schedule in it, not because you want it. Use the desktop client rather than the browser version, and check the meeting settings before you assume a call is private.

A client for the open Matrix network, which means you can self-host or join someone else's server and still talk to people on other servers. Choose it for sovereignty, not for polish.

If you install one thing from this entire page, install this. The free tier covers unlimited passwords on unlimited devices with sync, and everything is end-to-end encrypted. Start here rather than with a paid competitor.

A password database that is just an encrypted file on your own disk. No company, no account, no server to breach. You are responsible for your own backups, which is the trade you are making.

Creates encrypted containers and can encrypt a whole drive, including hidden volumes. The successor to TrueCrypt. Keep the password and the rescue disk somewhere you will still find them in two years.

Encrypts files before they reach Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive, so the cloud provider stores scrambled data. The right tool if you must use a mainstream cloud but do not want to trust it.

The only reputable VPN with a genuinely usable free tier (unlimited data, no ads, no logs). Pay for it only if you need speed, more countries or streaming. A VPN hides your traffic from the local network, not from the sites you log into.

One flat price, no account email required, accepts cash, and has been raided by police without anything being found. The privacy purist's choice. No streaming unblocking, no affiliate programme, no marketing.

A modern VPN protocol in a few thousand lines of code, now built into the Linux kernel. Use it to reach your own home network or office securely. It is a tunnel, not a privacy service.

Keep the free version as a second opinion when something feels wrong. Windows Defender already handles real-time protection well enough that paying for a second always-on scanner is mostly redundant.

A single portable screen of switches for Windows telemetry, ads, Cortana and background reporting, with a restore point button. Read each description before flipping it and you will not break anything.

Clears caches, logs and traces from dozens of applications, and shreds files properly. Only useful if you understand what you are deleting. Windows' own Disk Cleanup covers the safe basics.

The default editor for most languages, with the largest extension ecosystem in existence. Note that official builds ship Microsoft telemetry, so turn it off in settings or use VSCodium if that matters to you.

Version control, plus a real Bash shell on Windows so you can stop translating commands in your head. Install it before anything else in this section.

Tabs, panes, proper font rendering and a config file, in place of the old console window. On Windows 11 it is already installed. On Windows 10 get it from the Microsoft Store.

A bundle of small fixes for Windows: PowerRename for bulk renames, FancyZones for window layouts, a colour picker, a text extractor and more. Enable the two or three you want and ignore the rest.

Replaces Notepad for anything involving line endings, encodings, regex search or large log files. Light enough to open in a fraction of a second, which is why it survives next to VS Code.

Take the LTS release, never the Current one, unless you enjoy debugging someone else's broken dependency at midnight. Installing it also gives you npm and npx.

Tick 'Add python.exe to PATH' during install or you will spend tomorrow morning reading forum posts. For real projects, use uv or a virtual environment rather than installing packages globally.

Containers without a Linux VM to babysit. Free for personal use and small companies, but check the licence terms before using it commercially. Needs WSL2 enabled on Windows.

One database client that speaks PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, SQL Server, Oracle and a hundred more. Browse tables, write queries, export results. The community edition is genuinely complete.

Small, ancient, reliable SSH client that has been the answer on Windows for twenty years. If you live in a terminal, OpenSSH is now built into Windows and you may not need this at all.

Moves files over SFTP, SCP and FTP with a two-pane interface and a proper synchronise feature. Pair it with PuTTY and you have a complete remote workflow on Windows.

Turns a few lines of script into keyboard shortcuts, text expansion and window automation. The usual use is small: remap one awkward key, or expand a signature block. The unusual use is a full personal automation layer. Windows only.

Writes a Windows or Linux ISO to a USB stick in a couple of minutes, faster than most vendor tools, and can bypass the Windows 11 TPM and account requirements if you ask it to. No install needed.

Format a USB stick once, then just copy ISO files onto it and pick one from a boot menu. Replaces the whole reformat-burn-reformat cycle. Worth the twenty minutes of learning if you install systems regularly.

Reads the master file table directly and shows you what is eating your disk in seconds, not minutes, with a treemap view. The fastest way to find the 40 GB you did not know you had.

Reads every temperature, fan speed, voltage and power draw your hardware exposes, and logs it over time. The reference tool for diagnosing a laptop that throttles or a fan that will not stop.

Tells you exactly which CPU, motherboard and memory you actually have, including real memory timings rather than the marketing numbers. Useful when buying a used machine or checking a second-hand part.

Shows the SMART health of every drive in plain language, so you get a warning before a disk dies instead of after. Check any second-hand laptop with this before you hand over money.

Measures real read and write speed on a drive so you can tell whether that new SSD is actually performing as advertised. Run it once after any upgrade, then forget about it.

Removes an application and then hunts down the leftover files and registry keys Windows leaves behind. Use the free version for the occasional stubborn uninstall, not as a weekly cleaning ritual.

Keeps folders identical across your own devices, peer to peer, with no cloud in the middle and no account. Because deletions propagate, it is synchronisation rather than backup. Pair it with versioning turned on.

Compares two folders and shows you exactly what will be copied, moved or deleted before anything happens, then does it and verifies the result. The clearest free tool for mirroring to an external drive.

Scheduled encrypted incremental backups to a local drive, a NAS or cloud storage, with a browser interface and retention rules. Good for a home setup. Test a restore before you trust it with anything.

A single command line binary that does fast, encrypted, deduplicated snapshots to almost any storage backend. The choice for people who want backups they can script and verify rather than click through.

Unlimited cloud backup of one computer for a flat annual fee, including external drives. The one paid subscription on this page that most households should genuinely consider, because off-site is the part people skip. Free 15-minute restore window for the first 30 days.

Remote desktop support that you can point at your own relay server instead of someone else's cloud, so the session never leaves infrastructure you control. The honest free alternative to the commercial tools in this section.

The one to install when you are talking a relative through a problem on their machine and cannot be there. Fast, works through most home routers without configuration, and free for personal use. Commercial use needs a licence.

Builds a private network between your own devices in about two minutes, with no ports to forward and no firewall rules to write. The free tier covers personal use. Use it to reach your home server from anywhere as if you were sitting next to it.

The long-standing FTP and SFTP client, with a two-pane queue, saved sites and resume support. Download it directly from the project page and decline any offer to install bundled extras on the way through.

A BitTorrent client with no advertising, no bundled software and no cryptocurrency miner, which is more than can be said for the better-known alternatives. Use it for legal distributions: Linux images, public-domain media, game patches.

Captures and decodes network traffic so you can see what a program actually sends. The tool you reach for when something is phoning home and you want proof rather than suspicion. Deep, and worth reading the manual before you point it at a real network.