Essential Windows Applications

By SM | Published: November 17, 2011

A lot of the Vedanta Cen­ter work is accom­plished using com­put­ers. We have found cer­tain free soft­ware appli­ca­tions to be nearly indis­pens­able for our work. For our own ref­er­ence, as well as for the inter­est of oth­ers, we list the most use­ful appli­ca­tions here, along with links to the sites. All the soft­ware listed here is free, most is open source. (A great resource for trusted free Win­dows soft­ware is Gizmo’s Free­ware.)

Free Soft­ware

  • Every­thing search engine: a tiny, lightning-speed util­ity that finds any file on your com­puter instantly.
  • Stick­ies: just like the “Post-it” notes, for your com­puter desktop.
  • PDF-Xchange viewer: A much smaller, faster, nicer viewer than the stan­dard Adobe reader.
  • Chrome web browser from Google. It really is faster in our experience.
  • AdBlock: blocks inter­net adver­tis­ing in Chrome and Fire­fox.
  • Open Office: very sim­i­lar to Microsoft Office, but free and open source.
  • Fast­stone Image Viewer: with basic edit­ing fea­tures, fast and elegant.
  • Audac­ity: for audio edit­ing. It’s a bit com­plex, but very useful.
  • Ccleaner: disk cleanup, reg­istry cleanup.
  • Defrag­gler: a disk defrag­ment­ing application.
  • Itrans­la­tor: for typ­ing Devana­gari using the reg­u­lar alphabet.
  • Microsoft Key­board Lay­out Cre­ator: for mak­ing cus­tom key­boards. A geek tool, very useful!
  • 7-zip file com­pres­sor. One of the best.
  • Microsoft Secu­rity Essen­tials: a free anti-virus sys­tem from Microsoft. Reli­able and no nag­ging for money.
  • Color Cop: a very small color picker use­ful for web­site design.
  • Launchy: a very fast pro­gram launcher: just hit the Win­dows key and space­bar (or other hotkey as you define) to quickly launch appli­ca­tions. This is for peo­ple who like to get away from the mouse.
  • PsPad: A text edi­tor for html, css, other scripts. You can edit files on remote servers via ftp: very use­ful for web­site development.
  • Sync­toy: a Microsoft pro­gram for mak­ing backups.
  • Edit­pad Lite: one of many alter­na­tives to Notepad. Customizable.
  • Filezilla: FTP pro­gram (for web­site admin­is­tra­tion) from Mozilla
  • Fire­fox: Slower than Chrome (sorry), but has some very use­ful add-ons for web­site development.
  • Pure­Text: A great lit­tle app which pastes only text, stripped of all for­mat­ting; hooked to win-v or any short­cut you choose.

Pro­pri­etary Soft­ware we find use­ful (not free)

  • Adobe Pho­to­shop
  • Adobe InDe­sign
Online Tools and References