MajorGeeks.Com takes pride in hand-selecting the best freeware, shareware, Freemium, and Open Source software. However, in our 15,000 plus listings, you can find the cream of the crop, or as we call it, the top 1%. These are the apps that most geeks would recommend to you in their respective categories. There are now (very) few freemium listings included that we could not avoid. For example, Malwarebytes, a household name, is included. You can scan for free, but real-time protection requires a license.
Simple System Tweaker A handful of safe, tested tweaks most geeks will apply to a computer. This does it for you and saves potentially hours.
Advanced SystemCare ASC is an all-in-one suite to keep your computer running fine and forget about it. We like Driver Booster from them, as well.
Wise Care 365 We have used Wise Care 365 over the years, and it's a solid, all-in-one suite that pretty much does it all. There's a video on the download page, so check that out as well. Glary Utilities Glary Utilities has a Disk cleaner, registry cleaner, startup manager, file shredder, process manager, shortcuts to Windows tools, memory optimizer, and much more.
X-Setup (Older) X-Setup was a pretty hardcore tweaking program but was abandoned in 2002. The author agreed to provide the key to Majorgeeks to live on.
JetClean JetClean is rarely updated anymore, yet it has a cult following.
IObit Malware Fighter IObit Malware Fighter is the biggest competitor to Malwarebytes. They have a long history and hate each other, but that's good for you.
SpywareBlaster Not a removal tool but a proactive program to block known rogue websites that install hijackers and more. Install it once and forget it.
Windows Security - Windows Defender The antivirus section has massively changed in the past years. Most free antivirus programs are rarely free and often bloated. We recommend you uninstall your antivirus. Once uninstalled, Windows Defender will take over. We're having difficulty recommending any other freeware antivirus app due to bloat, poor performance, and hard-sell tactics. BitDefender, one of the last and best freeware antivirus apps, ceased making it available at the end of 2021. Game over.
Reset This PC is part of Windows and makes resetting your Windows 10 or 11 to factory settings, without losing your files, easy for anyone. We stopped using drive cloning software thanks to Reset This PC.
FBackup FBackup is a free, lightweight automated backup program that can effectively help protect your important files and folders from being lost.
Cobian Backup Cobian is a backup tool designed to back up files on your computer or network on a schedule. It also can FTP. It uses little resources and can compress files it backs up.
Clonezilla Clonezilla is an Open Source partition, disk imaging, and cloning program similar to True Image or Norton Ghost. It's an all-in-one disk management suite. You won't find anything like this for free or Open Source.
XXCLONE XXCLONE clones your hard drive to another hard drive with the system files, installed applications, and all of your data files. Not updated since 2017, but it still works in a category where there are very few free apps.
Karen's Replicator Karen has been around for years, and we love it. Karen Kenworthy passed away on April 12, 2011, and in 2019, someone began updating her apps again. Karen was one of those who made software to help people for free.
Microsoft Edge We've had so much fun picking on Microsoft Edge that we were surprised when Microsoft moved Edge to Chromium-based. Since you see it here in MajorGeeks Top Freeware Picks, yeah, it's good.
Google Chrome Google Chrome has become the market dominator yet tends to use a lot of memory. Still, Chrome remains one of the best browsers.
Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox is one of the most popular browsers out there, and for a good reason. It is fast, stable, and offers enough add-ons to make sure it works as you prefer.
Opera Opera Web Browser is a free web browser that originally started as a research project back in 1995 and today continues to be a fast, safe, and secure web browser.
Brave Brave is a Chromium-based web browser focused on speed, privacy, and security.
Recuva Portable For free, Recuva is an excellent choice. It's fast, easy to use, and can even recover lost emails, deleted music, and Microsoft Word documents or temporary files.
Wise Data Recovery Wise is another tool that is part of an entire suite of tools. Often overlooked, you would be mistaken to do so.
FreeUndelete Free undelete hasn't been updated since 2001, but the same recovery methods apply to this day.
PC INSPECTOR Smart Recovery Bad news? It hasn't been updated since 2006. Good news? It is designed to recover photos from digital cameras, including memory cards, so only get it for that.
TestDisk & PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents, and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures
Tweaking.com Windows Repair Are you getting errors from your computer? Windows Repair will go through your system and reset and repair any potential problems with your computer. Easily the best repair tool on MajorGeeks that's free.
Windows Repair Toolbox Windows Repair Toolbox includes most third-party applications and utilities you might need to repair any Windows problems in one small application. Video tutorial available.
Sergei Strelec's WinPE Sergei Strelec's WinPE creates a bootable DVD or thumb drive for the computer maintenance, partitioning, backup, restore, diagnostics, data recovery, and more.
Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) With Ultimate Boot CD, you can boot your computer from the CDDVD drive to run tools. This is especially useful if you have a computer that will not start at all.
Privazer Privazer takes the traditional drive cleaner approach and focuses on security. PrivaZer is currently our pick of picks in this category.
CCleaner CCleaner has been around and highly rated for many years but has moved to the dark side a bit since the acquisition by Avast. We still use it for the startup manager and registry cleaner.
Wise Disk Cleaner Do you find CCleaner too conservative? Wise Disk Cleaner can often free up an additional gigabyte or more removing files CCleaner won't touch. I happen to love it personally.
HDCleaner HDCleaner is designed to completely clean your Windows PC, including registry and backup, encrypting data, splitting files, removing traces, and more.
Driver Booster I've used this one for years, and it works great. They offer a premium version and typically a third-party app during installation, so watch for that.
Snappy Driver Installer Origin Snappy Driver Installer Origin is an Open Source fork of Snappy Driver Installer designed by a former contributing developer and build master who felt that the project had gone astray.
Snappy Driver Installer Snappy Driver Installer is a driver updater geared toward geeks and techs alike. Video tutorial available.
NVIDIA GeForce Experience GeForce Experience comes with NVIDIA driver installations and watches for new drivers. Windows 10 & 11 manage most drivers well, but not video drivers.
Intel Driver & Support Assistant Intel Driver & Support Assistant quickly scans your machine for the latest up-to-date drivers currently available from Intel.
7-Zip The list of what we would consider excellent compression tools is pretty short, so your choices are easy. 7-Zip is simple, portable, and easy to use. PeaZip The list of what we would consider excellent compression tools is pretty short, so your choices are easy. This one or the other one :) PeaZip is open source and has many additional options if you want more control. Explzh Explzh is a freeware compression tool capable of creating and extracting file archives.
Rufus Rufus is a small Open Source utility that helps quickly format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB keys/pen drives, memory sticks, etc.
Ventoy Ventoy is an Open Source tool to create a bootable USB drive for Windows and Linux ISO files.
YUMI YUMI helps create a multiboot USB flash drive containing multiple operating systems, antivirus utilities, diagnostic tools, disc cloning, and more.
balenaEtcher balenaEtcher provides you with a useful Open Source cross-platform image burner for SD cards and USB drives.
FastStone Image Viewer Don't be fooled by the word viewer here. They should have called it "Faststone Image Viewer, Editor, Converter and More," but I guess that would be a bit long.
Krita Studio Krita Studio is an Open-source, all-in-one painting application geared for professional artists, VFX, and game studios.
XnView Photoshop is expensive. Sometimes you need those features but not a full-blown, pricey suite. XnView might fill in the gap.
IrfanView You can apply everything written about XnView (above) and apply it to IrfanView. Both have a very long history. One neat advantage to IrfanView is the IrfanView Plugins.
Paint.net Paint.net was designed to replace the old Microsoft Paint that came with Windows that grew into an excellent program offering features that make it as good as IrfanView and XnView.
The Gimp Gimp can be used for many different photo management purposes, but its real power lies in photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring.
Inkscape Portable Inscape aims to be an open-source editor to replace Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X. It won't replace all of those but does come close.
PicPick PicPick is an all-in-one screen capture tool that includes an intuitive image editor, color picker, color palette, pixel ruler, protractor, crosshair, whiteboard, and more.
Wildbit Viewer WildBit Viewer is a compact & fast image viewer with a slide show and editor.
VLC Media Player Multimedia player for various audio and video formats and DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server.
foobar2000 foobar2000 intends to be a small footprint audio player for Windows. Simple, customizable colors and gets the job done. The installation offers to install it or use it as a portable app.
PotPlayer PotPlayer is a comprehensive video and audio player that supports TV channels, subtitles, and skins.
Kodi Kodi (formerly XBMC) is a free and Open Source software media player and digital media entertainment hub.
Universal Media Server Universal Media Server is a DLNA-compliant UPnP Media Server based on the PS3 Media Server by shagrath.
Media Player Classic Black Edition (MPC-BE) An often overlooked, 5-star app based on the original "Media Player Classic" project and "Media Player Classic Home Cinema" project.
Apache OpenOffice Apache OpenOffice For Windows is a free, Open Source MS Office alternative with a Word compatible word processor, a complete Excel compatible spreadsheet program, and more.
LibreOffice LibreOffice is a powerful all-in-one office suite that combines pretty much everything you need to increase workflow productivity.
SSuite Office SSuite Office - Excalibur office suite provides you with a stable and robust way to improve your productivity and document format compatibility.
SSuite Office - Premium HD SSuite Office - Premium HD is a feature-rich office suite that works better on HD and larger monitors.
Parted Magic The Parted Magic employs GParted and Parted core programs to handle partitioning tasks while featuring other useful programs easily.
Partition Logic Create, delete, erase, format, defragment, resize, copy, and move partitions and modify their attributes. As a bonus, it can copy entire hard disks from one to another. It has a few limitations (see description) but should do what you need.
GParted Live GParted is a large (over 210 MB) program but runs as a bootable live cd. It's a good program to use if you cannot make changes with other programs. It is a powerful, open-source program.
Super Fdisk Super Fdisk is a driven disk partition manager. With Super Fdisk, you can quickly and easily create, delete, format partitions on IDE/ATA/SATA/SCSI hard disk drives without destroying data.
KeePass Password Safe KeePass Password Safe is an open-source password manager or safe that helps you manage your passwords securely.
KeeWeb KeeWeb provides you with a free cross-platform password manager that includes full compatibility with KeePass.
LastPass Password Manager LastPass Password Manager - The last password you'll ever have to remember. This easy-to-use password manager will make your browsing a lot easier and much more secure without having to remember multiple passwords.
Buttercup Buttercup is a password manager for all your accounts built for your desktop or Google Chrome. Also, we like calling people Buttercup, so that's fun. Buttercup.
Asterisk Key Asterisk Key shows passwords hidden under asterisks. Video available.
WirelessKeyView WirelessKeyView recovers all stored wireless network security keys/passwords (WEP/WPA).
ProduKey ProduKey is an essential utility for retrieving lost ProductIDs and CD-Keys for Microsoft Office, Windows, and more. Video tutorial available.
ShowKeyPlus ShowKeyPlus is a portable freeware app to retrieve and save your Windows product key if you lose it.
Tweaking.com - System Information Tweaking.com is the same guy from PCWinTech.com, and all of his utilities are free and 5-star programs, so this is no exception.
Belarc Advisor Belarc Advisor can be found in use by most techs. It shows all of your system information on a web page.
Speccy Another solid from the CCleaner guys. It will offer to install Ccleaner so watch for that. A portable version is available.
HWiNFO32 HWINFO is a system information tool but has benchmarking, monitoring, and more. Driver Updates tab in the program is an advertisement, so don't fall for that. 64-bit available, but 32 bit runs just fine.
Open Hardware Monitor Under one MB, open-source and can report back on your fans, CPU, video card temperatures, and more. If you're looking to see if heat is an issue, this is a good choice—also, an excellent system information tool.
QOwnNotes QOwnNotes is a portable Open Source app that allows you to create notes that can be efficiently sorted, organized, printed, exported, and more.
Notepad++ Microsoft Notepad included with Windows works. That's about it. Notepad++ allows you to have Notepad on steroids. It has a WYSIWYG interface and is handy for programmers, including HTML, Java, PHP, Pascal, Perl, and more.
SynWrite SynWrite is a free text editor designed mainly as a complete environment for web coders and writers.
CintaNotes Sometimes you don't need a text editor but simply a note-taking application. This one does the job and keeps it simple. Sync via DropBox and other places across computers. Run from a thumb drive.
RJ TextEd RJ TextEd Portable is a web development tool plus a text editor with many features, including syntax highlighting advanced column mode and text folding.
IOBit Uninstaller IOBit Uninstaller can remove programs and deep scan leftover files, folders, and registry entries. This one does offer to install their Advanced System Care, so watch that at the end.
HiBit Uninstaller HiBit Uninstaller can completely uninstall Windows programs and features ten more tools, including a drive and registry cleaner, process and startup manager, and more. Video tutorial available.
Revo Uninstaller While Revo is now only updated as shareware, an older, freeware version is still available. Revo has been listed here for 20 years, and many geeks swear by it.
GeekUninstaller Simple, small, and portable. Export to HTML, force removal, look up assigned registry keys, and more. Pretty amazing what is packed into this small program.
BCUninstaller BCUninstaller is a free program uninstaller. It is focused on removing large amounts of applications at once in a small amount of time. Video tutorial available.
Display Driver Uninstaller Display Driver Uninstaller is a graphics driver removal tool that helps remove all remnants of AMD, Nvidia, and Intel graphics card drivers. Video tutorial available.
Feedback, suggestions, complaints are welcome in the comments below.
Updates: 12-25-21. Massive overhaul. Categories and individual entries were added and removed as needed. Some grammar fixes. Everything now has fewer spaces and should be easier and more compact to read.