Must have Windows Program?

[jasonwj322a]

Im new to this so I just downloaded Adobe programs, browser, and games. What other useful programs are there? I plan on programming on it, any good programs on Windows 10?

Thank you!

[Nobel]

Notepad++ 64bit.

F.lux.

[jasonwj322a]

2 minutes ago, Nobel said:

Notepad++ 64bit.

F.lux.

What exactly do they do?

[vanished]

Almost anything you can think of, Windows has it... rather than trying to just collect every program that might be useful, think "what do I need to do?" and then look for that.

[SageOfSpice]

3 minutes ago, Nobel said:

Notepad++ 64bit.

F.lux.

Wow, F.lux looks pretty cool. I can't believe I've never heard of that.

 

Well, I don't know a ton about programming, but if you're doing anything for an extended period of time, it'd probably get boring.

 

So:

 

Toastify

3VRX

 

Toastify allows you to set up hotkeys to control the Spotify client without having to tab to it, or take up screen space.

3VRX allows you to assign media keys if your keyboard doesn't have them, so you can control volume and screen brightness without having to click anything.

[2FA]

7 minutes ago, jasonwj322a said:

What exactly do they do?

Notepad++ is a much better text editor than the built in one.

 

F.lux is used to automatically adjust the color/brightness of your monitor based off of time of day to reduce eye strain.

[jasonwj322a]

2 minutes ago, DeadEyePsycho said:

Notepad++ is a much better text editor than the built in one.

 

F.lux is used to automatically adjust the color/brightness of your monitor based off of time of day to reduce eye strain.

How will flux effect the quality of the image? I have a 4k screen so I want to use it the fullest.

[2FA]

1 minute ago, jasonwj322a said:

How will flux effect the quality of the image? I have a 4k screen so I want to use it the fullest.

I've never used it myself but it's mainly used to filter out blue light which is a major source of eye strain. Maybe try it out and see if it's something you mind?

[kirashi]

Notepad++, Spotify, Discord, MailBird, DropBox Pro, MEGA, Adobe CC, Handbrake, Transmission-BT

[vanished]

6 minutes ago, jasonwj322a said:

How will flux effect the quality of the image? I have a 4k screen so I want to use it the fullest.

I would always suggest exhausting your on/in-monitor controls before resulting to software solutions.

[jasonwj322a]

1 minute ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I would always suggest exhausting your on/in-monitor controls before resulting to software solutions.

How should I approach that?

[vanished]

Just now, jasonwj322a said:

How should I approach that?

Your monitor probably lets you set colour profiles like "warm", "cool", etc. or for more fine tuning, the manual amount of R G and B.

[Cylon Muffins]

7zip - all in one file decompression 

 

Secunia PSI - Automatically keeps many of your apps up to date 

 

Benefit of f.lux is it adjusts automatically according to the time of day, no need to be constantly messing with monitor controls everyday

[LAwLz]

All of these are free, and most of them are open source.

 

7-zip - High performance file archiver. It's like WinRAR, but free and performs better.

 

Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive/whichever online storage program you use - Syncing is really neat.

 

Firefox or Chrome - The only thing you should use IE and Edge for is to download another browser.

 

Foobar2000 - Very customizable music player.

 

KCP - Very good video player. You could use VLC as well if you want, but I prefer KCP.

 

Keepass2 - Password manager.

 

Thunderbird - Great email client from the good folks at Mozilla.

 

Notepad++ - Sooooo much better than notepad. Way more functionality and seems to perform better too (with very large text files at least).

 

VMWare Workstation Player - You never know when you need a VM to run some sketchy program.

 

Greenshot - Very good screenshot took. Has a ton of options to make it work just like you want it to.

 

Audacity - My go-to program for anything audio related, like recording.

 

Handbrake - Easy to use video transcoding program.

 

IrfanView - In my opinion, the best image viewer for Windows. Takes quite a bit of customization to get it to work and look like you want though, because the defaults are pretty terrible.

 

YouTube-dlg - Download youtube videos in full quality. None of that transcoding bullshit.

 

WinDirStat - For when your drives are all of a sudden full and you have no idea what takes up so much space.

 

Speccy - Nice and easy way of looking at your computer specs.

 

OBS - Video recording and streaming program.

[vanished]

2 minutes ago, Cylon Muffins said:

Benefit of f.lux is it adjusts automatically according to the time of day, no need to be constantly messing with monitor controls everyday

Does it actually talk to the monitor though like how some programs can change the in-monitor settings over DVI, or is it just a software thing?  Like, for example, the difference between actually turning down the backlight and just digitally crushing the output range, like 0 - 255 -> 0 - 100 for example.

[tauwtech]

41 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Speccy - Nice and easy way of looking at your computer specs.

Can"t agree more with you about Speccy. A very user friendly program that shows you the specs and maybe more usefull, the temps of your pc

[Cylon Muffins]

4 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Does it actually talk to the monitor though like how some programs can change the in-monitor settings over DVI, or is it just a software thing?  Like, for example, the difference between actually turning down the backlight and just digitally crushing the output range, like 0 - 255 -> 0 - 100 for example.

No idea how it actually works, you're way is probably better. As a set and forget it, it is easy though

[Dat Guy]

It's hard to tell you what's a "must-have" without knowing what you plan to use Windows for - or, at least, your technical background. Here are some of the allround tools from my usual toolkit, regardless of if you're a developer or a gamer or a casual Office user. Note that I won't suggest text editors to avoid flame wars. (I, for one, found N++ to be really disappointing.)

• ArsClip - flexible multi-item clipboard replacement.
• WinRAR - better than the built-in .zip tool.
• KeePass - the last password manager you'll need.
• Firefox or Vivaldi - browsing the web.
• Chocolatey - downloading software and keeping it up-to-date with just one command.
• ShareX - for all of your screenshotting needs.
• FastStone Image Viewer - precisely what you think it does.

HTH.

[jasonwj322a]

3 hours ago, Dat Guy said:

It's hard to tell you what's a "must-have" without knowing what you plan to use Windows for - or, at least, your technical background. Here are some of the allround tools from my usual toolkit, regardless of if you're a developer or a gamer or a casual Office user. Note that I won't suggest text editors to avoid flame wars. (I, for one, found N++ to be really disappointing.)

• ArsClip - flexible multi-item clipboard replacement.
• WinRAR - better than the built-in .zip tool.
• KeePass - the last password manager you'll need.
• Firefox or Vivaldi - browsing the web.
• Chocolatey - downloading software and keeping it up-to-date with just one command.
• ShareX - for all of your screenshotting needs.
• FastStone Image Viewer - precisely what you think it does.

HTH.

What about 7zip? It was recommended by @LAwLz . 

[Dat Guy]

I switched from 7zip to WinRAR just last year. It was not reliable and fast enough for me. YMMV. 

[vanished]

9 hours ago, Cylon Muffins said:

No idea how it actually works, you're way is probably better. As a set and forget it, it is easy though

Well I'd really like to know since I've heard it mentioned around and sort of just "let it go", but depending on how it works, it's something I would have a strong opinion on.  If it's actually controlling the monitor, that's pretty cool, but if it's just messing with the output signal, that's absolutely terrible and it should probably be avoided.  That would seriously lower your image quality, reducing contrast primarily, and potentially causing discolouration of grays across the spectrum, just to name a few potential problems that come to mind.

[jasonwj322a]

22 hours ago, Nobel said:

Notepad++ 64bit.

F.lux.

 

22 hours ago, kirashi said:

Notepad++, Spotify, Discord, MailBird, DropBox Pro, MEGA, Adobe CC, Handbrake, Transmission-BT

 

22 hours ago, LAwLz said:

All of these are free, and most of them are open source.

 

7-zip - High performance file archiver. It's like WinRAR, but free and performs better.

 

Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive/whichever online storage program you use - Syncing is really neat.

 

Firefox or Chrome - The only thing you should use IE and Edge for is to download another browser.

 

Foobar2000 - Very customizable music player.

 

KCP - Very good video player. You could use VLC as well if you want, but I prefer KCP.

 

Keepass2 - Password manager.

 

Thunderbird - Great email client from the good folks at Mozilla.

 

Notepad++ - Sooooo much better than notepad. Way more functionality and seems to perform better too (with very large text files at least).

 

VMWare Workstation Player - You never know when you need a VM to run some sketchy program.

 

Greenshot - Very good screenshot took. Has a ton of options to make it work just like you want it to.

 

Audacity - My go-to program for anything audio related, like recording.

 

Handbrake - Easy to use video transcoding program.

 

IrfanView - In my opinion, the best image viewer for Windows. Takes quite a bit of customization to get it to work and look like you want though, because the defaults are pretty terrible.

 

YouTube-dlg - Download youtube videos in full quality. None of that transcoding bullshit.

 

WinDirStat - For when your drives are all of a sudden full and you have no idea what takes up so much space.

 

Speccy - Nice and easy way of looking at your computer specs.

 

OBS - Video recording and streaming program.

How is Notepad++ vs OneNote? I currently have OneNote.

[vanished]

1 hour ago, jasonwj322a said:

 

 

How is Notepad++ vs OneNote? I currently have OneNote.

Those serve completely different purposes.

[GoldSolitude]

20 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Well I'd really like to know since I've heard it mentioned around and sort of just "let it go", but depending on how it works, it's something I would have a strong opinion on.  If it's actually controlling the monitor, that's pretty cool, but if it's just messing with the output signal, that's absolutely terrible and it should probably be avoided.  That would seriously lower your image quality, reducing contrast primarily, and potentially causing discolouration of grays across the spectrum, just to name a few potential problems that come to mind.

I believe its software based. I think it does not communicate with your monitor. If it does, how is it communicating with my CRT. I don't think my television is smart enough for that!

[AlTech]

On 1/27/2017 at 3:46 PM, jasonwj322a said:

Im new to this so I just downloaded Adobe programs, browser, and games. What other useful programs are there? I plan on programming on it, any good programs on Windows 10?

Thank you!

Visual Studio 2017 Community is good.

 

I also use VS Code or Atom or my own custom made code editor for more lightweight code editing.

 

GitHub Desktop is a must for me. Discord and Spotify.

 

And of course shameless self promotion , I also use Linus Forum Tips.