Tools you use to augment your Windows install

[Kwartel]

Consider including myDefrag into your installations for all your defragmentation needs, alternatively there's Auslogics Disk Defrag, both miles better than the stock Windows tool.

Defragmentation on Windows sucks indeed, but I don't see them fix it anymore, because SSDs don't require defragmentation and those are the future.

 

[Foxi4]

Defragmentation on Windows sucks indeed, but I don't see them fix it anymore, because SSDs don't require defragmentation and those are the future.

Future not everyone can afford yet.

 

[Kwartel]

Future not everyone can afford yet.

The prices are getting better and better.

 

[Foxi4]

The prices are getting better and better.

Sure, anyone can buy 1TB of SSD storage, oh wait, $500+ price tag. SSD drives are great for OS drives but remain terribly inefficient storage drives as far as $/GB is concerned and will remain that way for a number of years.

 

[Kwartel]

Sure, anyone can buy 1TB of SSD storage, oh wait, $500+ price tag. SSD drives are great for OS drives but remain terribly inefficient storage drives as far as $/GB is concerned and will remain that way for a number of years.

Yeah sure, but for storage, fragmentation isn't that much of a problem, because HDDs aren't a bottleneck for things like video. If you have games on it, it does need to be defragmented occasionally though

 

[Arras]

Oh, one other thing I always have installed is puush. Great little program that allows you to instantly take a screenshot of (part of) your screen, automatically uploads it and puts the resulting link in your clipboard. It can also upload any file by right clicking.
http://puush.me/

 

[Celice]

I use windowblinds to use custom UI skins for Win7. I like it, but man, I wish there were some better skins available--a lot of kinda ugly :<

 

[Psionic Roshambo]

ImgBurn gets a vote from me.

 

[Cyan]

http://www.classicshell.net/
it's used to customize vista/7/8 explorer and make it looks like XP and add (back) a lot of options.

 

[PolloDiablo]

These are some of the ones I use:
AutoHotkey
ResophNotes
Rainmeter
SpeedFan
Clover

 

[gifi4]

Icaros Shell Extensions:

Icaros 2.2.3 is a collection of lightweight, high quality, Windows Shell Extensions, which is capable of providing Windows Explorer thumbnails for essentially any video media filetype. Icaros can provide Windows Explorer thumbnails, for essentially any video media format supported by FFmpeg which includes popular filetypes such as: Mkv, Flv, Avi, Mp4, Mov, Rmvb, M2ts, Ogm etc. It is capable of thumbnailing just about any file by adding its extension(s) to the optional filetypes box and re-activating Icaros

Simply add the extension to the list, click activate and thumbnails appear.

 

[FAST6191]

Interesting, I often end up disabling thumbnail support for speed and annoyance reasons (so many times it was trying to read a thumbnail and preventing me from deleting a video).

However support for more useful formats might see that swing back around.

 

[Depravo]

http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php

Very useful for pendants who don't like the file naming conventions of downloaded albums/series.

 

[Hells Malice]

I never could stand Flux. It made things look like garbage on my monitor. This way a while ago though so maybe it has improved since then.

One thing I instantly install is Fences. Desktops look so neat and organized even with a billion icons. Any time I see a desktop without Fences I cringe.
Oh and I guess Opera/Chrome/Firefox as well (yeah I use all 3 at the same time). Other 'essential' programs like winrar, skype, utorrent, etc.
Dropbox is the last thing I can think of that I always install now.

Revo Uninstaller seems nice though, i'll probably grab that.

 

[3bbb7]

Currently not too many programs, but steam, skype, teamspeak, np++, mbam, dropbox, lightshot, and a few more
Then the software for managing my mouse and headset.

I usually don't install anything else, and I hate having tons of programs. I tend to be minimal on that.

 

[Satangel]

Oh, one other thing I always have installed is puush. Great little program that allows you to instantly take a screenshot of (part of) your screen, automatically uploads it and puts the resulting link in your clipboard. It can also upload any file by right clicking.
http://puush.me/

Thanks, was looking for something like this.

 

[Taleweaver]

Let's see...(note: some of these will be obvious ones)

-AIMP for music
-VLC for anything else multimedia
-firefox and thunderbird
-pidgin for messenger
-slickrun for keyboard shortcuts (when I want to open a favorite folder, program or site, I can do it with a simple keyboard shortcut and a few letters)
-7-zip for zip purposes
-tixati for P2P (though uloader is a fine runner-up)
-libreoffice for all office-related purposes
-foxit reader for PDF
-faststone capture for screen capturing (note: there are dozens of good freeware out there. This is one I'm used to)
-xnview for picture viewer


I have more (I think I still have some scripts from autohotkey to properly play starcraft 2 without it complaining), but that should pretty much cover what I basically install. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that linux mint comes with most of these programs preinstalled, but until I can get all my games to work on that, I'm sticking with windows 7.

 

[Duo8]

I just installed MacType for font smoothing. Chrome looks better now but f.lux kinda screws with the colors.

 

[Kwartel]

These are some of the ones I use:
AutoHotkey
ResophNotes
Rainmeter
SpeedFan
Clover

I just installed Clover and I have to say: WOW what a brilliant piece of software!! I did tweak my install a bit though.
1. I changed the theme, because it looks shit on W8(.1). I used this theme: Chrome store link | download link

Spoiler: Result

2. I made a shortcut to clover in semi-hidden folder and changed the icon to the one of explorer. I unpinned clover and explorer from my taskbar and pinned that shortcut to it. Now all clover windows use the explorer icon.

 

[PolloDiablo]

I made a shortcut to clover in semi-hidden folder and changed the icon to the one of explorer. I unpinned clover and explorer from my taskbar and pinned that shortcut to it. Now all clover windows use the explorer icon.

I did exactly the same