My Windows Faves

The best compression app around. Handles everything, and does it with maximum options and minimal bloat.

The best plain text editor, hands-down. I find it absolutely crucial for any kind of light coding or scripting (Python, CSS, HTML, etc)

Not quite as nice as Adobe Photoshop, but nothing really is. It's nearly as good though, and for free. Hard to beat that.

When Microsoft finally gets rid of MS Paint, this will be the best replacement. More features, but not too much to deal with for quick edits.

Very solid drawing & digital painting app.

Screencap tool with lots of options.

My favorite note-taking app. It's may quicker and easier to work with than MS OneNote, and that's maybe the most important part of a quick note-taking tool. Evernote is a close second though.

I would be lost without this thing. Free with limited features, but $12 a year is absolutely cheap for all the features.

Sometimes you just need to FTP something.

For reading comics.

The best app for listening to and downloading podcasts. Android app is a few dollars, and it can connect to their web app to sync across systems or play in your browser.

Quick and bloat-free image viewer, with useful editing tools for basic resizing, cropping, converting, etc.

Windows' built-in copy/move utility is surprisingly bad. This will give you more options and make some transfers (especially to flash storage) much faster. Free version has all the features you probably need.

Sometimes you've got two files, and you need to know what's different between them. Works on folders too.

For when you need to turn disk image (.iso, etc) into a mounted drive.