Advice Request Best Free Softwares for Windows

Other software
490 Replies 153,630 Views
Share practical recommendations that address the author's needs.
Fast image viewer, very fast:
Very impressed with how light and fluid Phoxee is (maybe the lightest out there). But it's slower than XnView MP to process & load HEIF files. It's also pretty barebones.
 
After an insanely positive response to my earlier thread in 2014, I have decided to create a new thread as per @Jack 's recommendation.

This is still a partial list, and more categories will be added soon. Sadly I had to limit to 1 software per category. Also included only desktop software's no browser extensions etc. Do give your recommendations and alternatives and hopefully you like the list. :)
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List Updates:

*Project Management- Added Taskade (Sep 15 2021
*Sandboxing Software- Added Sandboxie Plus (Mar 14 2021)
*Font Management- Added FontBase (Mar 14 2021)
*Graphic Card Manager - Added MSI Afterburner (Mar 07 2021)
*Duplicate File finder - Added Auslogics Duplicate File Finder (Jan 06 2021)
*IM Client - Replaced Pidgin with All-in-One Messenger (Sep 24 2020)
*Antimalware - Replaced Zemana Antimalware with Emsisoft Emergency Kit (Jun 11 2020)
*Archiver- Replaced Bandizip with 7-zip (Apr 26 2020)

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@jackuars is it possible to update this list once a year?
 
 
Fast image viewer, very fast:
Phoxee is blazing fast and UI is beautiful. I just replaced Pictureflect Photo Viewer with it.
1737653880330.png

Edit: For some reason Webroot classify the exe as bad. Probably Webroot being Webroot.
1737654132727.png
 
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replaced XnView
XnView lags when opening high-resolution images and cannot open them quickly. There is another program called ImageEye that is fast.
  • High quality dithering: Floyd-Steinberg dithering is used for superior perceived image quality when displaying high bit-depth images.
  • Asynchronous file I/O: Images are decompressed at the same time as data is being read - i.e. it doesn't wait for file reads to finish before starting to decode.
  • Speculative decoding & caching of images: While you view a file, the next file in the folder is invisibly being decoded, so that it can be brought up very quickly. When you move to a new image, the old one is cached, so that there's little delay if you toggle back and forth between images.
  • Data parallelism exploitation: Many heavy computational tasks are considerably sped up by using SEE instructions. These SIMD instructions work on 4, 8 or even 16 numbers in parallel.

"The king of all image viewers is Photo Mechanic, but it's not free.
 
Much better than notepad++ and notepad3
 

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