Microsoft PowerToys is a fantastic program if you like to tweak your experience with Windows.
It lets you do things like set up individual zones within your monitor that act like picture in picture or another monitor. It has a robust color picker, which helps greatly when it comes to photoshop and template creation. I also use the text extractor very often to extract text from pictures, which it copies to the clipboard.
The best, and technically the worst, is it lets you change settings that you can’t normally do in Windows.
While it could get someone YOLO adminning in trouble, thankfully it has a lot of warnings before you mess things up too badly.
Those are the features I use, but there are too many useful features to name in one go.
While not a “Windows program,” Ninite allows you to queue up and download a lot of the most common software installs you’d make after a fresh install.
In terms of actual windows programs, I quite like “Everything.” It’s basically a database of all the files on your computer that allows for near instant searching.
“Space Sniffer” is an excellent utility for finding what takes up a lot of room on your drive.
“Unidentified flying raw” is a free program that allows the manipulation and conversion of raw picture files. I use it before editing in Gimp, but if you have Photoshop, it’s not necessary.
“Dark Table” is an acceptable free light room alternative if you have the patience. It’s pretty slow though.
“Everything” is amazing. Works great as a search tool, and it has really cool capabilities. Lately I’ve been using to mass-rename files, instead of downloading a specific tool for that (or learning bash).
That program is essential windows software since the stock windows search utility is basically fake. There’s no way to actually search without it.
Also I found a new good use for it recently. You can sort the entire file list by date and it updates live. So suppose you’re using a program and it saves a file without telling you where. Since it’s Windows and the file system is obfuscated to shit, there’s no way to know where it is. But it will be near the top of the Search Everything file list.
Notepad++ for any text file that needs to be opened, and VLC for any video file that needs to be opened. Both are great.
VoidTools’ Everything. Indexes your whole filesystem (across all drives too) and allows you to search your whole filesystem for matching filenames, save search presets for later, and even allowing RegEx search queries if you need files of names matching some pattern.
content indexing
Do you mean separating video, audio and document file types?
No, I mean you can search for the contents of text files, like PDFs, DOCX, TXT, etc. not only the file names. Sometimes you know what you read but don’t know the name of the file and in this case you can look for what you remember and find your file this way.
Another pro for everything is that you can index remote storage as well, you can’t do that with the windows provided indexing. I use this a lot for work, since I usually do not have the patience to look through the file structure of our server to find something.
WizTree is like WinDirStat but a lot faster.
