Today, you're going to learn about five free Windows apps
that will make your work life more enjoyable. I use them all the time. They're super handy and best of all they're free.
Let's jump in. Number one: Drawboard PDF. You and your colleagues are probably spending a lot of time
working remotely. It's really important to find the right tools to collaborate. The one topic that comes up a lot is how to annotate a PDF.
Maybe you're a designer and you want to annotate your artwork or annotate a website wireframe, a dashboard, and so on.
Now. it can also be great for teachers to provide feedback and grade students' assignments. In all of these cases, you need a tool to red line, mark up and
collaborate on these PDF files. One of the best free tools I found is Drawboard PDF. You can install it from the Microsoft store for free. Once installed, just open the PDF that you want to annotate. It's quite intuitive to use actually. You've got a range of tools and
you can adjust your settings from the radial menu. When you click on the tools' outer arrow, you can configure the
tool. For example, adjust color, stroke, opacity, and more. Once you've configured a tool, you can add it to your favorites
bar, then just annotate your document as you need. Add a text box to give feedback or add a shape
to visualize something. But that's not all! You can insert an image on the document
or even add your signature. You can select an annotation, move it on the page or create a
copy with the shortcut, Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V. And if the radio menu is in the way, just drag it anywhere else or
just click in the middle to minimize it. It's super simple to use and really powerful.
Give it a try. Number two: QTTabBar. The one thing I always missed in the file exploring windows is to
have separate tabs. So just like you have in the internet browser, I'm sure you often move or copy files around to different folders. This means that you're going to have to open a bunch of
separate explorer windows. A program called QTTabBar fixes that. It's an extension,
so it just adds functionality. But the file explorer, it still works the same. Once you installed it,
enable it by going to the View tab. Click on the drop down for Options and select QTTabBar.
To open a new tab, just right click on it and select "Open in New Tab" or you just use the mouse wheel button
which will do the same. There are lots of settings to customize the experience.
Right click on the tab bar and select QTTabBar Options. For example, what I find useful is to define the double click on
the folder view to close the active tab. This way, simple double click closes the tab.
Or you can also use the shortcut Ctrl + W. On top of all this, you can also activate command
bars for some quick access buttons. Now, I don't use them much but you can enable them
in the View tab under Options. They can be displayed horizontally and vertically. Number three: CrystalDiskInfo. We all have important data and documents on
our hard drives that we don't want to lose. But here's the thing, every hard drive dies eventually.
The one thing that we can do is keep an eye on its health. CrystalDiskInfo can help you do that. Most hard disk drives
have smart information to monitor the health of the disk. So for example, how many times the power was
turned on, the time length of use, and the temperature. CrystalDiskInfo supports both HDD and SDD and it can tap into
the smart data on your disk to assess the status of the drive. It's going to give you an overall health status and it shows the
temperature of your drives. If it's blue, everything is in order you can switch the drives by just
clicking on it, and it will show you some basic information about your drive down here. On the side here, it shows how many times it's been turned on
and how many hours it's been in operation. Down here, you have many attributes and each of them have
their own status color. As soon as you see some of them turn yellow or red,
you should consider replacing the drive. Checking these parameters can give you an early warning, so
you can back up your data before your hard drive breaks down. Number four: FreeFileSync. I use cloud services, but I also use external hard drives a lot,
but I don't want to copy my entire folders every time, to make sure that my backup is up to date. Instead, I want a solution that finds the differences between a
source and a target folder and transfers only the minimum amount of data that I need. One of the most powerful open source solutions is FreeFileSync.
It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. All you have to do is to put your source folder on the left side
here and target folder on the right. With synchronization settings, you can decide if you want to do a
two-way synchronization or to just mirror your files. So the synchronization will be only one-way, from left to right. Or you can also choose Update which is the same as Mirror, but
it won't delete files in the target folder. So this may be a bit confusing, so let's do an example. I have a temp folder on C which I'm going to add on the left side.
It includes four files. On the right, I'm going to add another temp folder which is on D
with five different files. When I click compare, I can already see the differences.
With a two-way sync changes will flow in both directions. You can already see it with the arrows that indicate the action. So 1 to 4 will be added on the right and 5 to 9 will be copied to
the left, meaning you're going to end up with the files 1 to 9 in both folders. Mirror, on the other hand, is going to delete the five files on the
right and copy over the four files from the left side, and update is not going to touch the five files on the right. It's just going to add the four files from the left. So just pick whatever fits your situation best. Then click
synchronize and confirm with start when the syncing is done. You're going to hear this satisfying sound, and there's even more!
You can schedule a batch job for unattended synchronization. And the real time sync component allows you to monitor one or
more folders and automatically synchronize if any changes happen. Number five: VLC Media Player. You probably already came across situations where movies and
TV, the default app to play videos, gave you an error. Maybe some Codec was missing or it didn't support the file format. This is where VLC Media Player comes into play. It's been around for years, and while it may not look as fancy as
some other ones out there, it will be the only media player that you're ever going to need. I didn't come across a file format that didn't work with it and I
never needed to download any additional codex, but it can actually do much more than just video playback.
For example, you can play internet radio. In VLC Media Player, go to the playlist view by pressing the
shortcut Ctrl + L. Down here, under Internet, select IceCast Radio Directory. This will bring up
the available online radio stations. Then just double click on any of them to play it.
You can also convert video or audio files to another format, stream video, and even record the video that you're
playing; highly recommended. And I hope these apps will come in handy for you. If you're using some other Windows software that you like a lot,
please share it in the comments. Don't forget to give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it and
consider joining our community by subscribing, if you haven't done so already. Many thanks for watching and I'm going to
see you in the next video.
