Top 10 Free Windows Programs (You've Never Heard Of)

how's it going guys I'm Theo Joe and if you're like me you're always looking for new useful programs for Windows so today I've got 10 really cool Windows programs you've probably never heard of unless you've seen some of my previous videos I might have mentioned a couple of these before but definitely not all of them and I think you'll find a lot of these really useful and yes they are all free as usual Before we jump in I want to quickly plug my Instagram account I try to post cool and funny stuff on there every once in a while some tech related memes so hopefully that should be entertaining definitely go check it out that's just at Theo Joe over on Instagram and without further ado let's get started number one this one's gonna be extremely useful if you haven't heard of this yet and it is called iobit unlocker and this basically unlocks files that may be locked or in use from another program so you may have come across this where you're trying to delete a file you're trying to copy a file from one place to another and it says in use from another program you can't do anything with it and you don't know what the heck is using it you don't really have any programs open you can't figure out why this program will allow you to not only see what program is using it but also free it from that program allowing you to delete it copy it do whatever so what you do is after you install it you'll get a new context of any shortcuts so when you right click you'll now see an option for iobit unlocker and then when the window comes up it'll tell you whether the program or a file is locked and what's using it and you can simply click unlock and most of the time it will fix that and you can then do whatever you want if not then you can also use the force unlock option which I believe just force quits the program that's using it obviously that's kind of extreme you don't want to do that unless necessary but you still have the option so definitely one that I think is pretty essential for having on windows because you know what happens all the time all right next up this one has definitely saved me a bunch of headache and it is called backup start menu layout I'm sure you can imagine what this one does and it's by a developer called sword um it seems to be like a pretty small developer so you might have never heard of this before but basically this is for when for whatever reason windows may corrupt the Start menu file and your layout gets ruined or you're installing a new installation of Windows or creating a new profile and basically the Start menu layout is reset to the default which has a bunch of crap on it you have to go through and you know remove all the tiles add the tiles back for what you want but this way you don't have to do that you can simply back it up and restore it instantly there's no installation required for this program you simply run it you click the create backup and it saves multiple ones you can look at and then you simply click restore backup when you want to restore it and you can also go ahead and look in the files it creates and backup these files so this is good again if you are creating a new Windows installation you can simply put those on a thumb drive or whatever and then as soon as you have all your programs reinstalled on the new computer you just run the restore and there it is it's all back to normal all right number three this one is called share X and it allows you to instantly and super easily share screenshots and files how it works is you can either left click or right click on the icon and the taskbar if you left click on it it instantly brings it into screenshot mode where you simply highlight a region on the screen and then what it does it takes the screenshot uploads it to the share X hosting thing and then gives you the URL and automatically adds it to the clipboard so after you take the screenshot literally all you have to do if you want to send it to a friend is paste it into the chat whatever you use in a chat with him if you want a little bit more control you can also right-click and then you have a ton of options for what you want to do you can again screenshot using a bunch of different options whether it's an entire window and a not entire screen just the region or you can also do this for files so it doesn't have to just be a picture you can upload a file and again send it to a friend and it works the same way it uploads it to this little thing and I believe you have to create an account so that way you can kind of manage the files and then you simply paste the URL wherever you want then it automatically creates if you right-click you'll also see a bunch of other stuff obviously for example some options for other stuff to do after you take the screenshot so you can have it save as in a specific location you can have it do like optical character recognition you can have it not save to a file or save to a file if you want a bunch of different options here and I don't always use all of this stuff really what I use this for is simply again if I want send a screenshot to my friends to show them what I'm looking at and without having to explain stuff I simply again left click on it take a screenshot and it makes it so easy to share screenshots with friends alright moving on number four we have one called hash tab and this one I have talked about before it's super cool it basically lets you super easily see the file hashes of any file on your to peer now a file hash is basically when you take some algorithm there's a bunch of them out there that basically runs on a file and calculates a string of characters based on everything in the file and what's important about it is that is completely unique to that file meaning if you change one single character one single byte of information in that file no matter how big it is if it's a hundred gigabytes if you change one bit in that file it will generate a completely different hash and this is very very useful because it allows you to verify that a file is exactly what it's supposed to be so a lot of times if you go to download software the website will list the hash so when you download it you can check that it matches the hash on the site so you know you download it may be the right version you know that the website wasn't like hacked and someone uploaded a malicious version of the file or it wasn't corrupted as you downloaded a lot of different reasons and you can see here how it works is it adds a new tab to the properties menu of every file so you just right click go to properties and it'll give you the different hashes of some basic ones and you can also right-click and go to settings and add a number of many many different hashes that it will automatically show you and then if you want to compare it you can simply paste the hash that it's supposed to be into the box and it'll tell you if it matches you can also compare files so if you don't have the exact hash but you know this other ones correct you can do that so I really like this program I don't use it all the time but it's definitely good to have alright number five we have one called measure with a Z and this is basically like a digital ruler for your computer and you can do things like measure the distance between two pixels whether it's a straight line or a diagonal line you can also draw a box and it'll show you the dimensions and the area of the box that it's in and you can even do like in a SERP and angle and stuff and every point you are clicking at it'll show a super zoomed in view so you can do things like look at the exact color of that pixel it'll tell you the RGB colors of that pixel so if you're doing some design work and you want to make sure the colors match on something super easy to do here it also has a couple other random tools like the ability to show a pixel ruler on the edges of the screen you can also have it show a grid across the entire screen so lots of cool stuff here that might come in handy every once in a while all right up next we have specky I've definitely talked about this before in past videos and this basically just lets you see the specs of your computer mostly hardware but some software and Windows specs as well the main window will show an overview and it'll show you some basic information like the name of each individual hardware component if it's available for me for example the RAM it can't figure out what that's called but everything else it knows what it's called so the CPU the motherboard all the different hard drives and it will obviously tell you how much RAM you have and you can also go on the left-hand panel and see much more detailed specs about each individual component so you can see stuff like the individual clock speed of each CPU core how much PCI slots are in use in which ones on the motherboard you can see how much RAM is in each slot and which Rams are empty and you can even see a bunch of Windows settings like the version of Windows obviously have some devices plugged in that sort of thing and another good thing is they'll show you the temperature based on the temperature sensors assuming some of your hardware has that I think most things these days like each hard drive I think comes with the temperature sensor built in so it kind of reads off that so you can see if your temperatures are good or bad or whatever alright moving on we have one called media info and like the name suggests it tells you info about media files this is another program that will create a new context menu shortcuts so you right click and then go to media info and here it will show you a whole bunch of different information about a media file whether it's a video file audio file or maybe we're trying to figure out if it's a video file or MIDI file and it can show you a whole bunch of different information things like the bitrate the resolution the framerate your show you how many audio and video streams it has and the codecs of each and this is really good if may you're trying to play a video file or something it's not working right it doesn't look right you might be able to use this to figure out why if you're looking at it you might discover for example that you don't have the right codec and you can see which codec it's using so you can kind of search for it and know which one to download or maybe if you see that the video looks kind of choppy you can look at the bitrate and the frame rate and see whether it's your computer is just not able to display the video correctly or maybe it just has a low frame rate on the video or even another example if the audio is not in the right language you can use this to see what other languages or subtitles and stuff there might be on the video file although a lot of video players will also have this information but this you'll have it all in one place all right we're up to number eight and this one is queue BitTorrent now for the longest time I believe utorrent was kind of like the favorite torrent software on internet most people liked that one but lately the consensus is that it's kind of gotten a bit bloated there's a lot of adware on it so it seems like the new favorite is queue BitTorrent and this is because it really is more like what utorrent used to be it's super lightweight it just works there's no adware or anything it's obviously free and you have a ton of different settings all the same settings and maybe more that you get on any other torrent program and it just works all right coming near the end we got a couple more and number nine is called media player classic also called MPC for short now everybody probably already knows about VLC which is another super popular media player and I do use that one too but I found that sometimes VLC is kind of clunky it's a bit stuttery it doesn't always play videos back well and that's why I usually just go with MPC by default and if I come across a program or a video file rather that has a really obscure codec then VLC is usually what that is best for media player classic is not exactly the prettiest video player it kind of looks old almost but I do find it runs really smoothly and it like never stutters and also another weird thing is I don't know about you but it seems like VLC a lot of times when playing a video file it seems like the colors are off like the darkness in the dynamic range especially things look washed out and I've seen other people talk about this but I have not had that problem at all with MPC I don't know if maybe it's just the way it renders the colors but again that's another reason I use the MPC is it just looks better and it also again as most of the same features it can pretty much do all the other stuff and this is probably best combined with a codec pack like the K light codec pack that way it's gonna be able to play pretty much anything that VLC can and I wouldn't choose one or the other obviously like I said I do have both installed and for whatever MPC can't play or it's being weird then I'll just go over to VLC alright finally number 10 we have one that is definitely going to be for more advanced users and it is called chocolately and it is a package manager for Windows like you typically see in Linux if you've ever used Linux you know there's the apt-get package manager where it makes it really easy to install programs but you do have to use the command line obviously where instead of having to go out to every website and search for the program you want to download you simply type in the command line the name of the thing and it automatically downloads it installs it no downloading files to do it or anything like that it also makes it super easy to manage these installations because typically you can just update all the programs all at once through the package manager you can also uninstall multiple things at once using the command line so it's pretty easy in most cases and this is also SuperDuper useful if you're like doing a new installation of Windows and you want to install all the same stuff that you had before there is a community maintained repository of thousands of different packages of most popular software even some that isn't super popular and kind of obscure I found has been on there so when you want to install something or make a list of things to install you just go on the chocolaty website you go to the packages search for it and then take note of whatever it's called and then you can install again multiple at once or just one and then it does it all automatically it's kind of similar if you've ever heard of nine it-- which is kind of like a more GUI user friendly version but ninite only has like 90 programs or so that are like the most popular software out there or as luckily has thousands so there's also a pro version for like people who want to install I don't know like on many many different computers or have some Advanced Options there's like a business option but for most users if you're just trying to install a bunch of programs at once then this is obviously a good option and it is free so that's it ten really cool Windows programs you might have never heard of before if you have any suggestions of your own that I have never mentioned before let us know down the comments maybe I'll include it in a future video if you want to keep watching I'll put some other videos on here like some previous videos I made about popular Windows programs you can just click on those if you want to see that and until next time guys thanks for watching have a good one

Channel: ThioJoe

Views: 522,941

Keywords: technology, tech, free software, best free software, best free windows software, best free windows programs, cool windows software, cool windows programs, cool windows utilities, software, windows, best software, free programs, software programs, best software programs, top 10, top 10 software, top 10 free software, cool software, top free programs, freeware

Id: -weUs4Le6B0

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2019