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Imagine, you have a new high end PC with Windows installed. You switch on the PC in excitement only to ask yourself the question, what should I do now? Even the most high end hardware is useless without the right software. This article deals with such five essential software for your PC that do not put any dent on your pocket. For convenience purposes, each software is provided according to the category of its usage. So lets begin.

All of the freeware software mentioned support all versions of Windows including Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

1.  Browsers: It is fair to say that for majority of PC users, surfing the internet is the only major use for their PC. So, it would have been unfair to begin this list with any other category. Although, windows comes with Internet Explorer, it would not be totally wrong to say that IE 8, the latest addition no more than an average web browser. So an alternative web browser is an absolute necessity. Coming to the point, there are two major contenders for inclusion in this category. So, I was unsure which one to choose. So I decided to include them both. (I have intentionally not numbered the browsers)                           

a.  Mozilla Firefox: Mozilla is not totally wrong to say that the Firefox Web browser is the faster, more secure, and fully customizable way to browse the web. Firefox is one of the most complete browsers available. It is considered to be the first browser to shake the Internet Explorer's dominance.One of the good things about Firefox is that it keeps up with the needs of time. Another cool thing about Firefox is that it has an almost perfect score in Acid 3 test. Firefox wins the race with other browsers in terms of available themes, plugins, and security. Overall, Firefox is a must have browser on your PC.




b.  Google Chrome: When Google does something, it is huge and the same is true for Google Chrome. Everything was looking settled in the browser market when Google all of a sudden came up with their new browser with the unique thought of building it almost from scratch. Google's Chrome is currently the fastest browser on the planet with tremendous java script rendering capabilities. Unlike Firefox, Chrome has a perfect score in Acid 3. Themes and plugins also make Chrome a totally customizable browser. Overall, Chrome is fast, safe and customizable. If you have no problem with Google's products, Chrome is a must have browser on your PC.



2.  Media Player: If we check our hard drives, one thing which most of us will find on them is media. To play that media, we need a media player. So a media player is an absolute necessity for most of the PC users. One can say that Windows comes with Windows Media Player, so why is a another media player needed. To them, I say that though Windows has media player but it does not have the ability to play all the media unless you install the necessary codecs. So there is an essential need for another media player which comes with almost all codecs installed. There is one such media player available. It is VideoLAN's free offering, VLC Media Player.

 VLC  Media Player: VLC Media Player is an open source, multi-platform media player that comes with almost all of the codecs required to play all different types of media on your PC. So you do not have to worry about installing codecs to play your files. Moreover, the best part about VLC media player is that being open source, you can install on almost any operating system. Moreover, VLC media player is portable so you can carry it in your flash drive. All this combined with stability, performance and the ability to change skins and take snapshots from videos make VLC Media Player an absolute essential software.



3.  Image Viewer: Well most of us like to take images, and most of us like to edit them as well. This leads to a large amount of images in different formats. The inbuilt image viewer in Windows is not all that bad but the problem arises when we try to open files of different formats. Imagine this situation, you have a great collection of images which are of different formats. Now you invite your friends to show those images. But you have one problem, Windows Image Viewer is not opening the images as they are of unsupported formats. What do you do? Well you install Irfan View with plugins.

Irfan View: Irfan View is developed by Irfan Skiljan, a student at the University of Vienna in 1996. Irfan View is one of the most popular image viewer worldwide. Irfan View gets downloaded over 1 million times each month. One of the major advantages of Irfan View is that it has a light interface, is fast in opening images and can open virtually every type of image image file possible. It can even open Flash files and also serves as a small media player as it can play movie files and mp3 files as well! And that is not all, Irfan View can be used to do minor image editing as well.
Some of its features are:
Slide show, batch conversion , Acquiring from a TWAIN source, Batch acquire or scan,add text to photos, convert to greyscale, enhance colours and even capture screen shots. Honestly, that is not even 5 % of what Irfan View is capable of. All this at a tremendously small size make Irfan View a must have essential.

Irfan View Plugins can add further functionality to this already great software.


4.  Security: This could well be the most important category of this article. Security of a PC is the most important thing in the cyber world now. There was a time when this was not essential but those were the good old days. Now one cannot even think of browsing the web without having an anti virus or anti spyware installed. Big organizations and corporate companies spend millions for securing their network but you don't have to. There are some free tools which do the job equally well without costing you a penny. (To read a full article on securing your PC, visit How to increase your Cyber Security.)

There were many alternatives to include in this category. So I decided to include the most popular one which is presumably AVG Free Edition.

AVG Free Edition: AVG is a popular antivirus with a slick interface having the ability to detect viruses and spywares. It receives updates frequently and is light on resources. Some of its key features are Automatic Update Functionality, Resident Shield, Email Scanner, free lifetime database updates for home users, Anti Spyware, Anti Virus, AVG toolbar and Search Scan. All these premium features are available free of cost in AVG free for home users making AVG a must have free anti virus/spyware for your PC.


 
5.  Office Suite: An office suite has become an absolute necessity these days. We use it to create text documents,create presentations, making tables, graphs recording data, managing schedules,creating spreadsheets and workbooks. A full fledged Office Suite like Microsoft Office will cost you no less than 500 USD (Rs. 25000). That is too high for any user. So what should one do. Well use the Open Office Suite instead.

Open Office Suite: Open Office Suite is an open source, multi lingual, multi platform project developed by Sun Micro systems. Among all the Office Suites available, Open Office is considered to be the only worthy competitor to Microsoft Office. It is fast, available in many languages, works on all computers, stores all data in an international open standard format, read and write files from other common office packages and the best of all, is free of charge for any purpose(commercial or private).


These freeware will definitely help you to make your PC more usable. Although there are many more free software for Windows that are worthwhile, these 5 are an absolute must for a freeware dominated Windows PC.