Top 10 Free Windows Utilities

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers comm this time I'm going to present my top 10 free Windows utilities these all those small programs are often helped me out when I'm working in Windows so let's go and see what's on my list first up we have with Coover which is a utility for recovering deleted or otherwise lost files and you can download this from the C cleaner website and of course links to all of the utilities covered here are in the video description now when you've downloaded recover your gone up its installer I just wanted to point out that any installer you may wish to uncheck the box also install CCleaner and you may wish to go into customize and to uncheck some options here so for example personally I don't want recover integrated into my recycle bin or my Explorer menus I don't want automatic updates now to demonstrate how recuva works I've inserted a flash drive and if we look at the flash drives contents here you'll see the drive is empty but if we go to recuva and we pick up that drive which is down there and we press on scan you will see it comes up with a whole list of files which have been deleted from the drive which which can be recovered and indeed if we click on the file you can see we can get a preview of it in the window there and if we click on the info box it tells us his Nexen condition it can be recovered so say for example I want to recover those three files I could click on there click on recover it'll ask me where to recover to which ideally should be a different Drive but here I'm going to use the same flash drive just because I want to it went like that very much we'll say ok and yes we will do that and it'll do the process ok and then hopefully you can see down here the files have come back so there we are recover a great utility for getting back deleted or otherwise lost files you next on my list is a fantastic image view of the windows called earth on view which you can get from earth on view dot com and if you scroll down on the main page you'll see you've got a choice of either 32 or 64 bit versions if in doubt if you don't sure what you need for your computer use the 32 bit version now here I've got the software running showing an image and it's just looking at a folder and we can go back and forth in this folder pressing the arrows or I can use the keyboard see different images if I press ENTER it'll go to full screen and continue flicking through and if I press ENTER again it gets me back to a normal view like that full view back again it's little touches like that that make this I think really nice as a piece of software and if you want you can do a little bit of image editing in this package and we'll just show you the menus you'll see there's a lot of options available here for working on the image doing basic things with it even things like doing you say redeye reduction for your photos there but the thing I would like about this package is how flexible it is you can choose exactly how it works in all circumstances you're in complete control of viewing your images in Windows using this package which is not something you can say when using one of the standard windows image viewers so there we are that's a thank you my favourite package for viewing images in Windows next on my list we have the very popular utility VLC media player which is an open source media player which can play all kinds of different media formats and you can get this from a video land org now it's worth pointing out when you click on the download link you're taken to a download page where you often see adverts and these might confuse you by you might think for example here that's the download link it isn't when you get to his page just wait the file will come up you can download the file and install the player so be careful you don't install some needing to intend to on the video Lander tool website now I've got VLC media player running here and there's not a great as I say about it over the fact it's a great media player for lots of different media formats here I'll get it loaded with that explaining computer's intro which is a play very nicely we could go fullscreen us if we wanted to there we are all running very well let's take it back to a standard view and the main thing I would stress here again is that VLC media player plays lots of different media formats so I like to have it installed on a Windows PC just in case is a piece of video I can't play with any other piece of Windows software next on my list we have angry IP scanner from angry IP dot org which is a scanner to find the IP addresses the Internet Protocol addresses of all the computers all the devices on your network so this can be handy for example if you're setting up a nas device and I point out if you go to download here there were various versions available and the critical thing is I actually use the legacy version which is the oldest version of angry right piece scanner I download this file here because you can run that file that doing any installs at all you don't have to install Java the other things you need for that the other versions but whatever version you use you'll end up with a program which will scan your network so this is set up to scan my network here here is a angry IP scanner if I click on start here you'll see it'll run on through final devices on my network and at there they are all you can see my Odroid HD one now to just come up there and that it's now told me that scanning is now finished so there we are that is our IP scanner a handy utility for locating the computers on your network moving from a fairly technical utility to want to use entirely for leisure purposes we come to MP suite tag which you can download from a mp3 tag dot d e and as I'm sure you can guess this is a utility to allow you to edit the metadata for tags of mp3 files and indeed other audio files so we have a look at this package very straightforward to use very nicely presented I like to keep all of my music in mp3 format I like to buy it from Amazon or rip it from my CD collection things like that and this package just allows me to edit Orbitz tags and change things around and keep good control of it I don't want to have my muted controlled by some to the service like iTunes or some like that I'd have control myself and mp3 tag allows me to do that next on my list we have the free edition of the drive imaging and cloning software MacEwan reflect which you can download from a macaron comm forward slash reflect free now this is great software to use if you wanted for example migrate your operating system from one drive to another or to create or maintain backups and we look at the package itself here it is so if we wanted for example to a clone this dry weaker to click on the drive and clicker clone this disk I'm not going to do that now I don't want to mess anything up on this PC but recently on my channel I did a video called Drive cloning and imaging well I showed you how to create clones and images and work with them in Macomb reflect so if you want to know more about this package look back to that video next on my list of the top 10 free Windows utilities is SD memory card for matter which is made available by the SD Association who actually provide all the standards in the world for SD memory cards and you can download this from the SD card website which is the SD association website and you might be thinking to yourself why do you need a special utility like the one you can download here for formatting SD memory cards currently just format them in Windows well you can but it's best use the official formatter if you're having problems with a card or if a card for example has been corrupted or maybe you've been using it another system another operating system and you need to get it back to a good state so here if we look at the software is a software itself very small little package comes up not a lot of controls we have here and here I've got a window is showing us a plugged in a micro SD card which is coming up as three drives it's been used on a Linux system and therefore it might not be in a state Windows can deal with it perfectly so you want to get it back to a standard state if you use the SD memory card for matters software here will give it to a volume label can't think we'll call it hello for once and we can simply press format do we want to format the card yes we do this is very simple software to use and there we are we've now formatted the card and windows is now happy with it so you might think this is a slightly strange thing to have on the list but if you use SD cards a lot I can assure you if you always format your card with SD card formatter you have far fewer issues with corrupted or otherwise malfunctioning cards well things now getting very exciting because we've reached the top three and third on my list is etching which is utility I've used many times before on this channel because it's used to write operating system images to SD cards and USB drives and other flash media as indeed it says on the screen right here and that hu is now available from villena dot io /h a-- so we look at the package itself filter how got it running I think just down there and the thing I really like about etch it it makes the whole process very straightforward to get your image written to your micro SD card or the flash media so you just select your image so here for example I take this image which is one for a block 64 single board computer and as you can see this is a compressed file it's an X 0 file and that's one of the great things about Ed sure you don't have to decompress any files you've download before you actually use them in the program it'll do all that for you with embers just select our SD card this is the one we've just forms it up with SD card formatter always a good idea to format your cards with SD card for matter before using at you prevent any possible errors and then all we have to do is to click on flash and to tell windows everything's ok and actually we'll get on with writing the image to the SD card so there we are number three on my list of the top free Windows utilities is etching a great utility for writing images to flash media well we've now reached my penultimate entry which is Note tab light which is a free text editing utility effectively a replacement for notepad in Windows but far more sophisticated and you can get this from the website at Note tab dot com now if you go to download you will see that there are various versions available there is a paid version for which there is a free trial but if you want to get a note tab light which is the free version you want to download of course note am light so for bring up the package itself which is running down here you can immediately see why it's called note tab because I've got lots and lots of different text files open here in different tablet so I can move between them you don't have to stack them like this I've chosen to do that and it's worth pointing out this package is highly configurable like many of the other utilities here you can decide exactly how you want to use it I for example chosen they're the font oh I'm looking at on screen just cuz I find it easiest to work with the font of that particular site and you can also see you can use libraries you can pick a live voice them down there or you can pick them from them yeah library bar down there but you can turn all this on off if you wanted everything here it is under your control so there we are my second-favorite free windows utility is the text editor note tab right so you're now probably asking what is my top three windows utility and the answer is veracrypt which is a piece of encryption software which allows you to create virtual encrypted disks virtual encrypted drives on your computer on the USB drives you might carry with you things like that so it's software for keeping your data safe and you can get it from the grower crypt dr. fr and it's worth noting it's based on some earlier and highly popular encryption software called true crypt as it tells us down here true crypt is no longer whether it's in software terms so we've moved on to other things like veracrypt now I did make a video called veracrypt encrypted USB Drive a few years ago which goes into veracrypt in depth but I will show you the basic operation of utility here and to do that I plugged in and of the flash drive if I open up at this PC we'll see the flash drive is here this is a flash drive I carry around in my pocket to keep all my files with me of working projects and it uses veracrypt for encryption so I'll open it up and I use veracrypt here in what's called portable mode so I run the file from Drive itself yes windows we want to do that and we now have to pick a driver to actually picked it already but we basically pick up a bear crypt container which he said that one there my videos container open that up and we press mount and I have to enter my password and enter it'll now wait for a little second and there we are the drive is now mounted and indeed if we just push that down there we can look back in Windows and lo it is look we've got a virtual drive on the system drive S which has got lots of backup files in ironically it's got backups of this very video which is of course yet to be completed you can turn we're really carrying around at thoughts of this video in my pocket so I could access these files I could add to that drive take things away and then when I was finished all I'd have to do is to get a very quick back again and I could dismount the drive and it would dismount things I could checked the USB Drive and all would be good so there we are my top 10 free windows utility it's veracrypt so there we have it the top ten free Windows utilities that I personally find most useful however there are of course lots of other free windows utilities out there so if you know of one you find particularly useful do let us all know about it down in the comment section also if you're looking for free Windows software you might like to look at my video the top 10 free windows applications and looks at free windows applications programs and also my video the top 7 free video editors finally I just want to say here if you are downloading free software for windows will deed for any other platform do take care do make sure you only download programs from legitimate links I've given you links down in in the video description and those are the ones I use as far as I'm aware they aren't legitimate they don't contain malware things like that but do keep your wits about you when you're downloading free software and installing it on your computer but now that's it for another video I've enjoyed what you see there please press the like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and I hope to talk to you again there Rison [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 378,279

Rating: 4.8996844 out of 5

Keywords: free windows utilities, free windows software, free software, Recuva, IrfanView, Irfan View, VLC Media Player, VLC, Angry IP scanner, AngryIP Scanner, IP scanner, MP3Tag, MP3 Tag, MP3 tag editor, Macrium, Macrium Reflect, SD card formatter, Etcher, NoteTab Light, NoteTab, Note tab, notepad replacement, VeraCrypt, Truecrypt replacement, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt

Id: SmkUxr6XADM

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 25 2018