All the greatest freeware and open source tools for computer diagnostics and repairs. Plus a few productivity tools for Windows 10.
“Portable” Apps means all the config and installed files are retained in one directory and you don’t have to “install” anything if you use it on a new system. This is great for when you upgrade your computer or just want a thumb drive with these utilities. I put a lot of tools in “My Docs” so when I upgrade I have a lot of apps already.
Productivity
Q-DIR Portable – QDIR is a great new file manager for windows. One of its main features is the ability to have a quad box open to see 4 different folders at once. This is great because windows 10 file manger kept changing all the default views on me on a daily bases and driving me crazy. Plus its only 1 meg or so in size.
Classic shell – Hate the new Windows 8 / 10 Start menu? Get Classic shell, has all the same features as Windows XP/7 with a few added bonuses.
Mozilla Thunderbird – The best email client to date, easy to backup and copy to a new computer as it stores everything in one place, no need to backup registry entries, folders and still have it break like Outlook.
Adobe PDF Reader – Kinda of a must have to read PDFs for a business computer or any power users these days.
Notepad++ Portable – Accurately edit any file without messing it with notepad or wordpad. Great for coding and config files.
7-Zip – Great utility for zipping and unzipping many archive file types.
Picasa 3 – Retired by google, but still one of the best image viewers and organizers.
Irfanview Portable – Great small portable image viewer and editor.
VLC Media Player Portable – Great media player that plays almost any file type.
Media Player Classic Portable – Great small media player, faster than VLC and plays a lot of files.
CDBurnerXP – I’ve been using this program to burn cds for nearly 20 years and still gets the job done without all the windows 10 annoying issues.
VirusTotal – Great website to drag and drop your downloads and scan them with 60+ virus scanners at once. Usually someone has already scanned it and it will match the MD5 checksum of your file and give you results almost instantly.
OpenOffice – Been using this one for about 20+ years as well. Great FREE office app to take the place of Microsoft word, Excel, Power Point, and more! 1 great thing about it is that they are always updating it, yet everything looks the same, no new crazy menus like Office 2003, 2010, 2013, etc. Simple and it works, also saves and opens DOC and XLS files.
TeraCopy – If you move a lot of files around like a power user, this little app takes over the useless windows 10 copy and paste utility that never gives you correct info. This gives you a powerful GUI that also lets you verify copied files choose many levels of overwriting and more.
Repair, Security, & Cleanup
Avast Antivirus – I usually don’t use an antivirus because I don’t download and click on things so much and I use Google Chrome which is pretty good at stopping malicious websites these days, but this is a pretty good AV you can get for free.
Malwarebytes is still a great tool for finding and destroying viruses and malware. The free version gets you a great scanner for cleaning systems.
CCleaner – Great tool for removing cache files, temp files, etc. Make sure you know what your doing with this one though.
Glary Utilities 5 – Great all in one product to tweak windows, cleanup your system and much more.
TreeSize – Great tool to find out where your drive space went. Breaks down each folder on your computer by size and lets you open each one to do some manual cleanup.
Process Explorer – Originally created by sysinternals until Microsoft took it over, but still a good program to diagnose processes running on your computer. The link takes you to other good downloads as well such as, autoruns (cleanup your startup) and portmon to find out what is using your network adapters.
Sosbackup – Not free of course, but a great offline backup for all your needs. They have many plans based on your space usage.