I talk about a lot of different software on the channel, and I use way more.
Every once in a while I’ll mention a program that I’ve used for years - some for more
than a decade and just assume I’ve given the proper context for it, but haven’t.
So this video is a different take on the “What’s on my desktop?”
concept where instead I’ll focus on 7 programs that are a MUST have for any PC I use.
These programs I’ve used for years - most back to the Windows XP and early Ubuntu days
- and are still around and serving me quite well, for various functions on my machine.
So let’s take a look, shall we?
[intro]
Also as a quick disclaimer, none of the programs in this video are sponsoring me.
I don’t have affiliate links for them, I’ve never had contact with anyone working on the
programs aside from a bug report that I don’t remember submitting but may have - nothing
like that.
These are purely programs I’ve over time and want to share.
The actual ad for this video, is…
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organizes your media collections and lets you securely access them on all your screens.
Now with live TV viewing and DVR.
Click the link in the video description to learn more.
[end ad]
So we’ll be talking about 7 different programs, with an alternate to one, in this video.
They’re listed in no particular order.
About half of these are open source, and a couple do work on Linux - but these are primarily
Windows-focused, since that’s what I’ve used the longest and what I primarily use
day-to-day.
I will have similar videos in the works for Linux, as well.
First up, we have the almighty 7-zip.
I got into this program back in late middle school or early high school - the very early
2000s.
In fact, I never understood how the “WinRAR Trial” thing became such a meme-y phenomenon
given that 7-zip has basically always been a great free option.
I wasn’t introduced to it for this reason - my best friend had told me about this crazy
“7z” format that could compress even the biggest video files to really tiny compressed
files.
I was on DSL back then, and compression was a huge deal at the time.
Turns out the 7-zip format wasn’t quite as much of a magical Silicon Valley middle-out
level of compression as suggested, BUT it’s still a great program.
7-Zip is a free, open-source program to create, edit, and uncompress compressed files in a
wide variety of formats.
It supports all the common formats such as .7z, ZIP, RAR, GZip, Tar, and can even open
ISOs, some EXEs and Mac installers, and even image files if you’ve used steganography
to hide files within them.
And the .7z file format can compress better than .zip if you really feel like waiting
on it to do its job.
Next up is a program that I frequently forget to install on a new PC until I need it, but
do rely on it in specific situations.
That program is WinDirStat.
WinDirStat analyzes your computer’s storage to help you figuring out what’s taking up
space.
Usage can go a lot deeper than that, but I primarily use it on my SSDs - these tiny little
drives always end up getting full by random caches or pagefiles, and WinDirStat makes
it super easy to track down what’s eating up precious solid state space.
With a nice little Pac Man-like animation, too.
Next up may seem like a weird choice for some, but I can’t seem to live without it.
Notepad++ is a tabbed, syntax-friendly text editor.
It has a ton of useful features for coding and scripting, but is also great for someone
like myself that just needs a quick Notepad, but with tabs and auto-saving.
I can type up quick video description bits, longer messages to people, or quick voiceover
scripts in a new tab, close the program, reboot my computer - and it saves all that text in
the appropriate tabs without me needing to save the files!
Obviously if I expect permanent storage of the data I would need to save them, which
I do - but that auto-save feature alone has saved my butt so many times.
The tabs combined with syntax highlighting for certain script formats - though not perfect
integration with AutoHotKey, sadly - just makes it super comfortable to use.
I’m really sad that there isn’t a native Linux build available.
It runs well enough through Wine, but the scaling and interface rendering looks a little
funky and breaks the experience for me.
On Windows this is one of my most-used programs, next to Chrome of course.
Winamp is a music player from the really old days.
But it still maintains quite the following due to it’s insane skin-ability and wide
skins available, if you can safely navigate the malware-ridden sites of yore, and support
for basically any music format.
I have had trouble using it with my music stored on a network share, but I’m sure
I’m just doing something wrong.
I have 100% separated from iTunes and only use Winamp for my music files now.
Imgburn is a wonderful program for managing physical discs.
Yes, there are still people who use them.
It can be good for burning files to discs, burning ISOs to discs, making an ISO file
from a disc - which is super important for me archiving all of my physical media, and
so on.
I use it quite frequently both for ripping and burning.
I even use it to burn files to BluRay for cold storage!
Video on that coming soon.
Next up is TeraCopy.
This program was a huge lifesaver back in the earlier Windows days when you could expect
frequent freezes or crashes of Windows Explorer when copying a ton of files or really big
files.
TeraCopy was the first time I experienced full, multi-threaded file copying.
It’s blazing fast, and as I covered in my video about its latest update, now performs
even better with lots of tiny files.
You can pause transfers, queue up a bunch of transfers to go in a row, verify data hashes,
and lots more.
Lastly, we get a two-for-one.
When it comes to general media playing, outside of my music library, I lean heavily on VLC
and MPC-HC or Media Player Classic.
These programs are fantastic for playing media files.
They play just about ANYTHING and support lots of awesome features, such as screenshotting,
multiple audio, video, and subtitle tracks, custom filters or effects, and so on.
VLC also acts as a full video converter, super basic ripper for non-DRM encrypted discs,
internet radio streamer, RTMP video stream player, and more.
Media Player Classic has announced the end of their development after 11 years, which
I covered in a recent video, but I’ll still be using it for a long time.
And that’s it!
7, or 8 I guess, programs that I use almost daily and have done so for going on a decade
or more.
These are the reliable “tried and true” programs I use and install on just about any
computer I use.
Hopefully this provides a bit more context for my videos and was helpful to you.
Hit the like button if you enjoyed, and I’ll see you next time.