What is up everybody, it’s time for another cool programs video.
And today I’ve got a whopping 10 of them, all free programs for Windows.
So you should at least find some of them useful even if you don’t need all of them.
And of course I’ll put all links in the description.
Before we jump in of course I have to do my usual plugs.
If you haven’t seen my truly amazing Instagram account you’re really missing out, it has
the most hilarious tech memes you could possibly imagine, so be sure to check that out, it’s
just @ThioJoe over on Instagram.
And with all that out of the way though, let’s get started.
So number 1 is a program called “QTTabBar”, which adds a feature to Windows Explorer that
honestly, Microsoft should have added years ago, but somehow has not yet.
Which is tabbed Explorer windows.
Instead of having a bunch of individual Windows that you need to switch between, you can just
click a tab like you do in any web browser, which makes way more sense.
Now after you install it, one thing that took me a lot of searching to figure out, is to
actually enable it, you need to the taskbar 'View' tab, and then the 'Options' dropdown,
and actually click 'QTTabBar' to enable it, or else it won't show up.
And also there are other command bar options you can click here to enable, but I don't
like the look of those, and I don't need them, so I just keep them disabled, but you might
see those options here.
But for the most part after you enable it, explorer should still look the same and behave
the same, so just with some extra elements.
So obviously you can see that the tabs are there now.
And when you hover over folders now, sometimes there will be a little arrow showing internal
folders if you hover over them.
So you can just ignore them, I don't know if there's a way to turn that off, that's
just part of the program.
And to open a new tab, you just right click on a folder, and click 'Open In New Tab',
or you can middle click the folder and it will also open in a new tab.
It might be a little bit faster.
So it's very similar to how browsers work with multiple tabs.
Alright next up we have MusicBee, which is a music manager kind of like iTunes, but not.
So if you don’t have an iPhone this could be a good option to keep track of all your
music.
It’s got a nice looking modern interface and will automatically import your music and
do all the the usual stuff like organizing by album, artist, and all that.
It’s also got a good amount of advanced features like multi band equalizers, skins,
tools for tagging and CD ripping and even support for Winamp plugins.
And yes, you can actually use it to sync with your phone if it runs Android.
So it can definitely do a lot.
Ok for number 3 we have a cool one called GOG Galaxy, which is a universal game manager
from the website GOG, aka Good Old Games.
Which fun fact, is actually owned by the same company that developed the Witcher games and
upcoming Cyberpunk 2077.
And this is actually the newly released Gog Galaxy 2.0 version.
Basically this program aims to let you connect all your different game services and manage
everything from one place.
So this includes Steam, Origin, Epic Games, and even console platforms like Playstation
and Xbox accounts.
You are able to import all your games, friends lists, achievements, and whatever else from
all the various platforms.
Now each platform has different levels of integration, so with most platforms you can
at least see which friends are online for example, and soon you’ll be able to do cross
platform chatting.
Some platforms like Steam also let you install and uninstall games right from GOG Galaxy,
and even does cloud save backups for some games.
There’s a lot more it can do that I don’t have time to go over in this video, but it’s
definitely worth checking out considering how many different game platforms there are
these days.
Up next, we actually have several programs are part of a suite that I’ll just count
as one, which is known as “SysInternals”.
And this is actually a set of tools created by Microsoft themselves for Windows, though
it isn’t included with Windows and has to be downloaded separately.
There are a ton of programs in here, literally around 70 I think, so some more useful than
others, so I’ll just go over some of the more useful ones.
And the good news is most of these are standalone and don’t require installation, you can
just run them.
One extremely powerful tool is called “Process Monitor”, which basically allows you to
keep track and see exactly what actions every single process on the computer does, which
is invaluable when trying to debug programs or figure out why something keeps crashing
for example.
Now I should warn you this is only going to be helpful to advanced users, and most of
you will probably have absolutely no idea what you’re looking at, hell even I don’t
really know 99% of what it says, because it’s kind of information overload.
You’re better off just reading tutorials dedicated to how to use this program, because
I don’t want to spend the whole video on it.
Another useful program is “Process Explorer”, which you can kind of think of like a super
version of the task manager.
It can do a lot of the same stuff like seeing running tasks, killing processes, but can
do a lot more like seeing which files a program is actively using, stuff like that.
Again, you’ll have to research this app separately to realize its full power.
Then there’s a ton of other little programs in the suite, a lot of which just serve single
functions, and some of them are kind of funny, such as the one called “NotMyFault”, which
literally is meant to purposefully crash the computer in a variety of ways to test things
out.
Just be sure to use that one responsibly if you decide to prank your friends with it.
Ok next up for number 5, this one is actually similar to the Process Explorer tool I just
mentioned, and it’s called “Process Hacker”.
This is pretty much the same idea, where it shows all running processes, can show parent-child
process relations, and all that.
But it is a bit more powerful with more options and abilities.
For example it has separate tabs not just for processes, but also services, network
connections, and disk activity.
You can also use it to see memory contents of different processes, which I won’t pretend
to understand, but some of you out there can probably take good advantage of it, and I’ve
heard it’s especially useful when it comes to diagnosing and removing viruses, if you
have the know-how of course.
Moving on, number 6 is a popular one you might have heard of already, which is LibreOffice.
It’s essentially a free alternative to the Microsoft Office suite of programs.
And this is another group of programs we’ll just count as one.
Some of the stuff it includes are Writer, which is a word processor, Calc for spreadsheets,
Impress for presentations like Powerpoint, and also Draw for diagrams, Base for databases,
Math for formulas, and some other stuff.
And yes it can actually open and save the same file formats as Microsoft Office, like
.docx for Word for example.
Though keep in mind if you do a lot of complicated documents with lots of weird formatting, there
might be the occasional formatting difference if it’s opened in Word, but that’s bound
to be expected.
Alright up to number 7, we have the program “TreeSize”, which helps you map your hard
drive and figure out stuff like where all your free space has gone.
It’s similar to another program I’m a big fan of called “WinDirStat”, but this
one’s just different so you might prefer it.
It will show you the size of different directories on your drive, and you can also see it as
a visual representation to see nested directories which are visually bigger based on storage
size.
I think I’d still prefer WinDirStat just because I’m familiar with it, but you might
decide you like this one better.
Alright number 8 is really cool, which is “Gamesave Manager”, and it’s pretty
much like it sounds.
It’s purpose is to let you automatically backup all your video game save files at once,
and restore them too.
And it should support pretty much every single game you can imagine.
And they have a list on their website and there’s literally over 6000 games on there
which is pretty crazy, and their website also shows the last time they updated the database.
It’s got a bunch of other cool features like the ability to tie in with cloud services
like Dropbox, the ability to do scheduled backups, and will also let you know if there’s
any special circumstances with certain games.
Like with Minecraft it lets you know it will back up the entire Minecraft world folder
because it has to for a true backup, so obviously that might be more storage than you expect.
So this is definitely one that could be useful if you ever need to move save files to a new
computer, or share them with friends, or just back them up, and you don’t want to have
to figure out where all the save files are.
Coming near the end we got a couple more still.
So for number 9 we have MSI Afterburner, which is a very useful program for controlling your
graphics card, including overclocking.
And keep in mind you can use this program no matter what graphics card you have, it
doesn’t have to be made by MSI.
It will display a lot of information about the GPU like current clock speed, voltage,
temperature, fan speed, stuff like that.
Then it makes it really easy to overclock just using some basic sliders like power limit,
core voltage, temperature limits, core clock and memory clock, and fan speed controls too.
Now remember, just because the slider is there doesn’t mean you can just max everything
out and expect it to magically triple your graphics power.
You’re better off looking up some overclocking guides for your specific GPU, because you
probably can’t increase these things as much as you imagine without making your system
unstable.
So maybe just try increasing stuff bit by bit, probably starting with the Power Limit
which I’ve had reasonable success with, but be especially careful with the voltage
limits, because setting that way too high could potentially damage your card.
Again you’ll want to definitely do some research before messing around with this too
much, even though it is very powerful.
Alright we’re finally up to number 10, which could be the most useful of them all.
And this program is called “SuperF4”.
And it’s purpose is to allow you to kill the foreground process if a program freezes
or refuses to quit.
Now you probably already know if this happens there are options such as using Ctrl+Alt+Delete
to bring up the task manager, but sometimes even that can be difficult, like if it’s
a full screen program that won’t go away, and is blocking you from even seeing the task
manager.
Pro tip though, in the task manager you can enable the “Always On Top” option to make
this less likely.
In any case, if all else fails, SuperF4 lets you just use the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+F4 to force
quit the application if it refuses to do so by itself, or you the task manager isn’t
working for whatever reason.
This one should definitely come in handy.
So, those are 10 really cool free windows programs worth checking out.
If you want to keep watching, the next video I highly recommend is one I made recently
going over 10 tips to make Windows run faster.
You can watch that by just clicking this little box right here.
Also be sure to subscribe for new videos twice a week, and I’ll see you in the next one.