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Your shiny new Windows 11 installation has almost everything you need for daily computing. Still, there are always a few outstanding applications that are always the first software downloads we perform after a fresh Windows installation.
The days of downloading massive code packs to play obscure video formats are thankfully long behind us. Luckily VLC Media Player can play every media format imaginable, and probably a few that no one has ever heard of! Microsoft Edge is a major improvement over the Internet Explorer web browser, and now Edge is even a Chromium-based browser.
Features such as an integrated password and download manager also reduce the number of apps you need in the first place. The PDF format is still in wide use today, despite us moving away from printed documents in favor of on-screen viewing.
There are plenty of good PDF readers you can download, and it used to be that the free version of Adobe Acrobat was too limited compared to third-party options. You can also annotate PDFs, so students can make notes on research papers or textbooks in PDF format without paying a cent. The main drawback of the free version of the app is that you have to perform scans manually. The Microsoft subscription is admittedly a fantastic deal. Especially the Family Plan, which includes all the Office apps you need along with a terabyte of cloud storage per family member.
This free and open-source office suite will make any classic MS Office user feel right at home. If you need a great free alternative to Word or Excel without any online complications, LibreOffice is the top choice, in our opinion.
VPN services hide your internet activity from your ISP and other people who share a network with you, such as the free WiFi at a coffee shop. It also makes it possible to hide your IP address and real location from online services.
Many people pay for a VPN subscription to circumvent geographical limitations on content. Once the Windows app is installed, it takes just a single click to secure your entire internet connection. Steam is the biggest online marketplace for PC games and has the best Windows client of any gaming service. There are over 50, games on Steam at the time of writing, many of them free! Steam lets you manage your games from one central application, and you can even launch games on your computer that you did not buy through the Steam storefront.
Most of us have simply too many passwords to remember them all. Besides, the sorts of passwords that you can easily remember are also the types of passwords that are the easiest to crack. There are many great password managers , but the commercial ones cost a fair amount of money or are limited if you opt for the free version. Google Chrome has a decent password manager built-in, although not everyone is comfortable storing their information with Google, or online for that matter. The same goes for Telegram, with its desktop application.
Not to mention, you can easily drag and drop files from your computer into chat. In the case of Telegram, you can share photos and videos without any compression at all. With massive hard drives and fast internet, you may not think file compression would be used much these days, but almost everything you download from the internet will be in a compressed format. Windows 11 has native support. ZIP files, but the OS can only scratch its head once you start downloading other formats.
It also has its proprietary 7-Zip format, which has some speed and size advantages over other algorithms. Much of the business world has now moved over to Microsoft Teams , and Skype still has a solid following, but both of these applications are preloaded in Windows Zoom is not included with your Windows installation, which is still one of the most widely-used video conferencing apps in the world.
For our money, Slack is the better option for coordinating a team of people to complete a project. While it lacks the same level of video integration that Teams offers, Slack is peerless as a text-based communications backbone. Discord started life as a voice and text chat service that allows gamers to chat to each other privately, without the danger of being harassed by public chat systems built into games.
Today, Discord has grown into something of a social phenomenon. Anyone can start their Discord server and create a social space for themselves for almost any reason. Discord is a great choice. For every version of Windows that supports it, one of the first things we always install is Microsoft PowerToys.
This is a set of tools and modifications to Windows intended to give power users more control over Windows and make them more productive. PowerRename lets you rename files in bulk. Our favorite is Shortcut Guide which pops up all the available keyboard shortcuts for your current desktop view! While you can use Windows settings to align the Taskbar and Start Menu to the left, the classic Start Menu experience is nowhere to be found.
If you miss the classic, minimalistic Start Menu, you can get it back by grabbing a copy of Start If you have multiple Windows 10 and 11 computers, you can get a 5-device license for just over twice the price of a single license. You also get a range of layout choices, color settings, and many other ways to make the Start Menu bend to your will through the power of customization. You can sync watched folders from your computer automatically to your cloud drive and can keep working on your Google documents when the internet is out.
The amount of storage you get for free is relatively modest. Still, by paying for a Google One subscription, you can quickly increase the amount of storage for practical backups of multiple computers. Apart from Google Drive, DropBox is another cloud storage app we can heartily recommend as a clean and straightforward way to sync data on your Windows 11 computer to cloud storage. The free tier of the service provides just enough storage to keep critical documents safe in the cloud, with very reasonable prices for larger space allocations.
Windows 11 includes a rudimentary video editing app, but if you want to make something professional, why not use the same software the pros use? It also has Mac and Linux versions in addition to Microsoft Windows so that you can transition or collaborate across multiple systems without any concerns about compatibility. One of the best things about being a PC user is that the sheer diversity of software choices means you can always find the right app for your needs.
Although we think the apps listed here are the best in their respective categories, every user needs something different. Sydney Butler is a social scientist and technology fanatic who tries to understand how people and technology coexist. He has two decades of experience as a freelance computer technician and more than a decade as a technologies researcher and instructor. Sydney has been a professional technology writer for more than five years and covers topics such as VR, Gaming, Cyber security and Transhumanism.
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