10 Cool Free Programs you should Use

10 Cool Free Programs you should Use

What is up everybody, it’s time for a new article about some cool program. And today I’ve got a whopping 10 of them, all 10 free programs for Windows. So you should at least find some of them useful even if you don’t need all of them. And with all that out of the way through, let's get started.

1. QTTabBar

So number 1 is a program called “QTTabBar”, which adds a feature to Windows Explorer that honestly, Microsoft should have added years ago, but somehow has not yet. Which is tabbed Explorer windows. Instead of having a bunch of individual Windows that you need to switch between, you can just click a tab like you do in any web browser, which makes way more sense.

Now after you install it, one thing that took me a lot of searching to figure out, is to actually enable it, 

• You need to go to the taskbar' View' tab, and then the 'Options' dropdown, 
• And actually click 'QTTabBar' to enable it, or else it won't show up. 

And also there are other command bar options you can click here to enable, but I don't like the look of those, and I don't need them, so I just keep them disabled, but you might see those options here.

But for the most part, after you enable it, explorer should still look the same and behave the same, so just with some extra elements. So obviously you can see that the tabs are there now. And when you hover over folders now, sometimes there will be a little arrow showing internal folders if you hover over them.

So you can just ignore them, I don't know if there's a way to turn that off, that's just part of the program. And to open a new tab, you just right-click on a folder, and click 'Open In New Tab', or you can middle-click the folder, and it will also open in a new tab. It might be a little bit faster. So it's very similar to how browsers work with multiple tabs.

2. MusicBee

Alright, next up we have MusicBee, which is a music manager kind of like iTunes, but not. So if you don’t have an iPhone this could be a good option to keep track of all your music.

It’s got a nice looking modern interface and will automatically import your music and do all the usual stuff like organizing by album, artist, and all that. It’s also got a good amount of advanced features like multi-band equalizers, skins, tools for tagging and CD ripping, and even support for Winamp plugins. 

And yes, you can actually use it to sync with your phone if it runs Android. So it can definitely do a lot.

3. GOG Galaxy

Ok for number 3 we have a cool one called Galaxy, which is a universal game manager from the website GOG, aka Good Old Games. Which fun fact, is actually owned by the same company that developed the Witcher games and upcoming Cyberpunk 2077.

And this is actually the newly released GogGalaxy 2.0 version. Basically, this program aims to let you connect all your different game services and manage everything from one place.

So this includes Steam, Origin, Epic Games, and even console platforms like Playstation and Xbox accounts. You can import all your games, friendslists, achievements, and whatever else from all the various platforms.

Now each platform has different levels of integration, so with most platforms, you can at least see which friends are online for example, and soon you’ll be able to do cross-platform chatting. Some platforms like Steam also let you install and uninstall games right from GOG Galaxy, and even does cloud save backups for some games.

There’s a lot more it can do that I don have time to go over in this article, but it’s definitely worth checking out considering how many different game platforms there are these days.

4. Sysinternals

Up next, we actually have several programs that are part of a suite that I’ll just count as one, which is known as “SysInternals”. And this is actually a set of tools created by Microsoft themselves for Windows, though it isn’t included with Windows and has to be downloaded separately. 

There are a ton of programs in here, literally around 70 I think, so some more useful than others, so I’ll just go over some of the more useful ones.

And the good news is most of these are standalone and don’t require installation, you can just run them. One extremely powerful tool is called “ProcessMonitor”, which basically allows you to keep track and see exactly what actions every single process on the computer does, which is invaluable when trying to debug programs or figure out why something keeps crashing for example.

Now I should warn you this is only going to be helpful to advanced users, and most of you will probably have absolutely no idea what you’re looking at, hell even I don’t really know 99% of what it says, because it kind of information overload. 

You’re better off just reading tutorials dedicated to how to use this program, because I don’t want to spend the whole article on it.

5. Process Hacker

Another useful program is “Process Explorer”, which you can kind of think of like a super version of the task manager. It can do a lot of the same stuff like seeing running tasks, killing processes, but can do a lot more like seeing which files a program is actively using, stuff like that. Again, you’ll have to research this app separately to realize its full power.

Then there’s a ton of other little programs in the suite, a lot of which just serve single functions, and some of them are kind of funny, such as the one called “NotMyFault”, which literally is meant to purposefully crash the computer in a variety of ways to test things out. Just be sure to use that one responsibly if you decide to prank your friends with it. 

6. Process Hacker

Ok next up for number 5, this one is actually similar to the Process Explorer tool I just mentioned, and it’s called “Process Hacker”. This is pretty much the same idea, where it shows all running processes, can show parent-child process relations, and all that.

But it is a bit more powerful with more options and abilities. For example, it has separate tabs, not just for processes, but also services, network connections, and disk activity.

You can also use it to see memory contents of different processes, which I won’t pretend to understand, but some of you out there can probably take good advantage of it, and I’ve heard it’s especially useful when it comes to diagnosing and removing viruses, if you have the know-how of course.

7. LibreOffice

Moving on, number 6 is a popular one you might have heard of already, which is LibreOffice. It’s essentially a free alternative to the Microsoft Office suite of programs. And this is another group of programs we'll just count as one.

Some of the stuff it includes are Writer, which is a word processor, Calc for spreadsheets, Impress for presentations like Powerpoint, and also Draw for diagrams, Base for databases, Math for formulas, and some other stuff.

And yes it can actually open and save the same file formats as Microsoft Office, like .docx for Word for example. Though keep in mind if you do a lot of complicated documents with lots of weird formatting, there might be the occasional formatting difference if it’s opened in Word, but that’s bound to be expected.

8. TreeSize

Alright up to number 7, we have the program“TreeSize”, which helps you map your hard drive and figure out stuff like where all your free space has gone. It’s similar to another program I’m a big fan of called “WinDirStat”, but this one’s just different so you might prefer it.

It will show you the size of different directories on your drive, and you can also see it as a visual representation to see nested directories that are visually bigger based on storage size. I think I’d still prefer WinDirStat just because I’m familiar with it, but you might decide you like this one better.

9. GameSave Manager

Alright, number 8 is really cool, which is“Gamesave Manager”, and it’s pretty much like it sounds. Its purpose is to let you automatically backup all your video games save files at once, and restore them too. And it should support pretty much every single game you can imagine.

And they have a list on their website and there's literally over 6000 games on there which is pretty crazy, and their website also shows the last time they updated the database. 

It’s got a bunch of other cool features like the ability to tie in with cloud services like Dropbox, the ability to do scheduled backups, and will also let you know if there are any special circumstances with certain games.

Like with Minecraft it lets you know it will back up the entire Minecraft world folder because it has to for a true backup, so obviously that might be more storage than you expect. 

So this is definitely one that could be useful if you ever need to move save files to a new computer, or share them with friends, or just back them up, and you don’t want to have to figure out where all the save files are. Coming near the end we got a couple more still.

10. MSI Afterburner

So for number 9, we have MSI Afterburner, which is a very useful program for controlling your graphics card, including overclocking. And keep in mind you can use this program no matter what graphics card you have, it doesn’t have to be made by MSI. It will display a lot of information about the GPU like current clock speed, voltage, temperature, fan speed, stuff like that.

Then it makes it really easy to overclock just using some basic sliders like power limit, core voltage, temperature limits, core clock and memory clock, and fan speed controls too. Now remember, just because the slider is there doesn't mean you can just max everything out and expect it to magically triple the power of your graphics.

You’re better off looking up some overclocking guides for your specific GPU, because you probably can’t increase these things as much as you imagine without making your system unstable.

So maybe just try increasing stuff bit by bit, probably starting with the Power Limit which I’ve had reasonable success with, but be especially careful with the voltage limits, because setting that way too high could potentially damage your card. Again you’ll want to definitely do some research before messing around with this too much, even though it is very powerful.

SuperF4

Alright, we’re finally up to number 10, which could be the most useful of them all. And this program is called “SuperF4”. And it’s purpose is to allow you to kill the foreground process if a program freezes or refuses to quit.

Now you probably already know if this happens there are options such as using Ctrl+Alt+Delete to bring up the task manager, but sometimes even that can be difficult, like if it’s a full-screen program that won’t go away, and is blocking you from even seeing the task manager. 

Pro-tip though, in the task manager you can enable the “Always On Top” option to make this less likely. In any case, if all else fails, SuperF4 lets you just use the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+F4 to force quit the application if it refuses to do so by itself, or you the task manager isn’t working for whatever reason. This one should definitely come in handy.

So, those are 10 really cool free windows programs worth checking out. If you want to keep reading, the next article I highly recommend reading 10 tips to make Windows run faster. so be sure to leave a comment.