Pintu’s essential windows utilities. They are that useful to me and may be useful to others.
Eraser – It is an utility to permanently deleting or purging files and folders. It allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Eraser is currently supported under Windows XP (with Service Pack 3), Windows Server 2003 (with Service Pack 2), Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and windows Server 2008 R2. Eraser is Free software and its source code is released under GNU General Public License.
Unlocker – If a file/folder cannot be deleted because it is being used by other process you can use this unlocker to end all processes using the particular file/folder.
http://www.emptyloop.com/unlocker/#description
WinDirStat – WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for windows.
Note: if you are looking for an alternative for Linux, you are looking for KDirStat (apt-get install kdirstat on Debian-derivatives) and for MacOS X it would be Disk Inventory X or GrandPerspective.
Double Killer– This is the only tool you need to get rid of all duplicate files on your computer including images and music files. It compares the file hash to identify duplicate files.
Picasa – Photo editing and managing tool now owned and managed by google. Picasa will automatically detect any photos that appear on your PC from any source, organize them by date. It also includes a capable photo viewer than pops up any time you double-click on an image file in Windows Explorer. It has some basic photo and video editing capabilities.
VLC – VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html
WinAmp – WinAmp is synonym with mp3 player. I am using it since 1998 when MP3 first arrived.
Fences – Fences® is a program that helps you organize your desktop and hide your icons when they’re not in use.
Dropbox – Free 2 GB minimum of cloud storage service. There are other options for cloud storage like Google Drive, Sky Drive etc. but Dropbox is my taste.
7Zip – 7-Zip is open source software. Most of the source code is under the GNU LGPL license. It is one of the best compression software.
Notepad++ – Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. It’s my favourite text editor on windows.