- Microsoft Excel. Microsoft products get a lot of (not undeserved) flak for bloat and vulnerabilities, but this one just plain works. It's just more powerful with more QoL features than its equivalents like OO Calc.
- MAX Data Recovery. Not a particularly well-liked piece of software as far as I know, but I was so impressed with it when I managed to repair the corrupted files from broken GTA San Andreas CDs with it back when I was a teenager.
- Notepad++. Fast, light and just works.
- QupZilla. Yes, it may be rough around the edges, sometimes freeze up trying to restore sessions with too many tabs, lack a split-screen source inspector or an extension support, have an old-school GUI, but it's largely stable, light and fast with a unique, clean file structure (DLL over JS), which makes it harder to develop malicious extensions for it. Even though it can theoretically be done, there are too few QZ users for it to be worthwhile.
- uBlock Origin. It's just the best ad blocking browser extension.
- Tampermonkey. Not only does it help you write useful content scripts, it can also be used for quickly testing the content scripts you're using in an extension you're developing.
- The older versions of Malwarebytes.
I also like the games GTA San Andreas, Mount & Blade: Warband, Vangers: One for the Road etc... and Minesweeper. I'm not too demanding about graphics and stuff.
PS. Honorable mentions for these two:
- 7-Zip. Not only is it fast and powerful, but it can also directly extract most compressed file formats. Too bad it's not always compatible with WinRAR archives.
- Python. If programming languages count, this one also deserves a place. It's clean, easy to read and write with indents instead of brackets and semicolons all over the place. New libraries and packages can easily be installed with the pip script.