5 Free Apps Your New Windows PC Needs
Written by Alan Saturday, 25 December 2010 06:30
Many of you have received a shiny new PC this morning. One of the first thing most of us do with a new PC, after booting up and doing a little personal customization, is look for programs to install. Here’s 5 good ones that you’ll want to put on your list.
Microsoft Security Essentials
The first thing any PC should have is good security. Microsoft’s free Security Essentials is a great antivirus tool. Before you do anything else online you should install this. Version 2.0 has just been released, and we took a quick first look the other day. You can find out quick take, as well the download link below.
Windows Live Essentials
Windows Live Essentials gives you a lot of the tools that Windows used to come with. You’ll find Windows Movie Maker, Messenger, Photo Gallery, Mail, Writer, Family Safety, and Live Mesh. All of these are incredibly useful programs. Movie Maker, especially, has been greatly improved.
Picasa
There’s no bigger use for PC’s these days than storing, retouching, and organizing digital photos. YOu can do all of those things easily with Picasa and PicasaWeb.
VLC Player
I am a big fan of Windows Media Player and I use it most of the time. But, WMP doesn’t play all formats and for everything it does and doesn’t do there VLC player. There doesn’t seem to be an audio or video format that you can throw at it and make it choke. It’s spectacularly diverse and easy to use
Mp3tag
Everyone these days seems to have a huge digital library of music. And if you’re like me then some of it is probably mislabeled in one way or another. A while back we took a look at 3 ways to clean up your music library and this was my favorite tool for it.
So there are 5 excellent free programs to get you started. We have begun compiling a list of our favorite free software here, but it’s not a very long list as of yet. Check back often though as new things are added regularly.
