Items14The creator’s order
- 1
Microsoft PowerToysMicrosoft's own free, open-source toolbox, and the single install that fixes the most small irritations at once. Command Palette is a fast keyboard launcher for apps, commands and tools; FancyZones snaps windows into layouts far beyond Windows' built-in snapping; PowerRename does bulk renames with…0 - 2
Everything (software)Type part of a filename and the match appears as you type, across every local drive. That is the whole pitch, and nothing in Windows itself comes close.
Everything indexes names rather than contents, which is why it is so quick: a fresh Windows 11 install of around 250,000 files takes about five…0 - 3
Process ExplorerTask Manager tells you something is busy; Process Explorer tells you what and why. Written by Mark Russinovich and published by Microsoft as part of Sysinternals, it shows every process with its owning account, and its lower pane lists the handles and DLLs each one has open or loaded.
The search…0 - 4
SysinternalsAutoruns
The honest answer to "why is this PC slow to start?" Autoruns lists everything set to launch at boot or sign-in: Run keys, startup folders, services, scheduled tasks, Explorer shell extensions, drivers and more, far beyond what Task Manager's Startup tab shows.
Tick Hide Signed Microsoft…0 - 5
7-ZipWindows can open a zip, but the moment someone sends a 7z, a tar or a split archive you need a real archiver. 7-Zip is it: small, mostly LGPL-licensed, free to use, and with no trial nag to click through.
Its own 7z format, using LZMA and LZMA2, squeezes files harder than zip, and even when you…0 - 6
Windows Package ManagerNot something you install so much as something you start using: WinGet ships with Windows 11 and modern Windows 10 as part of App Installer. It is the quickest way to put the rest of this list on a new machine, without hunting through download pages that bury the real button among ads.
winget…0 - 7
Notepad++The text editor for config files, logs and scripts when a full development environment is overkill. Notepad++ is free and GPL-licensed, built on the Scintilla editing component and written against the plain Win32 API, so it stays light and quick to open. Tabs, syntax highlighting and regex search…0 - 8
ShareXSnipping Tool covers a quick grab. ShareX covers everything after it: region, window and scrolling captures, screen recording, text recognition from a capture, and an after-capture pipeline that can annotate, save, copy and upload in one keystroke.
It is free, open source, carries no ads and needs…0 - 9
WizTreeWhen the drive fills up, WizTree answers "where did it all go?" in seconds rather than minutes. On NTFS it reads the Master File Table straight off the disk instead of walking every folder, then shows a sortable tree and a treemap where the biggest blocks are the files worth deleting.
Mind the…0 - 10
WinDirStatThe disk analyzer to use where licenses matter. WinDirStat is open source, works offline and shows no ads, and its colored treemap still makes oversized folders obvious at a glance.
For years it was the slow option, essentially frozen since the mid-2000s. The 2.x rewrite that began in 2024 changed…0
