essentials for windows

Software that makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

Microsoft Encarta was a digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation from 1993 until 2009. As of 2008, the complete English version, Encarta Premium consisted of more than 62,000 articles, numerous photos and illustrations, music clips, videos, interactivities, timelines, maps and atlas, and homework tools, and is available on the World Wide Web by yearly subscription or by purchase on DVD-ROM or multiple CD-ROMs. Many articles could also be viewed online free of charge, a service supported by advertisements.

In March 2009, Microsoft announced it was discontinuing the Encarta disc and online versions.
"Microsoft has discontinued its Microsoft Encarta and Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium lines of products.

Customers will receive product support for up to three years from purchase date or through January 10, 2012, which ever date is reached first."

Made by the company behind WordPress, Simplenote enables users to take notes, lists, and ideas. These notes are stored on the cloud and are accessible across multiple devices.

Simplenote's both client and server components are free and open-source. However, the service component of Simplenote requires free registration and accepting the terms of service.

ConvertXtoDVD is an easy-to-use, 'one-click' video conversion application to convert and burn any video file to DVD, such as AVI (DivX, XviD), MKV (H.264 AVC), WMV, MPEG, MOV, YouTube (flash) videos and many more.

MediaMonkey is a music player and a music library manager with support for 50,000+ files and many features for organizing, tagging, converting and burning your music. It also has advanced podcasting and syncing features. MediaMonkey syncs with iPhones, iPods, and most other MP3 Devices. MediaMonkey is an All-in-One music manager solution with many plugins available.

Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages.

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GIMP is a free program for such photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. Essentially it's the closest thing to Photoshop you can get for free.

WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool, inspired by KDirStat.

HijackThis™ is a free utility which quickly scans your Windows computer to find settings that may have been changed by spyware, malware or other unwanted programs. HijackThis creates a report, or log file, with the results of the scan.

VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework. Owned by the non-profit organization VideoLAN.

VS Code is more than just a code editor, it provides the tools and extensions to compile, debug, compare, refactor, and even manage code repositories all within a highly-customised development environment.

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foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform.

Main features

Supported audio formats: MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND... and more with additional components.
Gapless playback.
Easily customizable user interface layout.
Advanced tagging capabilities.
Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats using the Converter component.
Full ReplayGain support.
Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.

AlternativeTo is a website which lists alternatives to web-based software, desktop computer software, and mobile apps.