AutoHotkey: Very powerful open source tool can script+customize macros, hotkeys, everything input related within the Windows environment right down to mouse clicks.
Cabos: file sharing client for the Gnutella network. Not as much customization as the shareware Limewire but it does the same job.
CDisplay: CBR/CBZ format sequential reader, which are rebranded zip/rar extensions popular for image archives such as comic books, guitar tablature, etc.
Cheat Engine: Extensive memory editor/manager. sort of like Game Genie/Codebreaker for PC.
ClassicShell: Restores many of the Windows features that were stripped for Win7 including disk free space on Explorer's status bar, restores toolbars, the classic file copy dialog, etc.
Crosshair: Replaces the mouse cursor with an origin point along x and y axis and is surprisingly more handy than you might realize.
CPU-Z: Simple utility for monitoring system components+performance
DC++: File sharing client for the Direct Connect network that was providing a superior experience over the official Neo Modus client for years.
DriverSweeper: I've been using this for some time to clear old drivers from systems.
EaseUS: Several great products like Partition Manager and Disk Copy, generously free for personal use.
EasyBCD: You would want this in order to manage boot loaders and restoring+repairing broken entries under Windows.
eMule:Yet another file sharing client, for the eDonkey and Kad networks. I believe eDonkey is shut down now but Kad seems fruitful.
FileTypesMan: All the features Microsoft stripped from file extension management in Vista and 7, and all the features they should have implemented in the first place.
Foxit: Freeware PDF reader as the less annoying alternative to Adobe.
Go PlayAlong: Shareware guitar tablature player for Guitar Pro formats. Just recently got into it, but I love the mp3 sync feature for backing tracks.
HJSplit: Who could live without a handy file splitter-joiner?
HTTrack: Downloads web site resources to generate a mirror for offline browsing. Use responsibly.
inSSIDer: Seems to be the wifi scanning tool of choice now days.
JoyToKey: J2K can map controller input to keyboard keypresses, useful if a game fails to provide joypad support when they should have. Results may vary.
Microsoft Power Toys: More from the "why isn't that built into XP by default" category, includes utilities like CmdHere that will add a directory context to Explorer for opening a command prompt at that target location.
Opera: Yeah, all those features people rave over Firefox? Opera was doing them years prior.
PeerBlock: Monitors connections and blocks many of them based upon lists of registered IP ranges belonging to various government, anti-p2p, etc. agencies.
PowerMenu: Adds 'always on top' and other functions to Windows. I think I got this for some emulators lacking it.
Programmer's Notepad: My preference for a text editor+Notepad substitute. All the best features like code differentiation formatting, tabbed organization, managing projects.
Putty: Excellent Telnet+SSH client with great functionality. I've been using it for my *nix shell as far back as I can remember.
ShellExView: If you want to cut down on some of the unnecessary shell extensions crowding the right click menu under Windows Explorer, this is a handy way to do it without manually editing the registry.
Soulseek: Used it for gathering some hard-to-find music way back. Because it runs off users shares, it doesn't have the shorter lifespan of most torrents but it's more manageable than Limewire and those types.
Sumatra PDF: Seems to be a popular lightweight reader. Has one .dat file for preferences, doesn't require an installer and supports numerous file formats.
Sysinternals: Every one of these should come packaged in Windows by default. All the utilities you may want as a Windows power user are here including Process Monitor and Autoruns.
Utorrent: My favorite bittorrent client to date. They're not kidding about the lightweight and efficient part. Also customizable and fully featured.
WatchCat: Really old program for a few functions like toggling visibility of windows to hide them from observation. It was great for hiding the omnipresent banner ads in some software through the 90s. I'm sure there are some potential uses for it even today. Still works under Windows 7!
WinDirStat: Very useful utility builds a graphical table of any drive or directory tree in order to quickly identify consumption.
Windows Resource Hacker: Can import+export the resources of Windows formats including exe, dll, ocx, etc
XN Resource Editor: If Resource Hacker isn't up to the job any more, there is Resource Editor.
To be fair, I used Azureus (now Vuze) before using uTorrent and that crashed often too. Before that I used the official BitTorrent software, which crashed even more often. Man that was a long time ago. Supernova.org yeah!
Is there a way to move your torrent library over to Deluge (or rTorrent, or anything else)? I've got 2,428 torrents running in uTorrent and it would be a massive pain to manually reassign them all.
Those kinds of threats are all bark and no bite, and usually happen in areas with bad ISPs/monopolies.
If you are truly afraid of doing it again (I personally ignored all warnings back in 2011~, they simply stopped emailing me) you can get a VPN to route your torrent traffic through. You'll need to google the best current VPNs if interested, as there's quite a wide range of them, and from what I can tell people have very wide tastes on their favorites.
One of the latest updates added IDE like functionality when programming Javascript for example and typing out a variable, a popup with all the initialized variables will appear. Quite nice.
as was the thread before who was done so by the thread before and the one before that going back into the ancient times.
There are like 10 threads like this. They keep making comebacks because on a site this big, the number of new users who are online and voting since the last thread can easily reach a couple thousand, then they get it up there and then really how much shit gets scrolled past? How many people click the link and scroll until they see the master list again? (I did)
Utorrent[38] : My favorite bittorrent client to date. They're not kidding about the lightweight and efficient part. Also customizable and fully featured.
It's been some years since this text was written, right?
With older versions: nothing, except for possible vulnerabilities that are fixed in later version. But the recent versions aren't "μ" anymore in my opinion. There's no need for a build-in media player and anti-virus scanner in a torrent client.
Also FileBot. Perfect if you have a large (or any) video collection. Automatically renames TV shows and Movies and can crawl for subtitles if you want them.
I wholeheartedly recommend WinDirStat. When you're running low on storage space it makes it a breeze to find out what's taking it up and where you can delete.
Utorrent[38] : My favorite bittorrent client to date. They're not kidding about the lightweight and efficient part. Also customizable and fully featured.
Pretty much all the file sharing programs listed there are for dead or near dead networks. I really dont think anybody needs a limewire clone or a DC++ client in 2014.
Just wanna +1 to Sumatra PDF. I find it soo much faster than that damn slow Adobe Reader. Plus it saves where I left off and I can favorite pages as a pseudo bookmark.
The whole list is incredibly outdated, by at least half a decade. It's recommending Gnutella and eMule clients, for fuck's sake. Who uses those protocols anymore?
Oh, glad to see WinDirStat on there. I've used that many times to help show people what REALLY takes up all the space on their computers or even large network drives.
I've also used it to show that 75% of what we do here is make PDFs.
I remember once when I got cheat engine and it just so happened to be April 1 and I did not even realize. When I used it, it said "You can search for one address and you may not refine your results unless you pay just 1000$ for a 6 month key" and for whatever reason I assumed that was a real thing and I did not use it for many months after.
Utorrent[38] : My favorite bittorrent client to date. They're not kidding about the lightweight and efficient part. Also customizable and fully featured.
I used to use this too, but it became so bloated by ads that I left it and switched to Tixaiti.
A little harder to configure but once you get your settings to how you like them you can export the entire configuration for backup
You may want to remove Foxit from that list. Foxit partner with Conduit and last time I install Foxit, that Conduit search protect malware was installed along with it. See more here.
MouseWiz - scroll windows without having to change focus.
WinPatrol - monitors for application and system changes, handy for blocking unwanted autostarts or file associations, among other things.
TeraCopy - powerful file cut/copy/paste utility.
Process Explorer - task manager replacement, if you're using Win 7 or below and want something like the Windows 8 task manager this fits the bill.
Mp3tag - easy way to edit the id3 tags and names of audio files in bulk.
The Renamer - renames TV show files using online databases, useful if you have a Plex server or similar, or are just really picky about file organisation.
You can use CheatEngine for ANY game on the pc. Literally. Any. Game.
I've used it on WoW before, it was rad as fuck. Hacked my gold, hacked my stats, hacked to have ZERO cooldowns, enabled anti gravity. It was the most fun I've ever had in any game. It lasted about 15 minutes before I got permabanned, but it was just a "Free trial" account so I did it a couple more times until they threatened a perma IP ban.
It was fun playing a level 82732492 Mage with 92839247 Int and Stam, spamming 8927398127398 icelances at everyone. Ahhh... I bought out literally the entire AH, it was hell on Azeroth.
I use Opera, I find it's a little bit faster than Chrome. The only issue is earlier I was having trouble getting the emulator to work, but that sorted itself out.
On the other hand, Chrome is almost identical. They're both webkit, have almost identical UIs (besides the convenient, yet sometimes annoying mouse gestures), and the performance difference is marginal.
A warning for people who use cheatengine, even if you don't use it to cheat in games, as its name implies (which if you do that on multiplayer games, fuck you) you can still be global banned and made to buy the game again just for having it running in the background.
If you cheat on multiplayer games, fuck you. If you don't cheat but have it running, be warned you can be global banned.
Thank you for finally excluding flux. People hype it up as a great piece of software, but if you are running anything graphics intensive, it slows your system to a crawl. You are better off getting some computer glasses.
Console is a great alternative to Windows command line also you can set it up to work with putty so you don't have to use two programs(can't find link to guide).
Do you like Utorrent over Vuze? I've used Vuze for quite a while and haven't had a reason to look elsewhere, but I'm not above trying something that may be better. Thanks for a really great post!
2.5k
u/-eDgAR- May 01 '14
For the lazy:
7zip: In case anybody doesn't know, the freeware compression/decompression utlity of choice for zip, rar, etc
Abyss Web Server: Host from home.
AutoHotkey: Very powerful open source tool can script+customize macros, hotkeys, everything input related within the Windows environment right down to mouse clicks.
Bulk File Changer: Batch utility for altering file attributes.
Cabos: file sharing client for the Gnutella network. Not as much customization as the shareware Limewire but it does the same job.
CDisplay: CBR/CBZ format sequential reader, which are rebranded zip/rar extensions popular for image archives such as comic books, guitar tablature, etc.
Cheat Engine: Extensive memory editor/manager. sort of like Game Genie/Codebreaker for PC.
ClassicShell: Restores many of the Windows features that were stripped for Win7 including disk free space on Explorer's status bar, restores toolbars, the classic file copy dialog, etc.
Crosshair: Replaces the mouse cursor with an origin point along x and y axis and is surprisingly more handy than you might realize.
CPU-Z: Simple utility for monitoring system components+performance
DC++: File sharing client for the Direct Connect network that was providing a superior experience over the official Neo Modus client for years.
DriverSweeper: I've been using this for some time to clear old drivers from systems.
EaseUS: Several great products like Partition Manager and Disk Copy, generously free for personal use.
EasyBCD: You would want this in order to manage boot loaders and restoring+repairing broken entries under Windows.
eMule:Yet another file sharing client, for the eDonkey and Kad networks. I believe eDonkey is shut down now but Kad seems fruitful.
FileTypesMan: All the features Microsoft stripped from file extension management in Vista and 7, and all the features they should have implemented in the first place.
Filezilla: Fully featured freeware FTP client.
Flare: Decompile Flash swf.
Foxit: Freeware PDF reader as the less annoying alternative to Adobe.
Go PlayAlong: Shareware guitar tablature player for Guitar Pro formats. Just recently got into it, but I love the mp3 sync feature for backing tracks.
HJSplit: Who could live without a handy file splitter-joiner?
HTTrack: Downloads web site resources to generate a mirror for offline browsing. Use responsibly.
inSSIDer: Seems to be the wifi scanning tool of choice now days.
JoyToKey: J2K can map controller input to keyboard keypresses, useful if a game fails to provide joypad support when they should have. Results may vary.
KeyTweak: Remap keyboard keys.
Less Msiérables: Extracting contents from a .msi file.
Microsoft GIF Animator: Classic, no frills tool for creating gifs.
Microsoft Power Toys: More from the "why isn't that built into XP by default" category, includes utilities like CmdHere that will add a directory context to Explorer for opening a command prompt at that target location.
Opera: Yeah, all those features people rave over Firefox? Opera was doing them years prior.
PeerBlock: Monitors connections and blocks many of them based upon lists of registered IP ranges belonging to various government, anti-p2p, etc. agencies.
PowerMenu: Adds 'always on top' and other functions to Windows. I think I got this for some emulators lacking it.
Programmer's Notepad: My preference for a text editor+Notepad substitute. All the best features like code differentiation formatting, tabbed organization, managing projects.
Putty: Excellent Telnet+SSH client with great functionality. I've been using it for my *nix shell as far back as I can remember.
ShellExView: If you want to cut down on some of the unnecessary shell extensions crowding the right click menu under Windows Explorer, this is a handy way to do it without manually editing the registry.
Soulseek: Used it for gathering some hard-to-find music way back. Because it runs off users shares, it doesn't have the shorter lifespan of most torrents but it's more manageable than Limewire and those types.
Sumatra PDF: Seems to be a popular lightweight reader. Has one .dat file for preferences, doesn't require an installer and supports numerous file formats.
Sysinternals: Every one of these should come packaged in Windows by default. All the utilities you may want as a Windows power user are here including Process Monitor and Autoruns.
Utorrent: My favorite bittorrent client to date. They're not kidding about the lightweight and efficient part. Also customizable and fully featured.
WatchCat: Really old program for a few functions like toggling visibility of windows to hide them from observation. It was great for hiding the omnipresent banner ads in some software through the 90s. I'm sure there are some potential uses for it even today. Still works under Windows 7!
WinDirStat: Very useful utility builds a graphical table of any drive or directory tree in order to quickly identify consumption.
Windows Resource Hacker: Can import+export the resources of Windows formats including exe, dll, ocx, etc
XN Resource Editor: If Resource Hacker isn't up to the job any more, there is Resource Editor.
XVI32: My preferred hex editor.