We never thought we’d be able to create this much content with only one hand.
But since we got our new [company name] laptops, we’ve been able to work around the clock and generate more content than ever before! Our laptops are durable, efficient, and powerful enough to keep up with the demands of our clients.
And we’ve been making sure that all of this extra work pays off by using the best apps available for a new PC. We’re sharing our favorites with you here, paid or free—we love them all:
![Top 15 Best PC Software For Windows 11, 10, 8, 7 In 2022 [Free & Paid]](https://wethegeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/est-PC-Software-For-New-Windows-10-8-7-In-2021-.jpg)
Best Apps For New Pc
Whether you’ve just purchased a new PC or reinstalled Windows, the first task you’ll likely do is installing apps. While there are dozens of amazing Windows programs, knowing which ones are the must-have software for Windows 10 makes setting up a new installation easier.
In no particular order, let’s step through 15 essential apps for Windows 10 that everyone should install right away, along with some alternatives.
- Internet Browser: Google Chrome
Google Chrome 2021
Unsurprisingly, Google Chrome is still our top browser pick. It’s super-speedy, includes little conveniences like letting you instantly search Google for an image, and has a vast library of Chrome extensions. Throw in cross-platform syncing that lets you open your desktop tabs on your phone and vice-versa, and you’ve got a fantastic browser for all purposes.
Chrome isn’t without its faults, however. Plenty of people want to avoid Google’s pervasive tracking in Chrome, and it gobbles a lot of RAM. But the good news is that you have plenty of other fantastic browsers to choose from, like Firefox and Opera.
Even the built-in Microsoft Edge is now based on Chromium, so give it a try if you prefer Microsoft’s approach over Google’s.
Download: Google Chrome (Free)
Download: Firefox (Free)
Download: Opera (Free)
- Cloud Storage: Google Drive
Google Drive 2021
If you only pick one cloud app service, Google Drive is the one you should install. It offers 15GB of free storage, which is shared across your Google account with Google Photos and Gmail too.
Google Drive offers an app for every major platform, so you can take your files anywhere. In addition to syncing files you place in the dedicated Google Drive folder, the desktop app makes it easy to back up folders on your computer and external devices, too.
It’s also super easy to share files with others, plus the service plays well with Google’s productivity suite. Whether you use it as part of your backup plan, as a cloud flash drive, or for setting up shared folders with others, Google Drive is an essential Windows 10 app pick.
Paired with OneDrive that comes built into Windows 10 or another free cloud storage provider, you can get plenty of storage space and separate your files logically by service.
Download: Google Drive (Free, subscription available)
- Music Streaming: Spotify
Years ago, listening to music on your desktop meant painstakingly importing and organizing a collection of MP3s. That’s no longer the case; music streaming services eliminate the need for buying individual albums physically or digitally.
There are many music streaming services in the market, but we think the essential pick for Windows 10 is Spotify. Its ad-supported free plan lets you listen to as much music as you like, and there are several Spotify Premium plans that are worth it for avid listeners. Spotify is also home to hundreds of podcasts, making everything available in one convenient place.
Spotify also has a dedicated Windows app, unlike some of its competitors. If you’re already invested in another ecosystem, though, Apple Music or YouTube Music might be a better choice for you.
Download: Spotify (Free, subscription available)
Visit: Apple Music (Subscription required, free trial available)
Visit: YouTube Music (Free, subscription available)
- Office Suite: LibreOffice
Chances are you’ll need a tool that lets you work with documents, spreadsheets, and presentations at some point. You might think that paying for Microsoft Office is the only way to do this, but that’s far from the truth.
No Windows user should go without LibreOffice. It’s a completely free and powerful office suite that includes alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and more. Once you get used to a few small aesthetic differences from MS Office, you’ll be flying through your work with LibreOffice.
Note that OpenOffice, a once-popular alternative, is basically dead now. If you don’t want to use LibreOffice, try FreeOffice. You can use web apps like Word Online or Google Docs too, but we’re focused on full desktop downloads here.
Download: LibreOffice (Free)
Download: FreeOffice (Free)
- Image Editor: Paint.NET
Paint.Net Single Pixel Transparent
Whether you want to try your hand at basic image manipulation, need a way to blur sensitive info in screenshots, or want to retouch old photos, everyone should have an image editing program installed. Photoshop is the gold standard for this, but there are plenty of free tools that are more accessible.
Paint.NET is a must-have Windows app for your image editing needs. It’s far more powerful than Microsoft Paint, but doesn’t overwhelm you with loads of confusing tools. You can easily blur out parts of an image, auto-level photos to make them look better, and add text and shapes to your pictures in just a few clicks. Plenty of plugins allow you to expand its functionality, too.
If you find Paint.NET too basic, GIMP is a more advanced solution, and it’s also available at no charge.
Download: Paint.NET (Free)
Download: GIMP (Free)
- Security: Malwarebytes Anti-Malware
remove spyware by malwarebytes
Windows 10 includes Windows Defender, which is a good enough antivirus for most users. However, it’s wise to keep a secondary security program installed.
For this, you can’t beat Malwarebytes. The free version lets you scan your system for malware that your antivirus might not catch. And for a powerful blended security solution, upgrading to Malwarebytes Premium is worth the cost.
Download: Malwarebytes (Free, subscription available)
- Media Player: VLC
vlc player windows 10
Thanks to YouTube’s ubiquity, you probably don’t watch local videos too often. However, everyone should still keep a solid video player around on your desktop for when you need to play media files locally. Even if it’s not one of the things you think to download on a new computer right away, it will come in handy someday.
For this task, nothing beats VLC Media Player, which packs a ton of features and is capable of playing nearly every video and audio format imaginable. You might not break it out often, but give VLC a download while you’re setting up your PC. You’ll save yourself the hassle of messing with video codecs or using QuickTime, which isn’t supported for Windows any longer.
Download: VLC (Free)
- Screenshots: ShareX
Taking a screenshot on Windows is useful for everything from capturing funny moments to having a record of important information. The basic Snipping Tool and Snip & Sketch apps only provide a barebones feature set, so you need something better in your pack of essential Windows apps.
You won’t find a more powerful free screenshot tool than ShareX. With tons of capture methods, a solid built-in editor, the ability to run automated steps after you take a screenshot, and extra tools like a color grabber and ruler, ShareX has an impressive feature set for no cost.
If ShareX overwhelms you, give PicPick a try instead. It’s a bit simpler, but doesn’t compromise on features.
Download: ShareX (Free)
Download: PicPick (Free)
- File Compression and Extraction: 7-Zip
Windows includes native support for simple zipped files, but anything beyond the basics requires a more powerful tool. While this isn’t the most exciting software category, a file extractor is still a must-have PC app so you can work with any kind of archived files you might encounter.
7-Zip is the gold standard for file compression and extraction apps. It’s small and installs in seconds, is easy to use, and stays out of your way when you’re not using it. Those who needs advanced features will still find them in 7-Zip, though.
The only drawback of 7-Zip is its aged appearance. If you can’t get over that, take a look at PeaZip, which is a similar tool with a much more attractive interface. Either way, you certainly don’t need to pay for tools like WinRAR.
Download: 7-Zip (Free)
Download: PeaZip (Free)
- Messaging: Rambox
Chances are that you use at least one messaging service to stay in touch with your friends during the day. With so many options to choose from, there’s no way we could pick the best messaging service, because it all depends on what your friends use. So why not have all of them in one place?
Rambox is our pick for the best messaging app on Windows. It lets you add accounts from dozens of popular messaging services, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Telegram, GroupMe, Hangouts, Discord, and many more.
The app simply adds a new tab for every service you use, letting you keep up with every group in one window. It includes some extra features that make it more useful than opening these apps in your browser, and you can easily close one program when it’s time to focus.
While Rambox’s free plan has some limitations, it offers more for free than competitors like Franz.
Download: Rambox (Free, subscription available)
- Clipboard Manager: ClipClip
A clipboard manager is an important Windows app because it saves you a lot of time. Instead of only being able to keep one item on your PC’s clipboard at once, clipboard managers let you keep track of the last several dozen entries you’ve copied.
ClipClip is a great Windows 10 clipboard manager to use. In addition to logging what you copy, the app also lets you pin frequent snippets for easy access, and create folders for easily pasting canned text like addresses, email responses, and similar.
The app doesn’t overwhelm you with options, but does let you tweak its hotkeys, disable clipboard monitoring when needed, and choose what the app ignores. Add it to your list of basic Windows software and you’ll never have to worry about managing your PC’s clipboard again.
Download: ClipClip (Free)
- Password Manager: Bitwarden
It’s not humanly possible to create strong passwords for every account and remember them all. That’s why you need a password manager. It’s a secure service that creates good passwords for you and locks them behind one master password, which is the only one you have to remember.
Bitwarden is the best free password manager and one of the most important pieces of software you can download. In addition to the desktop app, you’ll need to install the Bitwarden extension in your browser of choice to easily auto-fill passwords. Follow our complete guide to getting started with a password manager to learn how to get started.
Download: Bitwarden (Free, subscription available)
- Backup: Backblaze
Backing up your PC is essential, as there’s only a natural disaster, break-in, or malware attack could wipe out all the files on your machine. You don’t want to lose all your documents, photos, and other files and have to start from scratch.
We like Backblaze as an essential backup service for Windows 10. For just a few dollars a month, the service backs up everything on your PC, as well as any external drives you connect, to the Backblaze cloud. You don’t have to worry about choosing what gets backed up, and there are no limits to your backup size either.
While it’s the only app on this list that doesn’t have a free option, backing up is worth paying for. If you ever lost all your files, the app will pay for itself in an instant.
As an additional backup layer, or for your main backup if you can’t afford Backblaze, you should try EaseUS Todo Backup Free. It’s an easy-to-use tool for making local backups of your files.
Download: Backblaze (From $6/month)
Download: EaseUS Todo Backup Free (Free, premium version available)
- Storage Management: TreeSize Free
TreeSize Free Windows 10
Everyone knows the hassle of running low on storage space. That’s why one of the other apps you should install on every Windows system is a disk analyzer.
TreeSize Free is a straightforward way to find out what’s taking up space on your computer. Simply open it and tell it which disk to scan, and it will order all the folders on your PC based on how large they are. You can then see the largest files on your computer and take action to delete or move them accordingly.
Don’t waste time trying to manually hunt through folders and find large files—let this essential utility do it for you.
Download: TreeSize Free (Free, premium version available)
- Scripting: AutoHotkey
If you want to automate more on your computer, then AutoHotkey is something you need to download. It’s a custom scripting tool that let you define your own commands, making it as useful as whatever you can dream up.
As just a few examples, you can create quick text expansion, enable automatic typo correction, override certain keyboard keys, and create macros to perform several actions with a few keypresses.
AutoHotkey can be a little intimidating at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a powerful tool to have in your kit. See our guide to getting started with AutoHotkey and great AutoHotkey scripts to try as an introduction.
Download: AutoHotkey (Free)
The Must-Have Apps for Every Windows 10 PC
We’ve looked at essential apps for Windows 10 that everyone should install right away, and they’re almost all free. If you don’t prefer one of our picks, you’ll find a suitable alternative without much trouble. Most people will get plenty of use out of these programs and appreciate them more than default software that comes installed on Windows 10.
Now that you know this necessary software for your PC, you should also be aware of useless Windows apps that you should uninstall.
best apps for pc windows 7
Windows 8.1 has been out since October 2013, but we still cling to our installs of Windows 7. We love its reliability, even if it’s missing some of Windows 8’s under-the-hood improvements. If you’re also still using Windows 7, your gaming PC is probably loaded with years of accumulated software. But are you using the best? Our colleagues at TechRadar put together a list of the best free programs for Windows 7, and we’ve boiled that list down to the 10 programs we think are essentials. If you don’t have these programs installed already, here’s why you should download them.
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- CCleaner
Who doesn’t love a clean computer? Even if you religiously empty your recycle bin and clean out your browser cache, there are still files that pile up in Windows that you can do without. Running CCleaner every few months will keep your system clear of temporary files and error logs and leftover registry strings. If you’re running Windows on an SSD, you may be surprised by how much vital space you free up with CCleaner, and a system cleanup only takes about a minute.
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- Notepad++
Even if you’re not a programmer by trade, Notepad++ is a great piece of software to have on your computer. It vastly expands on the basics of Notepad with tabs, powerful search, a customizable GUI, and support for multiple programming languages. It knows how to parse code and linebreaks and can make a jumbled mass of text into something perfectly readable. It can also add a handy link to your Windows context menu for quickly opening up text files. If your text editing needs are modest, you’ll appreciate Notepad++’s speed and accessibility. If you need to do heavy-duty coding work, you’ll love the depth of its options menus and how customizable it is. An absolute must-have.
Download Notepad++(opens in new tab)
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- 7-Zip
You’re probably already using 7-Zip. You are, right? Right? In the land of zipping, 7-Zip is king. Small, unobtrusive, but able to zip or unzip every format under the sun, with great context menu support thrown in to make it even faster. We’ve got nothing against WinRAR–it’s perfectly fine! But you know, don’t you get tired of that pop-up asking you to pay? 7-Zip doesn’t want your money. It just wants to unzip things for you. Won’t you let it?
Download 7-Zip(opens in new tab)
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- Adobe Reader
Adobe software has a reputation for bloat, and it’s true that there are lighter PDF applications out there. Foxit’s PDF Reader, for example, is a good tool if you only need to read PDFs. But if you ever need to edit PDFs, Acrobat Reader gets the job done. It’s free, includes easy tools for adding text or a signature to a document. It can also export as a Word document or
Download Adobe Reader(opens in new tab)
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- Defraggler
Windows 7 does a good job of automatically defragmenting your harddrives quietly in the background. Most likely, your drives are trucking along just fine without you manually defragging them. But sometimes–after moving a ton of files, or making space on an overly full hard drive–you want to do some manual defragging. Defraggler, from the creators of CCleaner, will do the trick. More importantly, it can do targeted defragmenting. You can see what files or drive sectors are fragmented, and specifically defragment those, without waiting two hours for your entire drive to be cleaned up.
Download Defraggler(opens in new tab)
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- Recuva
Recuva is a handy tool to have around when things go south. You accidentally delete a file, and Recuva can help you get it back. It’s designed to help with a simple undelete, or to go digging for files that may still be accessible even after you’ve formatted a disk. Recuva can also help with the opposite task: if you have a file you really want to erase, Recuva can help securely overwrite that file’s spot on the hard disk to make it much tougher to recover.
Download Recuva(opens in new tab)
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- VLC Media Player
If VLC can’t play it, it’s probably broke. That’s not VLC’s slogan, but it may as well be. This free, open source video player comes with built-in video codecs for just about any file format imaginable. It’s simple. It’s powerful. It’s an absolute essential video player, and is constantly dueling for my affection with the also-great Media Player Classic . VLC offers a couple extra features that I love: it can crank volume up to the 200% mark, which is important for quieter files, and it can easily adjust audio playback speed, which makes it a handy tool for transcribing. It may be the best video player on PC, but it’s good for audio, too!
Download VLC Media Player(opens in new tab)
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- Handbrake
You’ve got an .avi that needs to be an .mp4. Or an .mp4 that needs to be an .mkv. What do you do? You could mess around with heavy-duty video editing software or one of a million crappy website transcoding options that don’t work very well. Or you could simply download Handbrake, and it’ll solve all your problems. This open source transcoder is easy to use–you can drag a file into it, set a few quality options, and hit the big green start button–and it’ll fix up any video file as a shiny new .mp4 or .mkv. If you do any video editing, Handbrake should be in your arsenal.
Download Handbrake(opens in new tab)
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- Google Chrome
We use Chrome. You probably use Chrome. Google’s browser has grown from a scrappy Firefox alternative into the de facto web browser, and it’s still the one we install for our parents or grab first thing when we have a clean Windows machine. There have been some bumps along the road in Chrome’s development–sometimes it gets slow or crashy for a release or two–but it’s hard to imagine living without some of its features, like tab and password syncing between desktop and laptop and smartphone.
Download Google Chrome(opens in new tab)
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- LastPass
Unless you already use a password manager or have an incredible memory, you probably overuse the same password on too many websites. Most of us do! It’s okay: you can make things better before a hacker waltzes off with all your personal information. Using LastPass is a great starting point. The free service lets you create a master password, then creates strings of gibberish for all of your accounts, so you never have to worry about one website breach compromising all of your information. LastPass will also remember an autofill all your passwords, and you can install it on multiple devices to keep the sign-in process easy. It’s a painless password manager to use, and will make your data far more secure. You’ve got nothing to lose.
Dowload LastPass(opens in new tab)
PCGamer
PCGamer
Hey folks, beloved mascot Coconut Monkey here representing the collective PC Gamer editorial team, who worked together to write this article! PC Gamer is the global authority on PC games—starting in 1993 with the magazine, and then in 2010 with this website you’re currently reading. We have writers across the US, UK and Australia, who you can read about here.
Conclusion
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