MajorGeeks Top Freeware Picks
By Timothy Tibbetts |
MajorGeeks.Com takes pride in hand-selecting the best Freeware, Shareware, Freemium, and Open Source software. However, in our 15,000 plus listings, you can find the cream of the crop, or as we call it, the top 1%. We are obviously fans of payware programs. Profit tends to lead toward high-level features and development. But, damn, we do love our freeware. Forged by talented authors or open source groups with a goal to make something useful and beautiful. Most are niche, but some compete toe to toe with the big boys... and they save you a ton of money. These are what we think are the best of that group.
There are few freemium listings included that we could not avoid. For example, Malwarebytes, a household name, is included. You can scan for free, but real-time protection requires a license.
This list has been maintained for over ten years, and some of these programs have lived on this list since day one. It's a living document with additions and subtractions throughout the year. However, we give it a massive overhaul once a year, keeping items fresh and taking in your input.
We want to hear YOUR opinion. Leave a comment below if you think we forgot something.
All-In-One Tweakers
MajorGeeks Windows Tweaks: If we made it, we must think it is pretty awesome, right? MGWT is a collection of over 200 of our favorite system tweaks, scripts and hidden features in a browsable interface.
Advanced SystemCare: ASC is an all-in-one suite to keep your computer running fine and forget about it.
Wise Care 365: A solid, all-in-one suite that pretty much does it all. There's a video on the download page.
Glary Utilities: Has a Disk cleaner, registry cleaner, startup manager, and much more.
Extended GodMode: Expands on GodMode with saveable search, custom colors and fonts, and much more. Video tutorial available.
Honorable Mention:
X-Setup (Older): X-Setup was a pretty hardcore tweaking program but was abandoned in 2002. The author agreed to provide the key to Majorgeeks to live on. We wouldn't run this on a modern system, but if you are still rocking Win 8 or back.. This is the one.
Anti-Spyware & Anti-Malware
IObit Malware Fighter: The biggest competitor to Malwarebytes. They have a long history and hate each other, but that's good for the consumer.
SpywareBlaster: Not a removal tool but a proactive program. Install it once and forget it. The program isn’t updated very often but the definitions file is - which is the important part.
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware: Malwarebytes is one of our all-time top downloads for a good reason. It's simple, fast, and effective. Scanning for problems and removal of malware is free. You can purchase full-time protection so you don't get infected again.
Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool: Checks Windows computers for infections by specific malicious software. Not hardcore, but a great system check.
Anti-Virus Protection
Windows Defender: The antivirus section has massively changed in the past years. Most free antivirus programs are rarely free and often bloated. We recommend you uninstall your antivirus. Once uninstalled, Windows Defender will take over. We're having difficulty recommending any other freeware antivirus app due to bloat, poor performance, and hard-sell tactics.
BitDefender: One of the last and best freeware antivirus apps, ceased making it available at the end of 2021. Has brought their free version back - well freemium. (Thanks Seth)
DefnderUI provides a graphical user interface for Windows Defender that allows users to easily access and configure the settings.
Clam AV may not be for the average Windows User, but for Linux, Clam AV is your choice. Clam is multi-platform and open source with a fast scanner - but it shines when used in an email server or gateway environment.
Backup
Reset This PC: is part of Windows and makes resetting your Windows 10 or 11 to factory settings, without losing your files, easy for anyone. We stopped using drive cloning software thanks to Reset This PC. The link is to an article we wrote as to how to use it.
FBackup: a free, lightweight automated backup program that can effectively help protect your important files and folders from being lost.
Cobian Reflector: Designed to back up files on your computer or network on a schedule. It also can FTP.
Clonezilla: An Open Source partition, disk imaging, and cloning program similar to True Image or Norton Ghost. It's an all-in-one disk management suite. You won't find anything like this for free or Open Source.
Personal Backup: Can configure and unlimited about of data set to any destination folder located on a local fixed or removable drive, Windows network server or an FTP server using the Windows native task scheduler to mange each backup.
Macrium Reflect FREE Edition: Make an accurate and reliable image of your HDD for free.
Honorable Mentions:
XXCLONE: XXCLONE clones your hard drive to another hard drive with the system files, installed applications, and all of your data files. Not updated since 2017, but it still works in a category where there are very few free apps.
Karen's Replicator: Karen has been around for years, and we love it. Karen Kenworthy passed away on April 12, 2011, and in 2019, someone began updating her apps again. Karen was one of those who made software to help people for free.
Browsers
Opera GX: The ‘gamer’ version of the original Opera Browser. But don't let the Gamertag fool you; it is packed with unique features to make browsing fun again for anyone while continuing to be a fast, safe, and secure web browser that started in 1995.
Microsoft Edge: We've had so much fun picking on Microsoft Edge years that we were surprised when Microsoft moved Edge to a Chromium-based browser, and we loved it. Now, with CoPilot AI built into the browser, Edge is best in class in that regard.
Vivaldi: Superfast, chromium-based browser with a ton of features - including an in-browser game called ‘Vivaldia, But Vivalidi is built with privacy at its core. Pair with DuckDuckGo as a search engine, and enjoy!
Brave: Brave is a Chromium-based web browser focused on speed, privacy, and security.
Google Chrome: Google Chrome is the market dominator even though it tends to use a lot of memory. Still, Chrome remains one of the best browsers that integrates nicely other services, specifically with your Google Apps. .
Mozilla Firefox: Mozilla Firefox is one of the most popular browsers out there, and for a good reason. It is fast, stable, and offers enough add-ons to make sure it works as you prefer.
Data Recovery
Recuva Portable: An excellent choice. It's fast, easy to use, and can even recover lost emails, deleted music, and Microsoft Word documents or temporary files.
Undelete Onclick: This may be one of the newer “must haves” on a PC. Wicked simple to use.
FreeUndelete: This hasn't been updated since 2001, but the same recovery methods apply to this day.
PC INSPECTOR Smart Recovery: Bad news? It hasn't been updated since 2006. Good news? It still works! Mainly for photos from digital cameras, including memory cards.
TestDisk & PhotoRec: File data recovery software designed to recover lost files, including video, documents, and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures
Diagnostics
Tweaking.com Windows Repair: Are you getting errors from your computer? Windows Repair will go through your system and reset and repair any potential problems with your computer. Easily the best repair tool on MajorGeeks that's free.
Windows Repair Toolbox: This includes most third-party applications and utilities you might need to repair any Windows problems in one small application. Video tutorial available.
Sergei Strelec's WinPE: Creates a bootable DVD or thumb drive for the computer maintenance, partitioning, backup, restore, diagnostics, data recovery, and more.
Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD): With UBCD, you can boot your computer from the CDDVD drive to run tools. This is especially useful if you have a computer that will not start at all.
Microsoft Sysinternals Suite: containing dozens of Sysinternals troubleshooting utilities and Help files.
Drive Cleaners
Privazer: Takes the traditional drive cleaner approach and focuses on security. PrivaZer is currently our pick of picks in this category.
Wise Disk Cleaner: Do you find CCleaner too conservative? Wise Disk Cleaner can often free up an additional gigabyte or more removing files CCleaner won't touch. I happen to love it personally.
CCleaner: Been around and highly rated for many years but has moved to the dark side a bit since the acquisition by Avast. We still use it for the startup manager and registry cleaner.
HDCleaner: Designed to completely clean your Windows PC, including registry and backup, encrypting data, splitting files, removing traces, and more.
Dude: Duplicate files are the biggest space wasters on your system. Dude is a multi-platform, portable duplicate file detector. We love how you can save time with this app by selecting exactly the folders you want.
Driver Updaters
Driver Booster: I've used this one for years, and it works great. They offer a premium version and typically a third-party app during installation, so watch for that.
Snappy Driver Installer Origin: An Open Source fork of Snappy Driver Installer designed by a former contributing developer and build master who felt that the project had gone astray.
Snappy Driver Installer: A driver updater geared toward geeks and techs alike. Video tutorial available.
NVIDIA GeForce Experience: Comes with NVIDIA driver installations and watches for new drivers. Windows 10 & 11 manage most drivers well, but not video drivers.
AMD Auto-Detect and Install Radeon Graphics Drivers: Detect your graphics card and operating system and tell you if a new driver is available.
Intel Driver & Support Assistant: Scans your machine for the latest up-to-date drivers currently available from Intel.
File Compression
7-Zip: The list of what we would consider excellent compression tools is pretty short, so your choices are easy. 7-Zip is simple, portable, and easy to use.
PeaZip: The list of what we would consider excellent compression tools is pretty short, so your choices are easy. This one or the other one :) PeaZip is open source and has many additional options if you want more control.
Firewalls
Windows Firewall Control: Extends the functionality of the Windows firewall.
Fort Firewall: A simple to use Open Source Windows Firewall app.
Tweaking.com - Repair Windows Firewall: Will repair the Windows Firewall if broken / problematic.
Flash or Thumb Drives
Rufus: A small Open Source utility that helps quickly format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB keys/pen drives, memory sticks, etc.
Ventoy: An Open Source tool to create a bootable USB drive for Windows and Linux ISO files.
YUMI: Create a multiboot USB flash drive containing multiple operating systems, antivirus utilities, diagnostic tools, disc cloning, and more.
balenaEtcher: A useful Open Source cross-platform image burner for SD cards and USB drives.
WinDiskWriter: A macOS application that enables writing Microsoft Windows onto bootable flash drives using a macOS-based computer.
Games
Gaming Debloater: Allows for the disabling of several Windows services intended to enhance speed.
AntiMicro is a graphical program used to map keyboard keys and mouse controls to a gamepad
SpeedGuide.net TCP Optimizer A free, easy to use program that provides an intuitive interface for tuning and optimizing your internet connection. Side note: Philip from SpeedGuide is one of the people who inspired us into promoting utility software.
Aurora is a game trainer and management tool supporting over 7000 games. Free version gives you 3 games per week.
Graphics
FastStone Image Viewer: Don't be fooled by the word viewer here. They should have called it "Faststone Image Viewer, Editor, Converter and More," but I guess that would be a bit long.
Krita Studio: Open-source, all-in-one painting application geared for professional artists, VFX, and game studios.
XnView: Quickly and easily view, process, and convert your image files in a browser / file manager type interface. For you photographers, XnView also supports CR2 & RAW files.
IrfanView: You can apply everything written about XnView (above) and apply it to IrfanView. Both have a very long history. One neat advantage to IrfanView is the IrfanView Plugins.
PicPick: Screen capture tool that includes an intuitive image editor, color picker, color palette, pixel ruler, protractor, crosshair, whiteboard, and more.
Wildbit Viewer: Compact & fast image viewer with a slide show and editor.
Graphic Editing
Paint.net: Made to replace the old Microsoft Paint that came with Windows that grew into an excellent program offering features that make it an excellent alternative for Photo Editing and manipulation.
The Gimp: Used for MANY different photo management purposes, but its real power lies in photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. Photoshop is expensive. The Gimp is a real free alternative.
Inkscape Portable: Aims to be an open-source editor to replace Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X. It won't replace all of those but does come close.
Monitoring
CrystalDiskInfo: An open-source HDD health monitoring utility. It displays basic HDD information, and monitors S.M.A.R.T. values and disk temperature.
Wireless Network Watcher: A small freeware monitoring tool that quickly scans your wireless network and then lists all the computers and devices that are currently connected
SysGauge: Enables you to precisely monitor your machine's performance in numerous areas in real time.
Mem Reduct is a small application that monitors and cleans your computer memory.
Multimedia
VLC Media Player: Full-featured multimedia player for various audio and video formats and DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server.
SMPlayerSlim multi-platform media player with thumbnail and Youtube support.
Kodi: A free and Open Source software media player and digital media entertainment hub. The geeks choice for a media server.
Media Player Classic Black Edition (MPC-BE): An often overlooked, 5-star app based on the original "Media Player Classic" project and "Media Player Classic Home Cinema" project.
Shotcut: Cross-platform video editor capable of converting and editing video files in various formats.
foobar2000: Small footprint audio player for Windows. Simple, customizable colors and gets the job done. The installation offers to install it or use it as a portable app.
PotPlayer: A comprehensive video and audio player that supports TV channels, subtitles, and skins.
Universal Media Server: A free home media server that can stream to all your devices with little or no configuration.
Audacity: An Open Source audio application designed to be a full-featured yet easy-to-use multi-track recording and editing suite. Fantastic for a home studio.
Microsoft Office Alternatives
Apache OpenOffice: An open Source MS Office alternative with a Word-compatible word processor, a complete Excel-compatible spreadsheet program, and more. Huge user base.
LibreOffice: Powerful all-in-one office suite that combines pretty much everything you need to increase workflow productivity. Love it!
SSuite Office: Provides you with a stable and robust way to improve your productivity and document format compatibility.
SSuite Office - Premium HD: Feature-rich office suite that works better on HD and larger monitors than the above version.
Partitioning
Partition Logic: Create, delete, erase, format, defragment, resize, copy, and move partitions and modify their attributes. As a bonus, it can copy entire hard disks from one to another. It has a few limitations (see description) but should do what you need.
GParted Live: A large (over 210 MB) program but runs as a bootable live cd. It's a good program to use if you cannot make changes with other programs.
Super Fdisk: You can quickly and easily create, delete, format partitions on IDE/ATA/SATA/SCSI hard disk drives without destroying data.
IM-Magic Partition Resizer: Free partition software to help expand, move, shrink, and merge partitions without destroying data.
Parted Magic: Employs GParted and Parted core programs to handle partitioning tasks while featuring other useful programs easily. Alas - has gone payware. However, we have the last Freeware version listed. So grab it.
Password Managers & Recovery
KeePass Password Safe: Open-source password manager/ safe that helps you manage your passwords securely.
KeeWeb: Free cross-platform password manager that includes full compatibility with KeePass.
LastPass Password Manager: This easy-to-use password manager will make your browsing a lot easier and much more secure without having to remember multiple passwords.
Buttercup : A password manager for all your accounts built for your desktop or Google Chrome. Also, we like calling people Buttercup, so that's fun. Buttercup.
Asterisk Key: Shows passwords hidden under asterisks. Shhhhh don’t tell anyone. Video available.
WirelessKeyView: can recover all stored wireless network security keys/passwords (WEP/WPA).
ProduKey: An essential utility for retrieving lost ProductIDs and CD-Keys for Microsoft Office, Windows, and more. Video tutorial available.
ShowKeyPlus: A portable freeware app to retrieve and save your Windows product key if you lose it.
PDF Alternatives
Sumatra PDF: Small, light on resources, and completely portable, this is a nice choice for basic PDF viewing, which is all most people need.
PDF24 Creator: Create or convert PDF files into multiple file formats.
PDF-XChange Viewer: A 16-17 MB alternative to Adobe PDF. Better than Adobe, like all the others listed here.
Unity PDF: Not just a reader but lets you merge, split, divide, rotate, protect PDF files, and a lot more.
PDF Mixer A powerful PDF page editor tool that allows you to merge PDF documents into one. You can also import pages from WORD, Excel, PowerPoint to a PDF.
Screen Capture and Recording
ScreenToGif Small tool that allows you to record a selected area of your screen and save it as a GIF.
ShareX:Take a screenshot or a screencast, upload it, and get the URL copied to your clipboard with a single hotkey.
QRecorder is a straightforward no-frills screen recording utility.
Free Screen Recorder X: Powerful but easy-to-use tool for recording the screen's display.
Software Updaters
MajorGeeks News and Software Updater: Catch up on your software, news and latest memes with this little beauty.
Patch My PC is a portable app designed to check your system against the current version of over 300 apps and allow for streamlined updating.
IObit Software Updater: Freeware app that helps you update all outdated programs with just one click and install all popular must-have programs easily. The installer of this program offers some other programs - so watch for that.
UCheck: A simple to use app that can check your computer for out-of-date apps as well as hardware and system drivers. Very handy but their nag screen knocks this one down a peg for us.
System Information
Tweaking.com - System Information: Super fast app that drops all your system information into a handy text file.
SIV (System Information Viewer): An app for displaying useful Windows, network, and hardware info.
Belarc Advisor: Belarc Advisor can be found in use by most techs. It shows all of your system information on a web page.
Speccy: Another solid from the CCleaner guys. It will offer to install Ccleaner so watch for that. A portable version is available.
HWiNFO32: A system information tool but has benchmarking, monitoring, and more. Driver Updates tab in the program is an advertisement, so don't fall for that. 64-bit is available, but 32-bit runs just fine.
Open Hardware Monitor: Open Source utility that will monitor temperature sensors, voltages, fan speeds, clock speeds, and CPU core load of your machine.
Text Editors (Notepad, Wordpad Alternatives)
QOwnNotes: Portable Open Source app that allows you to create notes that can be efficiently sorted, organized, printed, exported, and more.
Notepad++: Microsoft Notepad included with Windows works. That's about it. Notepad++ allows you to have Notepad on steroids. It has a WYSIWYG interface and is handy for programmers, including HTML, Java, PHP, Pascal, Perl, and more.
SynWrite: A free text editor designed mainly as a complete environment for web coders and writers.
CintaNotes: Sometimes, you don't need a text editor but simply a note-taking application. This one does the job and keeps it simple. Sync via DropBox and other places across computers. Run from a thumb drive.
RJ TextEd: A web development tool plus a text editor with many features, including syntax highlighting advanced column mode and text folding.
Uninstallers
IOBit Uninstaller: Can remove programs and deep scan leftover files, folders, and registry entries. This one does offer to install their Advanced System Care, so watch that at the end.
HiBit Uninstaller: Can completely uninstall Windows programs and features ten more tools, including a drive and registry cleaner, process and startup manager, and more. Video tutorial available.
Revo Uninstaller: While Revo is now only updated as shareware, an older, freeware version is still available. Revo has been listed here for 20 years, and many geeks swear by it.
GeekUninstaller: Simple, small, and portable. Export to HTML, force removal, look up assigned registry keys, and more. Pretty amazing what is packed into this small program.
BCUninstaller: this uninstaller is focused on removing large amounts of applications at once in a small amount of time. Video tutorial available.
Display Driver Uninstaller: A graphics driver removal tool that helps remove all remnants of AMD, Nvidia, and Intel graphics card drivers. Video tutorial available.
Feedback, suggestions, and complaints are welcome in the comments below.
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Updates:
1/24/2024. Yearly pruning. We added a few categories and added some new names to the list -- removing quite a few. Some grammar fixes. Quite a bit of editing.
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