The worst part of moving is getting all your old stuff into your new place. The same holds true for all your pc programs when you fire up a new system. Nothing is where you want it to be and staring at a barren wasteland (or a clean pallet) you have to start fresh with your utilities. What’s one to do?

Maximum PC has put together an excellent list of 32 “essential + free” applications that are insanely useful. I’ve used tons of these and they get the job done quite well. They range for monitoring utilities to see what’s hogging up resources or making sure everything is running at the right specs.

Many of the utilities are direct replacements for some programs you have to pay for. My favorite example is the alternative for the MS Office Suite called Open Office. Open Office, as the name suggests, acts as an open source (read: FREE) choice for any office program. It’s pretty cool since it lets you save in any format compatible with everyone else’s software. Another one of these free alternatives is GIMP. Aside from the laughable name that surfaces memories of Pulp Fiction, it acts as a very powerful imaging tool similar to PhotoShop. For those of us without the deep pockets or a job that provides it free, it’s amazing software with tons of plugins.

They’ve also collected a bunch of nice “backup” utilities for ripping dvd’s/blu-ray disks/cd’s along with some essentials like anti-virus and spyware programs.

I guarantee you’ll go through the list and find something useful. All our readers with Macs might also find some of the programs have compatible versions that they can take advantage of also.

Check it out at Maximum PC

This entry was posted by Alex on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Guides, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.