The best free PC software programs aren't about the cost (lack thereof), they’re about a fresh opportunity—collections of code that puts the dumb hardware in your computer to smart use, tools that could accomplish anything from balancing your household budget to helping to cure cancer. Stocking your PC is an intensely personal task. Even still, some programs are so helpful, so handy, so useful across the board that we heartily recommend them to everybody. These free PC programs—a mix of must-haves and delightful auxiliary apps—have earned a place on almost any computer.

Makes loading up a new computer a breeze. Simply head to the Ninite website, select which free software you’d like to install on your PC—it offers dozens of options, including many of the programs named here—and click Get Installer to receive a single, custom.exe file containing the installers for those programs. Run the executable, and Ninite installs all of them in turn, and it automatically declines the offers for bundled bloatware so many free apps try to sneak in. No muss, no fuss, no hassle. It’s wonderful. The enabled by default in Windows 10 provides solid protection for most users, but no single antivirus utility offers bulletproof protection, especially against the latest and most clever threats.

Was designed specifically to find and eliminate those cutting-edge “zero day” vulnerabilites. You can’t schedule scans or even use it as a regular antivirus program, but it’s invaluable when you think that something nasty has slipped by your primary antivirus utility. Premium antivirus options strike a balance between excellent protection, a worthwhile selection of features, and minimal impact on your PC’s performance. PCWorld's guide to can walk you through your options.

Most boxed PCs come chock-full of bloatware intended to make dough for the PC makers, and you probably don’t need (or want) most of it clogging up your system resources. That’s where comes in. This pint-size wonder program scans your PC, brings up a checklist of the bloatware installed on your machine, and helps you wipe ’em all away in one fell swoop. A secondary screen lists all of your programs if you want to nuke even more. Ignore it, or just be careful to avoid erasing something important. Microsoft introduced its own tool to, but it involves performing a complete reinstallation of the operating system. Don’t mess around with it unless you know what you’re doing.

On the surface, is a simple app launcher, and that’s swell all on its own! App launchers let you activate software far faster than navigating Windows, even if you use the Windows key and search for an app by name. But Launchy can do much, much more: open any file or folder in mere seconds, shut down your PC, or even kill processes and perform math calculations with the right. Read superb tutorial and forget about your Start menu.

Launchy is donationware, so you can snag if for free, but we highly recommend tossing the developers a few dollars for this excellent program. Another must-have system tool:. It does all the dirty work required to keep your PC running in tip-top shape, including ditching unwanted cookies, wiping your browser history, deleting unnecessary files, and keeping your Windows Registry sparkling clean. Note: CCleaner recently got mud in its eye when for the purposes of industrial espionage. Piriform now has a safe version of the program available to download from its site. CCleaner is powerful, but even better, it’s free!

(A $25 Professional version with premium support, scheduled cleanings, and automatic updates is also available. Software Data Cable Free Download. ). But what if you want to bring a deleted file back to the realm of the living? Is a clean, simple undelete program from Piriform, the makers of CCleaner.

Be warned: Recuva won't be able to recover all deleted files, and the odds are even lower if you erased a program with a secure delete tool like (another top-notch free program). Even still, Recuva has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.

FreewareFiles.com top 100 free software downloads. Free Download Manager - FreewareFiles Edition 3.8 Pick. Best Essential Software. Download most popular software and games for PC. Read users' reviews and get free safe software updates. Best downloads.

A $20 pro upgrade adds automatic updates, premium customer service access, and support for virtual hard drives. Adobe Reader may be the go-to PDF reader for many people, but it’s by malware peddlers. If you need only basic functionality, go with instead. Sumatra lacks the fancy extras found in many full-featured PDF readers, but when it comes to straight-up reading Portable Document Format files, Sumatra PDF is blazing-fast and completely accurate. Oh, and since it’s less ubiquitous than Adobe’s offering, hackers tend to stay away from Sumatra PDF. If you’re willing to pay for more advanced features, check out PCWorld’s guide to.

Sometimes, blasting tunes is the only thing that makes slogging through a spreadsheet or a stuffed inbox even remotely tolerable. The exact music client you’ll want will depend on whether you’ve already bought into a service, naturally. For musical neophytes I recommend two programs: and. The iTunes Windows client notoriously sucks, but it gets the job done—and that job includes giving you access to a vast universe of premium music downloads and keeping your iPhone’s music library synced with your PC. Spotify, meanwhile, is an all-you-can-eat streaming service with millions of top-tier tunes available, all for free if you don’t mind listening to a few ads. The of the past few years have driven the point home: You need strong passwords, and you need a different password for each site you visit.

Rather than juggling dozens of alphanumeric codes in your noggin, download a password manager. There are several options available, but our favorite is, a cloud-based password manager that generates strong, random passwords and keeps track of your credentials across all your devices for free. Is another stellar option, but the free version is limited to a single device.

PCWorld’s guide to can help walk you through all the available options. PCs excel at helping you Get Things Done—but few of them ship with a productivity suite installed. Fix that, stat! Even if you don’t plan to use a productivity suite regularly, it’s smart to have basic editing capabilities available on your computer.

Legions of people swear by Microsoft’s legendary Office; I do, too. But you don’t have to drop big dollars on Office if you don’t need its myriad bells and whistles. Free—and good—alternatives abound, with (pictured) being the flagship free-and-open-source option. The online-only also rocks.

PCWorld's guide to explains your various options. Song Editing Software Free Download For Windows 8 there. Browsing websites and sending private data over open Wi-Fi hotspots is just begging for hackers to capture the details.

Virtual private networks secure your connection. If you need to log into your work website or email at Starbucks, use to keep your data safe. It’s fast, easy to use, and has a straightforward privacy policy, unlike many VPNs. The free version is limited to just 500MB of data per month, though. If you need more data or want to use a VPN to stream video from overseas, PCWorld’s guide to can walk you through premium options. All work and no play makes!

Valve’s outstanding PC game marketplace,, makes it easy to shrug off the stress of the workday and blow off some. Well, you know. You’ll find tons of free games available on Steam, and games are frequently given away free for a limited time. EA’s rival Origin service also has an On the House program that often provides games for free-as-in-beer free.

Those aren’t your only options though. Check out PCWorld’s guide to for more options than you’ll ever be able to actually play.

8 All Video Downloader is free software that allows you to download all videos from many video streaming sites. It is a very popular, and it also downloads video from other well-known sites such as Dailymotion, Vimeo, and others. Millions of videos available includes a search engine for finding videos and it allows you to add video URLs of your choice.

The software lets you filter the sites that perform the searches and display the corresponding results) as a list or thumbnails. You can preview the videos directly in the interface of All Video Downloader and even use the built-in browser to search, watch and download videos. All Video Downloader is compatible with a large number of output formats for downloading videos or simply extracting audio (AVI, WMV, MPEG, etc.). You can choose from pre-configured settings for certain devices (iPhone, iPad, PS3, PSP, etc.) and manually configure options such as the size and appearance of the video, the number of frames per second, the codecs used, and much more. This free version of All Video Downloader only lets you download two videos at the same time, and convert only four. Set the options, find your video and download it! The process to download videos using the software is easy: all you need to do is first set the parameters and output format, and then perform your search or paste the URL of the video you want.

The videos you add will all appear in the one download manager. And that, in a nutshell, is everything that the software will ask. Practical, but limited to two simultaneous downloads With extended compatibility that covers many websites and file formats, All Video Downloader is the download option of choice for videos. Because it's done in dribs and drabs, however, the number of simultaneous downloads allowed is very limited.

It's also worth noting that the software is at times unable to download some videos. During our test, an error message appeared several times when trying to download a video. All Video Downloader supports the following formats AVI, WMV, MPEG2, MPEG 1, MP4, MOV, FVL, iPod, iPod Touch, iPad, iPhone, Psp, Pd3, DVD.