I’ve long recommended the free as your one-stop shop for desktop applications. Simply click on the applications you want and Ninite will download the latest version, absolutely free of crapware, install them, and leave you in the driver’s seat. As we went to press, Ninite supported 87 different Windows programs ( in the paid version, $50 per month for up to 25 machines). The beauty of the Ninite approach? Each app is a click away: no fuss, no nags, no charge. Free Software Downloads. Download Them All! The Best Free Software 10 iPhone Productivity Apps You Need Now. Computer Shopper has a rich. One of the best & No.1 PC software site, where you can easily download full version software. 100% Trusted and Safe. It’s the best way I know to install a bunch of good programs on a new machine in minutes. The downside? It misses a few of my favorites—and it doesn’t touch UWP/Windows Store “Metro” apps. I used to recommend Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI) for ensuring that installed programs are up-to-date. ![]() I’ve switched to Ninite’s $10-per-year. It works better. While you can manually run the free Ninite anytime and the latest versions of your apps get installed, Ninite Updater proactively watches your installed programs and warns of any available updates. Ninite Updater even works with programs that you installed manually—as long as they’re among the apps. Unless you’re attached to a corporate network with a well-managed Update Server, Win10 will give you all of Microsoft’s patches, according to Microsoft’s schedule. You can usually keep the reboot limited to a time when you aren’t working, but the patches come whether you want ’em or not. Worse, if you uninstall a patch, every time you reboot or log on again, the same patch comes barreling at your machine. ![]() It’s like Sisyphus 10.0. As long as Microsoft’s patches, that’s great. But the minute there’s a problem—a faulty driver, a cumulative update that refuses to install, a conflict between the patch and one of your programs—forced updating can cause mayhem. Fortunately, Microsoft has a program that allows you to block and hide specific updates. Wushowhide, known by its cryptic Knowledge Base number KB 307930, scans to see which updates are pending and lets you hide individual updates. To use it, head over to, then download and stick wushowhide.diagcab on your machine. Next, follow these steps precisely: 1. Run wushowhide.diacab. This part’s important: Click the link marked Advanced. Uncheck the box marked 'Apply repairs automatically.' Wushowhide will run for a long time. When it comes back up for air, click the link to Hide Updates. You see a list like the one in the screenshot. Check the update(s) you want to avoid, click Next, then Next again. The chosen patch(es) won’t be installed, until you go back and uncheck it. Depending on your version of Win10, you may have options to slow down updates. No matter what Win10 says, this tool will block an update dead in its tracks—but watch out. If Microsoft releases a new version of a patch, it’ll switch off the “hidden” checkmark, so you have to go back and hide it again. I’m forever amazed at how many Win10 users don’t know they can keep full, incremental, accessible copies of their files with a couple of clicks using a utility that ships with Windows. Once enabled, Win10’s File History takes snapshots of your files, allowing you to go back to older versions with a right-click. You need a second hard drive—internal, external, or over a network—with enough free space to store your backups. Click Start > Settings > Update & Security > Backup. If “Back up using File History” isn’t set up yet, click the button marked Add a Drive to specify your target backup drive. After the first run, you see the “Automatically back up my files” slider (screenshot), which automatically backs up all the files in your User folder. You can click on More Options to add more folders. After that, backups happen automagically. To bring back an old version, go to File Explorer, right-click a file, and choose Properties > Previous Versions. You can get to versions of the files made long, long ago. Every desktop user needs. While Win10 File Explorer now has the ability to look inside ISO and other kinds of compressed files, Explorer still doesn’t support RAR compressed files or MSU Windows installer files (screenshot). 7-Zip also creates password-protected Zip files, as well as self-extracting Zips. You don’t need to register or pay for 7-Zip. Don’t fall for a website with a similar name. To get the real, original, and only free 7-Zip, with a crapware-free installer, go to or, better, get it from Ninite. There’s support on the. Make sure you get the desktop version; UWP/Windows Store programs with similar names aren’t the same. Free for everybody. File undelete has been a mainstay PC utility since DOS. But there's no better undeleter than (pronounced 'recover'): fast, thorough, free. When you empty the Windows Recycle Bin, files aren't destroyed; rather, the space they occupy is earmarked for new data. If you delete files on a USB drive (screenshot) or an SD card, they’re treated similarly, without the Recycle Bin as a safeguard. If you delete files on an SD card using a phone or tablet, heaven help ya! That’s where Recuva (free for personal use, $35 each for ) comes in. Undelete routines scan the flotsam and put the pieces back together. As long as you haven't added new data to a drive, undelete (almost) always works; if you've added some data, there's still a good chance you can get back most of the deleted stuff. With more than a dozen competing tools available for examining the innards of your machine, coming up with the “best” revolves around what you need and what you expect. I’ve long recommended and, but of late I’ve settled on (free for everybody). Like other hardware/software scanners, Speccy ferrets out all sorts of information, including real-time monitoring of internal temperatures, and a full SMART status report for each drive. The operating system report for Win10 includes details such as your Windows Update status, antivirus in use, scheduled tasks,.Net Framework versions installed, and much more. Unlike other examining programs, Speccy makes it easy to output reports, including free website posting. Speccy can be installed, or it can be run “portable” with no installation required. Both Speccy and Recuva (preceding slide) are made by Piriform, which also CCleaner. I don’t recommend because many people use it to clean their registries—and some rue the day they did. I realize that’s a religious statement open to debate, but I firmly believe the potential downside to using a registry cleaner far exceed the potential upside of cleaning out a few KB of aberrant entries here and there. If you use CCleaner for one of its many other features and studiously avoid registry cleaning, it’s a good one to add to your arsenal. Well and truly uninstalls desktop programs, and it does so in an unexpected manner. (To get rid of a UWP/Windows Store app, you have to use Win10 itself with, for example, Start > Settings > System > Apps & Features.) When you use Revo, it runs the program’s uninstaller and watches while the uninstaller works, looking for the location of program files and for Registry keys that the uninstaller zaps. It then goes in and removes leftover pieces, based on the locations and keys that the program’s uninstaller took out. Revo will also uninstall remnants of programs that have already been uninstalled. Revo consults its own internal database for commonly-left-behind bits and roots those out as well. The not-free version (from $40 but frequently discounted) monitors your system when you install a program, making removal easier and more complete. It also pushes harder to remove bits and pieces of programs that leave detritus behind when they’re uninstalled. Get it from Ninite. Windows 7 had a decent—but not perfect—backup and restore function. Win8.1 threw it all away. Win10 has brought it back, but many people complain about it. You can see the old Win7 backup in Win10 by typing backup in the Cortana search box. Microsoft wants you to use its new backup method, stick everything on OneDrive, and use Refresh/Restore should the proverbial hit the impeller. But many people aren’t comfortable with that approach, for many reasons, ranging from privacy concerns to the infernal requirement that you maintain installation media for all of your non-Microsoft programs. I’ve gone through lots of backup programs over the years: Norton Ghost, Comodo Backup, Macrium Reflect, Aomei Backupper, Clonezilla, and many more. They all have good and bad points. I’ve settled on and use its free edition. EaseUS, based in Shenzhen, has an easily skipped Amazon link in its installer, and it tries to upsell you to the ($23 or $31, including free lifetime upgrades). If you’re careful installing it, you’ll end up with a nimble, general-purpose backup tool that can create full disk image backups, incremental drive or file backups, and/or differential (“store the deltas”) backups per your specs. By default, it runs full backups once a week, with differential backups every 30 minutes. You won’t get Outlook email backups unless you pay for one of the not-so-free versions. I first used EaseUS to swap out my C: drive to an SSD. It worked well and was reasonably easy to decipher, so I recommended it to the crowd on. Positive reports all around. Remember that backing up is only half the battle. You need to test the backup to make sure it works. Swapping out a SSD is a great test for full-disk backups, but it doesn’t tackle the thorny problem of incremental backups. I still use File History (recommendation No. 3) as a safety net. Microsoft’s venerable and free-as-a-breeze finds more autostarting programs (add-ins, drivers, codecs, gadgets, shell extensions, whatever), in more obscure places, than any other program, anywhere. Autoruns not only lists autorunning programs, it lets you turn off individual programs. There are many minor features, including the ability to filter out Microsoft-signed programs, a quick way to jump to folders holding autostarting programs, and a command-line version that lets you display file hashes. Autoruns doesn’t require installation. It’s a program that runs and collects its information, displays it (with a rather rudimentary user interface), lets you wrangle with your system, then fades away. Free for everybody, personal or corporate. Tells you which files are currently open by what program. That feature alone has saved me half a head of hair because, once identified by Process Explorer, the process that has locked up your file can be killed. Process Explorer also gives you full information on all the svchost processes running on your PC. That accounts for the other half a head. Mouse over a process, even a generic svchost, and you can see the command line that launched the process, the path to the executable file, and all of the Windows services in use. Right-click and you can go online to get more information about the executable. Another must-have product from, yes, Microsoft. Free for everybody. Where does all the drive space go? Pick up a free copy of, and find out—quickly and accurately. You can use the file explorer-style view at the top to navigate among your most ponderous folders, or you can click on individual files in the decidedly more colorful “tree map” usage pane. Delete files directly from WinDirStat, or fire up File Explorer to delete from a more traditional point of view. Free, open source, fast, bulletproof. Nothing to install. Meaningful Help info. What more could you ask for? Get it on Ninite. I’ve long used—and recommended—Microsoft’s built-in Windows Defender as the only antivirus software you’ll ever need. Unfortunately, recent tests I trust, particularly the from October 2016, show Microsoft Defender at the bottom of the pack. There are several free-for-personal-use antivirus products worthy of your attention: Avast Free, Avira Free, AVG Free, and Bitdefender Free are the best known. All of them except Bitdefender are available on Ninite. I don’t recommend any of them. Your antivirus product watches everything you do. Some—perhaps all—of the free antivirus packages track your activity, and the vendor sells your history to advertisers. AVG in late 2015 and Avast’s privacy policy has. They’re all suspect. I use Win10 all the time, so I’ve resigned myself to the fact that Microsoft snoops on my computer from bootup to shutdown—and maybe other times. (Hello, Cortana!) Windows Defender isn’t going to tell Microsoft much more than it already knows. Defender is moderately competent, and it won’t bug me about paying for an upgrade or hijack my browser’s search engine. The others may. Defender’s a better-the-devil-ye-ken choice. No doubt you already have an antivirus program. As mentioned in the previous slide, I use Windows Defender, which comes baked into Win10, but there are many good alternatives. Malwarebytes is different. The free-for-personal-use version is designed to be run manually; I run mine once a week. Malwarebytes picks up all sorts of creepy crawlies that get past AV programs, and it’s surprisingly adept at running even if your machine is already infected. When combined with the support on the Malwarebytes forum, Malwarebytes is the ultimate fallback for infected systems—whether you know they’re infected or not. Get it on Ninite. Microsoft wants you to use its new Edge browser. For some, Edge may be all you need. For most, Edge doesn’t fill the bill. If you’ve grown accustomed to the more-advanced features in other browsers, Edge won’t be an adequate substitute. Your main options: • Opera, long the top underdog in the browser wars, has pioneered several features not previously seen in competitive browsers, including pop-up blocking, private browsing, and native ad blocking. It’s now available on Windows, OS X, and Linux. • Firefox is an excellent choice if you don’t want to send your browsing history to the folks at Google. Coupled with a search engine like or, which don’t track anything, you minimize your trackable presence on the web. I use Firefox all the time. • Chrome is my browser of choice. In spite of its snooping ways, it has the best collection of extensions, easiest operation, and best integration with Google Apps in the biz. On the downside, if you open a bunch of tabs, it sure sucks up a lot of cycles. Whatever you do, don’t run Internet Explorer. Microsoft has put it out to pasture. So should you. Pick ’n’ choose on Ninite. I use religiously, in all my browsers, on all my computers: Windows, Android, iOS, ChromeOS, Mac, you name it. LastPass keeps track of your user IDs, passwords, and other settings; stores them in the cloud; and offers them to you with a click. LastPass does its one-way salted AES-256 encrypting and decrypting on your PC, using a master password you have to remember. The data that gets stored in the cloud is encrypted, and without the key the stored passwords can’t be broken, unless you know somebody who can crack AES-256 encryption. In addition to installing the LastPass browser extension for all of my browsers, I use the UWP/Windows Store version (screenshot) on my Windows 10 machines. It’s much easier to edit entries with the UWP/Windows Store version than with the odd click-here-then-there editing interface inside browsers. If you’re using Win10 for anything more than a doorstop, you’re no doubt familiar with cloud storage. I prefer the desktop version of Dropbox, which integrates into File Manager. (The UWP/Windows Store version, at this point, isn’t worth the bother.) Everybody and his brother wants to offer you free cloud storage these days. They’re gambling that you’ll get hooked on the service, and later pay to stay. I’ve never gone over my limit with any of the services— (2GB free for personal use, unlimited business use for $12.50 per user per month), Microsoft’s (5GB free for personal use, many other options), (15GB free for personal use), (50GB free), (10GB free)—and I use them all, in various ways. Thumbnail comparison: Dropbox syncs with your computer remarkably well; for all intents, it works exactly like a File Manager folder (see screenshot), with solid security, easy operation, amazing reliability, and integration with many programs (including Office). The current version of OneDrive has all sorts of implementation and interface problems, reliability is a major concern, and Microsoft has already reneged on storage promises. Google Drive space gets swallowed up by saved Gmail attachments, but the tools are best of breed. I use Google Drive for photos (see my later recommendation). Mega is excellent, supersecure, somewhat limited in features, but is getting better. Box rates as the sine qua non of corporate storage, but it’s limited for freeloaders. Get it on Ninite. Like you, I spent years struggling with PC-based email: Outlook, in multitudinous versions; Outlook Express (which isn’t anything like Outlook itself); Windows Mail; Windows Live Mail; Thunderbird. I can’t recall how many months I’ve lost hassling with files, settings, quirks, and bugs. If you haven’t moved your mail to the cloud, it’s time to take a look. You have to jump through a few hoops, but it’s relatively easy to keep your email address ([email protected]) and push everything through Gmail—and nobody will know the difference. All the email services are free for personal use and come attached to more expensive packages (Google Apps for Business, Outlook 365, among others) for organizations. Flipping to online email will add years to your life. The only question is which service to use. The front-runners, Gmail and (formerly Hotmail) have pros and cons, with features in one showing up in the other sooner or later. Both have so many capabilities that nobody uses more than a tiny fraction. There’s no clear winner. Personally, I use Gmail—and have done so for years—because it’s better organized (which is a simple way to say that I’m used to it); it does a better job of trapping spam headed my way, separating “Important” messages from “Everything else” simplifies cleanup; and the tabs help occasionally. Microsoft counters by saying doesn’t serve ads targeted based on email content (though they serve targeted ads), they have inbox organization by custom categories, there are time-based rules, and makes it easy to connect to Skype, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn. Log on to from any computer. While the titans rage for paid online “office productivity” packages, those seeking free-for-personal-use productivity programs have two excellent choices from those same two titans. Office Online is so good, you’ll be hard-pressed to find features in the paid programs that aren’t available online for free. Google’s G Suite works well, too, but Office Online’s features and rock-solid compatibility with desktop Office programs run way out ahead of the competition. Both run inside your favorite web browser. Galen Gruman has, with conclusions that apply to Office Online in many cases. The big trick? You have to understand there is a free Office Online, it’s remarkably fully featured, and you don’t need to sign up for a free trial of anything (although you need a free Microsoft Account). To get started, go to the, avoid the temptation to sign up for an Office 365 free trial at the top, and look further down for the free online apps. If you are a professional photographer, need fancy touch-up tools and extremely high-definition archival storage, or have to set up paid downloading services, you need a more capable option. But for almost everybody, is a category killer. There’s rarely been a program, of any kind, with such broad appeal. There’s free unlimited storage, although pictures are limited to 16 megapixels and video to 1080p (the program will automatically squeeze bigger pictures, or you can pay for Google Drive storage space for the biggies). Apps for iOS, Android, and all the major browsers on any platform. You can set Google Photos to automatically upload pics from your phone or Wi-Fi-enabled camera. Once they’re on Google’s servers, you can get at them from anywhere with your Google ID and password. Google Photos automatically analyzes every picture. Face recognition is built in (though it can be turned off). The organization and analytical capabilities are breathtaking: “All the pictures of me holding a beer glass” or “Every picture we took of the pyramids.” Photos even offers to create montages, panoramas, storylines, or “animations” of similar pictures taken in succession. Of course, Google keeps track of everything you post and uses the info to serve ads, but that's the price you pay. Another poster child for open source software, VLC Media Player plays nearly anything—including YouTube Flash FLV files—with no additional software, no downloads, no headaches. I use it exclusively for videos, but I only use the desktop version. The UWP/Windows Store version, at this point, has all sorts of problems. Unlike other media players, VLC sports simple, Spartan controls, built-in codecs for almost every file type imaginable, and a large and vocal online support community. VLC plays internet streaming media with a click, records played media, converts between file types, and even supports individual frame screenshots. Tired of the sell, sell, sell in Win10’s built-in Groove Music or Movies & TV? Can’t get your oddball files to play in Win10’s apps? Take a look at VLC. VLC is well-known for tolerating incomplete or damaged media files. It will even start to play downloaded media before the download’s finished. The desktop version is available via Ninite. Get it on Ninite. If you look at Foobar2000 on its face, you won’t see much: a player that doesn’t meet the standards of VLC Media Player and a clunky interface. But underneath the surface, a whole geeky world unfolds: heavy-duty metadata editing tools; batch and command-line processing; user-programmable functions; a huge collection of plugins. There’s even a Title Formatting feature with an associated database-style Query Syntax. It’s a programmer’s music organizer. Foobar has a Universal Windows app called Foobar 2000 Mobile. You might want to try it, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t have many of the options you’d like. Get the regular Windows app on Ninite. Plex is the answer to all sorts of problems I’ve had forever with using a Windows network to store movies, music, and recorded TV. I use it with a Roku on my TVs. I use it on my Chromebooks, iPads, even my Android phone. In short, any computer I have around the house can tap into my movie, TV, or music collection. I can even get at those media files from anyplace with an internet connection. If that sounds like magic, it is. And it’s getting better all the time. Setting up and running Plex is an absolute breeze. Download the (the server) and install it on your PC (Windows, MacOS, Linux, some NAS servers). Point it to your media files. Then you can watch or listen to all your shows/music on the computer that’s acting as the server. But—here’s the magic—you can install a Plex player program on your tablets, phones, game boxes like an Xbox or PlayStation, and as long as they’re attached to the same network as the server, you get immediate access to all of the media. It's like falling off a log. There’s more. Roku picks up the Plex channel immediately. Apple TV, same thing. Some TVs now have Plex built-in. And you can connect to Plex remotely from anywhere in the world, any browser you like, using a simple password. It works better than any networking system I’ve ever used. Best of all, it’s free, although the. Add syncing to mobile devices and storage in the cloud, and it’ll cost you $5 a year for Plex Pass. The music streaming industry remains highly competitive. Between Amazon Music Prime (free if you’re already a Prime member), Apple Music (three-month free trial, then $10 per month), Pandora (free with ads), Spotify (free with ads, $10 per month no ads), and a dozen more, you’ll find an enormous array of music available for any platform, any time. Debatably, Spotify remains the best deal for cheapskates: 30 million songs, easy interface, any platform you can mention, top-quality curated playlists, news, weather—even a social platform that lets you eavesdrop on friends. With 50 million or so free users and 50 million more who pony up $10 per month, Spotify has become an 800-pound gorilla in the genre. Competition in the music space remains cutthroat. Apple Music, for example, for a two-week exclusive right to play Chance the Rapper’s new release 'Coloring Book.' The big question hanging over Spotify right now has more to do with business than with tunes—if there’s a difference. Several high-profile artists, including Taylor Swift, have from Spotify, leading the company to consider limiting some of its music to paid subscribers only. Get the desktop program from Ninite. Windows doesn’t rip DVDs—period. While you’re bound to get 100 different opinions from any collection of a dozen different RIAA lawyers, ripping DVDs for your own use (say, to play them from a computer that doesn’t have a DVD player or to keep your three-year-old’s fingers off the shiny side) is a common, debatably illegal, activity. Ask your lawyer how she rips DVDs. I rip DVDs all the time (so sue me), and when I do, I use HandBrake. It’ll rip to MP4, or if you like, it’ll create video files specifically tailored to iPhone, iPad, Android, or Apple TV. Personally, I rip MP4s and put them in Plex. Open source software at its finest, HandBrake has an enormous number of options that should cover even the most convoluted cases. Get it on Ninite. The best free PC software programs aren't about the cost (lack thereof), they’re about a fresh opportunity—collections of code that puts the dumb hardware in your computer to smart use, tools that could accomplish anything from balancing your household budget to helping to cure cancer. Stocking your PC is an intensely personal task. Even still, some programs are so helpful, so handy, so useful across the board that we heartily recommend them to everybody. These free PC programs—a mix of must-haves and delightful auxiliary apps—have earned a place on almost any computer. Makes loading up a new computer a breeze. Simply head to the Ninite website, select which free software you’d like to install on your PC—it offers dozens of options, including many of the programs named here—and click Get Installer to receive a single, custom.exe file containing the installers for those programs. Run the executable, and Ninite installs all of them in turn, and it automatically declines the offers for bundled bloatware so many free apps try to sneak in. No muss, no fuss, no hassle. It’s wonderful. The enabled by default in Windows 10 provides solid protection for most users, but no single antivirus utility offers bulletproof protection, especially against the latest and most clever threats. Was designed specifically to find and eliminate those cutting-edge “zero day” vulnerabilites. You can’t schedule scans or even use it as a regular antivirus program, but it’s invaluable when you think that something nasty has slipped by your primary antivirus utility. Premium antivirus options strike a balance between excellent protection, a worthwhile selection of features, and minimal impact on your PC’s performance. PCWorld's guide to can walk you through your options. Most boxed PCs come chock-full of bloatware intended to make dough for the PC makers, and you probably don’t need (or want) most of it clogging up your system resources. That’s where comes in. This pint-size wonder program scans your PC, brings up a checklist of the bloatware installed on your machine, and helps you wipe ’em all away in one fell swoop. A secondary screen lists all of your programs if you want to nuke even more. Ignore it, or just be careful to avoid erasing something important. Microsoft introduced its own tool to, but it involves performing a complete reinstallation of the operating system. Don’t mess around with it unless you know what you’re doing. On the surface, is a simple app launcher, and that’s swell all on its own! App launchers let you activate software far faster than navigating Windows, even if you use the Windows key and search for an app by name. But Launchy can do much, much more: open any file or folder in mere seconds, shut down your PC, or even kill processes and perform math calculations with the right. Read superb tutorial and forget about your Start menu. Launchy is donationware, so you can snag if for free, but we highly recommend tossing the developers a few dollars for this excellent program. Another must-have system tool:. It does all the dirty work required to keep your PC running in tip-top shape, including ditching unwanted cookies, wiping your browser history, deleting unnecessary files, and keeping your Windows Registry sparkling clean. Note: CCleaner recently got mud in its eye when for the purposes of industrial espionage. Piriform now has a safe version of the program available to download from its site. CCleaner is powerful, but even better, it’s free! (A $25 Professional version with premium support, scheduled cleanings, and automatic updates is also available.). But what if you want to bring a deleted file back to the realm of the living? Is a clean, simple undelete program from Piriform, the makers of CCleaner. Be warned: Recuva won't be able to recover all deleted files, and the odds are even lower if you erased a program with a secure delete tool like (another top-notch free program). Even still, Recuva has saved my bacon on more than one occasion. A $20 pro upgrade adds automatic updates, premium customer service access, and support for virtual hard drives. Adobe Reader may be the go-to PDF reader for many people, but it’s by malware peddlers. If you need only basic functionality, go with instead. Sumatra lacks the fancy extras found in many full-featured PDF readers, but when it comes to straight-up reading Portable Document Format files, Sumatra PDF is blazing-fast and completely accurate. Oh, and since it’s less ubiquitous than Adobe’s offering, hackers tend to stay away from Sumatra PDF. If you’re willing to pay for more advanced features, check out PCWorld’s guide to. Sometimes, blasting tunes is the only thing that makes slogging through a spreadsheet or a stuffed inbox even remotely tolerable. The exact music client you’ll want will depend on whether you’ve already bought into a service, naturally. For musical neophytes I recommend two programs: and. The iTunes Windows client notoriously sucks, but it gets the job done—and that job includes giving you access to a vast universe of premium music downloads and keeping your iPhone’s music library synced with your PC. Spotify, meanwhile, is an all-you-can-eat streaming service with millions of top-tier tunes available, all for free if you don’t mind listening to a few ads. The of the past few years have driven the point home: You need strong passwords, and you need a different password for each site you visit. Rather than juggling dozens of alphanumeric codes in your noggin, download a password manager. There are several options available, but our favorite is, a cloud-based password manager that generates strong, random passwords and keeps track of your credentials across all your devices for free. Is another stellar option, but the free version is limited to a single device. PCWorld’s guide to can help walk you through all the available options. PCs excel at helping you Get Things Done—but few of them ship with a productivity suite installed. Fix that, stat! Even if you don’t plan to use a productivity suite regularly, it’s smart to have basic editing capabilities available on your computer. Legions of people swear by Microsoft’s legendary Office; I do, too. But you don’t have to drop big dollars on Office if you don’t need its myriad bells and whistles. Free—and good—alternatives abound, with (pictured) being the flagship free-and-open-source option. The online-only also rocks. PCWorld's guide to explains your various options. Browsing websites and sending private data over open Wi-Fi hotspots is just begging for hackers to capture the details. Virtual private networks secure your connection. If you need to log into your work website or email at Starbucks, use to keep your data safe. It’s fast, easy to use, and has a straightforward privacy policy, unlike many VPNs. The free version is limited to just 500MB of data per month, though. If you need more data or want to use a VPN to stream video from overseas, PCWorld’s guide to can walk you through premium options. All work and no play makes! Valve’s outstanding PC game marketplace,, makes it easy to shrug off the stress of the workday and blow off some. Well, you know. You’ll find tons of free games available on Steam, and games are frequently given away free for a limited time. EA’s rival Origin service also has an On the House program that often provides games for free-as-in-beer free. Those aren’t your only options though. Check out PCWorld’s guide to for more options than you’ll ever be able to actually play.
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January 2018
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