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Here are my recommendations for Windows 10/PC Software. Most on this list I use myself, others are recommendations from trusted friends. This is not the be all and end all list. There are some other really great software out there that either a. I haven’t tried, or b. I don’t know about it or c. It doesn’t work for my use case, but it might for you.
Some of these are free, some are low cost. Some like my photo editor are geared more towards advanced amateurs and professionals so Capture One might be seen as high cost, but if you are editing hundreds of photos at a time, it’s so worth the money for the time saved and the quality of the edited photos.
I’ve put them into categories and the categories are listed below A-Z.
Just to let you know, some of these I am an affiliate for. That means if you click on the link and purchase it, I receive a small incentive from the company for bringing them in a sale. This allows me to keep on making quality content on my website and YouTube. Bad software will not make my recommendations list.
Microsoft Defender Antivirus is built into Windows 10. It works really well and it’s all I use. Over the years I’ve used most of the leading antivirus programs, Nortons, McAfee, Trend Micro etc. While not bad and keep you protected, Microsoft Defender does a really good job, is free and relatively lightweight. Before I moved to Defender, more than once I had to change to a different antivirus program as some really make your computer sluggish and not fun to use.
Audacity is a free, easy to use, multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac and Linux. You can use this for complex audio editing, or simple things for example for a dancer, shortening a song to match the end of a dance and having it fade out. A great piece of open source software.
Backblaze is the cloud backup I have used for the past few years. It costs money, but at currently $US6 a month, it’s a couple of coffees to keep all your data safe. Did I mention it’s unlimited? Windows and Mac supported
You might sync your important data to something like Google Drive, but you really need a proper backup system as well. Synching is great, but if you delete or overwrite a file, guess what, that deletion or overwrite gets synched. Now instead of having 2 copies of your files, you have none or 2 incorrect files. A proper backup will back it up and keep a number of versions of the file, which Backblaze does. What Backblaze and other cloud backup providers gives you is it gets your data offsite. It’s great to have multiple copies/backups at home or work, but if your house burns down, or you get robbed and they take all your drives, you have nothing.
Syncback is a great backup and sync utility that I’ve been using for over 10 years now. There is a free version you can use, but if you find it useful, I suggest upgrading to the paid SE version at least. The SE and Pro versions are much faster and support really useful things like versioning.
How I use it, is that I have a laptop and a desktop. I setup a sync between my laptop and my desktop with versioning. So for example if I create an excel file and save it to my laptop, my Syncback Pro will copy that to my desktop. If I make a change to the excel file, it will then sync the changes. Syncback allows you to set how many versions of the file you want to keep. So you can keep say the last 10 versions, so you can go back to an older version if you want.
Syncback SE allows you to do proper backups to local drives, NAS etc. Syncback Pro extends that and allows you to backup to cloud services.
Google One is Google’s cloud storage service. There are other good cloud storage systems, but Google’s is priced quite good and if you live in the google ecosystem with Gmail, google photos etc, then going with Google One is an easy option. Now with the recent announcement that Google Photos will no longer have unlimited photo/video storage for “high quality” photos and videos if you don’t want to manually backup your photos elsewhere, you will need something like Google One. At the time of writing in Australia, 200GB is just $4.39 a month (16% less on yearly plan) or 2TB for $124.99 yr. Compared to another popular cloud storage service Dropbox, the minimum plan is 2TB and that’s $184.67 a year.
Microsoft’s OneNote is one of the best notebook applications and it’s free. There are 2 versions, one installed automatically in Windows 10, or the one I prefer, OneNote 2016 (now just called OneNote). What’s so great about notebook apps you say? It’s like having one of those paper notebooks with the different coloured tabs for different subjects, but better. Add text, images, make drawings, insert files into it etc. You can have as many tabs as you want, and as many notebooks as you want. Plus you can sync it to mobile apps on Android and iOS.
Google’s Gmail is free and comes with 15GB of storage. It’s easy to use and it’s SPAM filtering is amazing. It comes with office suite apps including Docs, Sheets, Slides, calendar, contacts and other useful tools.
Google Workspace is Google’s paid email offering that includes office suite apps including Docs, Sheets, Slides, calendar and contacts like the free version, but gives you more apps and more space.
My wife and I both use it daily and it’s awesome. If you run or are starting a business (or just want your own domain name for email) you can setup your email with your own domain name, which you can’t in the free Gmail. So it looks nice and professional with yourname@yourcompanyname.com. Plus you can do cool things like where my wife and I have separate accounts, but I created another alias group account (like a shortcut) and if we use that email address, both of us get the emails without having to pay for a 3rd account (great for signups for schools, kids activities, bills etc). Sweet.
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Trello is something that once you try, you are not sure how you did without. Trello is an app that helps you organise and prioritize projects, whether that’s organising your next holiday or the next systems upgrade at a big corporation. Trello has a free tier that will be good enough for most people and small businesses. It has apps for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and the web. It syncs between the apps, so you always have the current state of play.
What’s so great about Trello? It uses a framework called Kanban. Kanban lets you visually represent work items on a board with cards allowing you to see where everything is. Imagine you are planning your holiday. A nice simple setup is to have a card for To Do, Doing and Done. So place everything you need to plan for your holiday under To Do, then move it do Doing when you start working on it and when that task is finished (like booked hotel), put it under Done. You can also put checklists under items too, so put in an item for clothes to pack and put in a checklist for everything you need to take. Start packing, move it to Doing, check off all the items and then move it to done.
Bitwarden is a great, open source password manager for personal and business use. You can use it for free and it syncs between all your devices, desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux), Android and iOS (iPhone) and via web browser. You can get a premium for $10 a year, or for $40 a year, you get the family plan for up to 6 people. We have the family plan and it allows us to securely share things like Netflix login details between us. We’ve setup our daughters account so that she can add and modify her logins, but things like Netflix that we all share, she can’t change those passwords. I used to use LastPass, but Bitwarden is as good if not better, and cheaper. Plus it’s open source.
Capture One is a professional photo editing software. I’ve been using this for the last 18 months or so with my side business, Photography Garage. It’s not cheap, but if your a professional, or you take a lot of photos, then this is fantastic software. You can buy it outright, or subscribe to it monthly or yearly. The regular version allows you to edit any RAW photos from basically any camera, but you can get a slightly cheaper version for Sony, Fujifilm and Nikon cameras that will only allow you to edit RAW files from that brand. An alternative to this is Adobe Lightroom. Lots of people use it and love it. I used it for a while before going to Capture One. It was fine, but it didn’t gel with me and I found I could get great results from my photos quicker in Capture One than Lightroom. But each to their own.
Affinity Photo is a professional grade photo/image editor, but at an amateur’s price. An alternative to Adobe Photoshop, I use this in conjunction with Capture One for my photography. It’s also great just for editing/cropping doing anything to images, creating flyers, posters etc. Forget paying a subscription for Photoshop, Affinity Photo is just $AUS79.99 for Windows and Mac and $AUS30.99 for iPad. I think I got it on sale about 2 years ago for about $20 off the official price. So very good value and very powerful. Not as popular as photoshop, but there is still plenty of tutorials around the web and youtube to help you do anything you need in the software.
JPEGmini Pro is not an photo or image editor. What it does is it takes jpg files and compresses them down to save space, but without losing any visual quality. You can also resize the images at the same time. It does a great job if you want to shrink jpegs down for web pages, or just want to save space on your drive. Why I’ve lumped it with photo/image editing software is that that if you buy the Pro Suite version of the app, you get the normal standalone app, but you also get plugins for Capture One, Lightroom and Photoshop. This is the real power of this utility. For me, I’ve got it as a plugin for Capture One. As a plugin, it’s just added to the output recipe. So when I want to export a photo or bunch of photos, it will process my edits in Capture One, then behind the scenes, send it to JPEGmini for optimisation, then save the file as an optimised jpg. It barely adds anything to the export time. So suddenly you can export thousands of photos in full resolution and quality, but still fit them on a USB stick.
Google’s Duo is an easy to use free video/voice call app. Available on the Android, iOS, computers and smart displays. I would most compare this to Facetime on the iOS/Mac platform, but being on a lot more platforms, means whatever device they have, they should be able to use Duo. One to one or up to 32 participants in voice/video calls make this very versatile. Throw in end-to-end encryption and it’s a no brainer.
Google Meet is Google’s other video call app. Meet ranges from free to having extra features as part of the paid Google Workspace.Where Duo is more for just connecting and talking/video chatting with people, Meet is more based around a meeting where a person/group run the meeting and invite others to join. You can do other things like present your screen or window, live stream meetings, record them, use whiteboards etc.
Zoom. If there is one brand that went from unknown to becoming synonymous with video calls during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s Zoom. Offering group meetings up to 40 mins on their free tier, hosting up to 100 participants, it became the go to for school teachers, dance teachers, calls to grandparents and businesses when we had to social distance, work from home and gatherings of lots of people weren’t allowed. It’s a great platform that is easy to use and forced Google and the other big players in video meeting software to ramp up their offerings.
HandBrake is a free, open source video converter for Windows, Mac and Linux. If you have a video and need to convert it into a different video format, then HandBrake is for you. Lots of presets for formats and devices, plus lots of options if you want to tweek it to the way you like. You can convert a single file, or add them to the queue, click start and come back and they are all done.
Davinci Resolve is a free, feature rich video editor, complete with special effects, audio editor and colour grading modules. It’s almost criminal that this is free and an Aussie company to boot. There is a paid version that edits higher resolution video, takes better advantage of GPUs to speed up processing and gives you more effects, but for most people, the free one will be more than enough. It’s a little bit of a learning curve, but well worth it. The only downside is it’s a bit heavy on your computer, but I’m running it on a 6 year old laptop, quad core CPU and 12GB of RAM and it runs ok. They use this in TV shows and movies, but is also great for home videos or for me, making YouTube videos.
UltraSearch Free is one utility if you install on your windows pc/laptop and only use once a year, it’s well worth installing. Have you ever tried to find a file, gone into windows explorer and tried to search through your hard drive/s? It’s slow. Then if you don’t find it, you try again with a different word or phrase and wait again. Not with UltraSearch. It uses the Master File Table (MFT) on your hard drive which is the drives database of what’s on the drive instead of looking through the file system. What that gives you is a utility that starts bringing up results as you type in the search string. On my laptop searching through 2 drives (1 512GB and 1 1TB drive, both very full), it can find a file in seconds. If you need to search through network drives amongst other things, there is a paid Pro version, but for most of us, the free version will do just fine.