There is a mixture of free and paid for apps for Windows that I use regularly. I tend to use Windows professionally and where possible now use Windows 7 64-bit so all of the apps below work on that.
- Office 2007. OK so this one may be a) a surprise and b) controversial. The thing is this. I use Office every day of my working life. Whether Outlook for my emails and calendar or Excel for the many spreadsheets that I write. It’s vital therefore that it works and works well. And it does. But then they came out with 2007 and changed to the new ribbon UI. I started using this about 8 months before release when it was in early beta and liked it so much that I pretty soon began using it in mainstream life. It is for me a real improvement and while it will need a fair amount of retraining for “general” users I think it will see some real productivity gains. Now using the beta of 2010 which has some fantastic enhancements, Outlook has had a major overhaul and has some really nice features and UI tweaks, the changes to meeting requests alone make it worth while. And the new Word sidebar that has all the headings and subheadings allowing for easy navigation of long documents is one of those “why did it take this long” features.
- Pidgin. This was formally known as Gaim and it is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. As with Adium on the Mac, Pidgin works with all the main, and many of the minor, IM platforms. I’d previously used Trillian for my PC based IMing but when I started using Google Talk in anger my only choice with Trillian was to pay. Pidgin works every bit as well and is free.
- Putty. This is my personal favourite Telnet/SSH client on Windows. It has all the features that one would need and comes in a small package that doesn’t need to be installed so is ideal as part of a toolkit for IT pros.
- Paint.Net. I am by no means an artist but I do have occasion to make modifications to photos once in a while and Paint.net is a free tool that has all the features that I need without the, shall we say quirky, GIMP user interface.
- IrfanView. This is one of those apps that is so simple but genius. It is a viewer for graphics files, that is pretty much any format ever used. It can also do a range of other simple things like rotate, save as alternate formats etc. Simple to use and totally free. Excellent.
- SyncToy. This is a free download from Microsoft that should in my opinion be included in Windows. It is a utility for synchronising two folders. Simple. The “pairs” are configured and can be from any source to any destination that Windows Explorer understands. Once set up the synchronisation can be scheduled using the command line version which is how I make sure I have backups of those crappy applications that insist on saving important files to random places on the C: drive and don’t allow you to change them. Yes I’m talking to you BT billing analyst.
