What are some of your favorite programs and utilities?

We've had a bit of a discussion here recently about the use of various utilities vs attempting to perform many tasks using only native Windows tools and utilities.

I thought that I would post some of my favorite utilities and programs. Maybe you can post a list of some of your favorites. Maybe I can learn about a few new tools.

RUFUS - I think the reasons for using this are pretty well known here already.

Windows ADK & Windows PE Add-on - I do a lot experimention with / modification of Windows images. The ADK and Win PE add-on are vital for that.

Driver Store Explorer - This is a great utility for managing drivers in your Windows Driver Store. I regularly make a backup of all drivers on my system by exporting them. After numerous driver updates, the size of the driver store can grow. By deleting old driver versions with this utility I can make those backups smaller.

UltraISO - This is a great utility for creating and managing ISO files. I use ISO images in place of ZIP files for some things. For example, I mentioned above that I like to make a backup of all my drivers. The results in a folder with many thousands of tiny files. Large numbers of files are slow in copy operations. I simply take all these files and create a single ISO image with them inside. The advantage of this is that large files copy faster AND I can edit the contents of an ISO really easily using UltraISO. Much easier to manage than the contents of a ZIP.

7-ZIP - Yes, I know that Windows can now natively extract the contents of 7-ZIP and other archive formats now, but guess what? The very first .7z file that I tried to extract with Windows failed with an "unknown error". Naturally, 7-ZIP handled it just fine.

Handbrake - Tool for converting video to other formats.

VLC - Video player
www.videolan.org/vlc/

FreeFileSync - Fantastic tool for syncing files between drives in the same system or to / from other systems. This is by far one of my most used utilities.
freefilesync.org

Macrium Reflect - My favorite backup software
macrium.com

Veritas System Recovery Desktop Edition - Formerly known as Norton Ghost, this is another good backup program. Not as full featured as Macrium, but it has a few really nice features.

Net Time - Works way better than the built-in Windows functions for syncing time.
timesynctool.com

QB64PE - A modern take on the old QuickBASIC. Super handy for automating tasks.

StableBit CloudDrive - This tools allows you to access OneDrive as well as many other Cloud Services as a drive. Makes them look like a local drive attached to your system.
STABLEBIT.COM

WOL Utilities - Various Wake On LAN utilities to allow me to remotely wake my computers if they are not ciurrently powered on.

VMware Workstation - I am mostly transitioned to Hyper-V but I still like to use VMware once in a while because it has a few features that come in handy for certain tests that are simply better suited to VMware rather than Hyper-V.
www.vmware.com

Virtual CD - Great optical drive emulator. This utility has become less useful as optical media becomes extinct, but it still serves a purpose now and then.
www.virtualcd-online.com

BDInfo - Tool for obtaining Blu-Ray disc information

MediaInfo - Provides detailed information about media files

Plex Server and Windows Client - Great program for serving movies, TV shows, music, and personal media

Ccleaner for cleaning temporary files (not using Reg Cleanup tools) . Winrar. Bitdefender Free antivirus. HWInfo for checking temperature. Ahh and of course Macrium Reflect for system backup

MiguelAngel11 said:

Ccleaner for cleaning temporary files (not using Reg Cleanup tools) . Winrar. Bitdefender Free antivirus. HWInfo for checking temperature

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Ahh, yes. I forgot all about tools like HWInfo, CPU-Z, CrystalDiskInfo, CrystalDiskMark, etc. Some of those can be incredibly helpful.

I've not tried anything like Ccleaner but I think that I may need to just to educate myself.

Macrium, Stream Deck (needs a hardware), Wallpaper Engine and Rainmeter.

I second the vote for Macrium, VLC, 7Zip, and VMWARE. These as more of my favs. Most are free. .

To know what's going on in my machine:
HWInfo (portable version available) HWiNFO - Free System Information, Monitoring and Diagnostics
CPUZ CPU-Z | Softwares | CPUID
CoreTemp Core Temp
HWMonitor HWMONITOR | Softwares | CPUID

the ultimate tweaking tool:

download accelerator (paid)

and Revo Uninstaller Free(portable) Revo Uninstaller Free

MKVToolNix for editing mkv metadata & recoding, converting is something I use a lot. And as you already mentioned FreeFileSync & RealTimeSync are so valuable to me, never not loaded.

Hey, this is really good. I see a few items already that I need to try. Thanks!

glasskuter said:

To know what's going on in my machine:
HWInfo (portable version available) HWiNFO - Free System Information, Monitoring and Diagnostics
CPUZ CPU-Z | Softwares | CPUID
CoreTemp Core Temp
HWMonitor HWMONITOR | Softwares | CPUID

Click to expand...

AIDA64 Extreme takes care of these for me. I am using this software (combined with Rainmeter) to create a sensor panel that shows temps and other info on my PC.

cant live without my revo pro and XYplorer :)

hsehestedt said:

7-ZIP - Yes, I know that Windows can now natively extract the contents of 7-ZIP and other archive formats now, but guess what? The very first .7z file that I tried to extract with Windows failed with an "unknown error".

Click to expand...

There's another very good reason to have 7-Zip. While Windows has always been able to open password protected .zip files, it doesn't support passwords for any other type of archive format.

badrobot said:

AIDA64 Extreme takes care of these for me. I am using this software (combined with Rainmeter) to create a sensor panel that shows temps and other info on my PC.

View attachment 74242

Click to expand...

Pretty cool

Microsoft Money 2005 (UK version) for managing my finances. Nothing since has beaten it.

Everything from Void Tools. "Locate files and folders by name instantly. Small installation file. Clean and simple user interface. Quick filename indexing. Quick searching. Minimal resource usage."

Grammarly "Learn where you can use our generative AI assistance and writing suggestions, how Grammarly’s product interacts with your text, and how we continuously improve our AI to make our prompts and suggestions more helpful."

Jason Savard's Chrome extensions for checking Gmail or Calendar plus a great screen capture tool.

Newsnow A news aggregator. Versions for UK, USA and more. "NewsNow is a news aggregator service that was launched in 1997[1] with fewer than ten sources, it now links to thousands of publications including top news providers. NewsNow provides a service in which breaking news articles are matched against key-word topic specifications, the relevant links and publication names are then delivered to the user.[2]"

SUMO for checking updates of software installed in my PC (sadly it'll die at the end of this month).

MiniTool Partition Wizard
Macrium
Revo Portable
UnCleaner
BatteryInfoView
SMPlayer
CrystalDiskInfo
ShareX
WinFF
Process Explorer
Autoruns
CoreTemp
PowerToys
ImgBurn
Everything
IconPackager
TeraCopy
RoboMirror
HPSmart.

Time and Date Website for checking the time in any part of the world, meeting planner and more.

Fabler2 said:

MiniTool Partition Wizard

Click to expand...

Some of my frequently used. Most free and very useful:

Macrium Reflect (backup)
PrimoCache ( block level disk cache)
RAPR Driver Store Explorer ( manage drive store)
Microsoft Windows Sysinternals
Wifi-Analyzer (windows free app for analyzing signal strength and channel competition)
Windirstat (visualize disk space used by directory trees)
MinitTool partition Wizard
CyrstalDiskInfo (monitor disk smart stats and temperatre)
CDCheck ( checksums on files and directories)
Prime95 ( stress test)
OCCT (stress test)
AIDA64 Extreme (stress test, benchmarks)
HWInfo64 (monitor just about everything, plots)
stressapptest, AKA GSAT (for Linux subsystem for Windows)
MSI Afterburner ( overlock and monitor GPU)
Asrock Timing Configurator ( memory timings)
Karhu Memtest (stress memory detect errors)
Test Memory 5 (TM5)
RAMMon (display ram information)
Thaiphoon ( display ram information plus more)
Counter Control
AutoHotKey ( Scripts to automate input)
python ( scripting language )
powershell ( scripting language)
UBU (UEFI BIOS firmware Modifier utility)

It might be a good idea if people explained what these utilities do.