Useful Windows Applications Available for Free

For Microsoft Windows operating system, a number of free applications are available out there. These applications extend the capabilities of the operating system in a profound way. In fact, rather than purchasing proprietary software, you should consider some of these free alternatives that pack power. In this article, you will find some of such highly useful applications.

Mozilla Firefox

This is the second most popular browser out there, and it is far more secure than Windows Internet Explorer. With a lot of extensions and add-ons, Mozilla Firefox is a very powerful browser that you can download and use freely. The tabbed interface of the browser is simple and fast as well.

 

Google Chrome

This is another powerful browser. It has also become very popular recently. It is probably one of the fastest browsers out there. The settings and interface are minimal and easier to use.

 

Apache OpenOffice

This is a free alternative to Microsoft’s proprietary MS Office suite. It has all the features that Microsoft Office has and provides support for Microsoft Office file formats, as well as having its own file formats.

 

Adobe Flash

Adobe Flash player plugin is available for most of the browsers, and it provides playback of online video formats. You can download the Flash plugin at the Adobe website. In order to better control video playback with Flash plugin, you can use Flash block add-ons available for Chrome and Firefox.

VideoLAN VLC Player

This is a free media player available with all the necessary video and audio codecs built in. With this application installed, you do not have to download and install separate codecs to play specific files. This is widely regarded to be a universal video player.

Desktop iCalendar Lite

This is a desktop calendar application with event notifications and a ‘to do’ list. The features are accessible right from the desktop in the form of a widget after installation. It can download events from the local calendar as well as Google’s online calendar. However, the advanced options may require upgrade to the Pro version.

Microsoft Security Essentials

This is Microsoft’s own antivirus and firewall suite. This is freely available to all users of Windows Vista and Windows 7. It is available for individual PCs as well as small businesses. It runs from the system area without consuming much system resources. In addition, it creates only a few notifications.

SuperCopier & TeraCopy

Both of these applications can copy files from one location to another. It may sound simple, but in cases of files with great size, a very good copying tool is essential. Windows file copy tool does not take care of such errors as the cyclic redundancy check (CRC), and it terminates the entire copy operation as soon as it finds an error in one of the files. SuperCopier and TeraCopy have great features such as multiple copy threads, ability to pause the copy process, and resuming from the last point on interrupted copy operations.

K-Lite Codec Pack

If you are playing video files or audio, you need codecs to recognize file formats. K-Lite is a codec pack that has all the essential codecs built in. In addition, it has some tools that help you tweak the settings of certain codecs. With this complete package, you do not have to look anywhere else for codecs to play any kind of files.

CCleaner

Would you not like cleaning your hard disk and your registry occasionally for better performance of the system? CCleaner is a great free application that does all that. It cleans unnecessary content from all the browsers you have; it also cleans Recycle Bin, recent documents, clipboard, DNS cache, Windows memory dumps, registry, etc. Besides this, it helps remove temporary files from several third party applications.

Skype

For VoIP communication, Skype is a very useful tool. It is a free download for Windows. Moreover, if you want to make calls to cell phones or want to set up your own Skype number that anyone can call, you just need to pay a little amount of money. For free PC-to-PC Internet calls, Skype is the best.

Paint.Net

This is a powerful photo-retouching tool. Although not as powerful as proprietary applications like Photoshop, this is a very useful application available freely. It has several tools to cut, crop, and edit all kinds of image formats.

Apple iTunes

Apple iTunes is a complete media manager that can play media files, organize them, rip CDs, search through media files, purchase media online, etc. It is available as a free download for Windows OS since version XP. With the cloud integration, iTunes can make all the media that you have available on all of your devices (iPhone, iPad, etc).

Conclusion

Those were some of the most useful and important free downloads for the Windows operating system. Based on the resources available on your computer and the requirements, you can download and install a number of these applications. In fact, these free applications can make your system more powerful than if you were using proprietary applications.