You’ve bought home a brand-new laptop and there’s an air of excitement around it. You can’t wait to peel the plastics off it, power it on, setup a new account, and login to the desktop. Then comes the fun part, of choosing the software you install on the laptop. Some of the software are things we need but there are other software that we use for everyday tasks. These are movie players, music players, image editors, browsers among others. There are just too many plenty of software to choose from so we searched the web, far and wide to find the nicest, free software for your laptop. That’s right, software that’s free, also light-weight, efficient and packed with features.
File compression tool – 7-zip
Most popular compression tools either have a nagging reminder that tells you to buy a copy of the software. The default Windows compression tool is very basic, so it doesn’t support too many compression formats. The feature that makes 7-zip so neat is that it’s compact and takes up very little space, and memory. The installer weighs just a megabyte (1 MB). It handles practically every popular compression format, including disc images such as ISO files. You can even use it like a file manager to transfer files from one location to another. All of this make it one of the most efficient and smart bits of software ever.
Image viewer – IrfanView
Windows’ image viewer isn’t intuitive or feature-packed. Going into full screen mode, zooming and navigating across folders is just too confusing. IrfanView is a free and compact image viewer that loads in a second, lets you customize how images are displayed, even lets you bulk convert and resize images so you can easily scale down photos shot on your DSLR or phone, to a size that’s easy to upload to Facebook or attach to mails. It even has an in-built editor if you urgently need to do some amount of complex work done on it. The interface is customizable. The number of features it has could be an entire article by itself. The software has been around since 1996 and is actively updated even to this day. Don’t skip it!
Office suite – Google Office Suite
This recommendation isn’t necessarily a software, it’s a service you access using your web browser. Installed Office suites can be bulky, slow and sometimes unnecessary. For example, some of just need something to edit spreadsheets or only to edit documents, not the entire suite. Google’s online suite that consists of several services such as Docs, Sheets and Slides that do the job just right. There are others you can use as well. Open your web browser, and head over to Google Drive (http://drive.google.com) and you can use it practically for nearly every purpose If you prefer using a suite that installs on your laptop, consider installing LibreOffice. It’s a free office suite and the installer weighs just a little over 152MB.
Web browser – Mozilla Firefox
Google Chrome might be the most popular and a good browser to use, but it has its fair share of criticism. Mozilla Firefox, another old-timer has seen big enhancements over the past couple of years. Some of the newer features allows users to reduce distractions in the form of notifications, and it even stops music from playing on random tabs without your permission. The engine used for the browser makes good use of your hardware and page render times have improved as well. Like Google Chrome, it too has a variety of add-ons to choose from, so you can enhance it by adding new features to it.
Note taking and programming IDE – Notepad++
Notepad is a simple tool bundled with Windows for taking quite notes, but it could have been better. Till that happens, Notepad++ is a similarly named, but much better alternative to use. It keeps notes so you can close Notepad++ in a hurry and return to find your texts still there. It’s made for programmers, so you can simply assign a language to a file, and all your functions, auto-complete, improved formatting and highlights will be available to you. Notepad++ has support for add-ons that further extends its capability. It’s visually customizable too, so you don’t need to use the plain look you’re used to with Notepad.
Media player – Media Player Classic – Home Cinema (MPC-HC)
Media Player Classic – Home Cinema (MPC-HC) looks like a player from the past, something that came out of Windows 98. It’s way better than most of today’s media players – it supports all major formats, it includes support for 4K video playback using the latest HEVC decoders, HDR support and more. Users can adjust colours and other picture settings like you can on a TV. It’s free and it loads in an instant. Once you have it installed, just make sure you set it as the default video player and you’ll never need to download a codec or player again.
Music player – MusicBee
Some of us still store our music offline and there is an eternal search for the perfect music player. Winamp was that player in the past but since it changed hands, it has long been shut down. There are rumours of a new version but there’s no timeline for it. For now, the best music player you can install on your Windows laptop is called MusicBee. Besides having a colourful and fun interface which can be themed to look even better, it takes a bunch of features that you might find useful. It supports podcasts, where you can spend hours listening to episodes on several topics. There is also support for some of Winamp’s extensions.
Game distribution platform – Steam
Gaming isn’t a thing only for full-time gamers. If you’re someone who’s never played games either, you should really give Steam a shot. It’s by far, the most popular game distribution system online. This means you can download the latest games by paying for them, and even find free games across all kinds of genres. Some of the popular titles such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), DOTA2, Grand Theft Auto V can be found online. Those are just some of the thousands of games, Steam allows you to play games online with people across the world. It’s a whole lot of fun. Once you have a game installed, Steam even lets you stream games from your PC to your phone or tablet.
Image editor – Paint.net
Good image editors are some of the most expensive pieces of software around. Paint.net tries to offer all the features you really need in an image editor. This goes well beyond what you can do with an image viewer like IrfanView, the one we mentioned a while back. With those features in place, you can do a lot of interesting things. It’s quite thorough too, while the interface is still simple to use. What’s better, there are plenty of tutorials you can find online that will help you some impressive results. Like most other community developed software, there is also support for add-ons that are worth trying out.
Screenshot tool – Greenshot
It might seem odd that a screenshot capturing tool is on this list. Whether you’re taking screenshots of a game or designing a presentation, you will need to capture information. Using the Print Screen key along with MS Paint just doesn’t cut it anymore – it takes too much time and too many steps. Instead, this free screen capture tool called Greenshot makes some of the most complex actions happen in seconds. It lets you capture multiple screenshots, sections of the screen and it automatically names them and lets you edit them before you send it out on e-mail or plug it into a PowerPoint presentation. There is a lot it can do, and it’s best you read our feature on how to save time taking screenshots using Greenshot.
Video compression – Handbrake
We record a lot of videos when we’re out at a party or a picnic. Unfortunately, with large resolution cameras and 4K video recording phones, we end up storing way too much data. A couple of minutes of video footage can consume a gigabyte of space. Our phones and cameras can’t store all of it, so we transfer it to our laptop or PC. If you’re faced with the dilemma of either, backing up videos or uploading them, perhaps Handbrake can help. It is an extremely easy tool that lets you encode a large bulk of videos at once with just a few clicks. You can resize videos down to the kind of screen you’ll be viewing it on, using presets that come bundled with the software. There are options to change the audio quality, also add chapters to them and even tweak the encoding quality and filters. It’s quite easy one of the simplest, but most effective video compression tools around.
If you have just upgraded to a new model, you should find these software to be very handy. If you’ve been pushing back buying a new laptop, now is a great time. Things are a lot simpler and there are great deals on our product catalogue and at your nearest Reliance Digital store. If you need help on how to buy a new laptop, we have a lot of easy-to-understand directions ranging from how to choose processors, graphics cards to screens, connectivity features, even solid-state drives and why spending just a little more than Rs. 30,000 can be a much better deal!
