Microsoft PowerToys is a fantastic program if you like to tweak your experience with Windows.

It lets you do things like set up individual zones within your monitor that act like picture in picture or another monitor. It has a robust color picker, which helps greatly when it comes to photoshop and template creation. I also use the text extractor very often to extract text from pictures, which it copies to the clipboard.

The best, and technically the worst, is it lets you change settings that you can't normally do in Windows.

While it could get someone YOLO adminning in trouble, thankfully it has a lot of warnings before you mess things up too badly.

Those are the features I use, but there are too many useful features to name in one go.

Here's the link to get it in the Microsoft Store

While not a "Windows program," Ninite allows you to queue up and download a lot of the most common software installs you'd make after a fresh install.

In terms of actual windows programs, I quite like "Everything." It's basically a database of all the files on your computer that allows for near instant searching.

"Space Sniffer" is an excellent utility for finding what takes up a lot of room on your drive.

"Unidentified flying raw" is a free program that allows the manipulation and conversion of raw picture files. I use it before editing in Gimp, but if you have Photoshop, it's not necessary.

"Dark Table" is an acceptable free light room alternative if you have the patience. It's pretty slow though.

Notepad++ for any text file that needs to be opened, and VLC for any video file that needs to be opened. Both are great.

Rufus

Create bootable USB drives the easy way

You can use it to flash an ISO for a free operating system instead Microsoft Windows spyware. You could go Linux, or BSD, or Haiku, or whatever so long as your personal data & freedom are respected.

VoidTools' Everything. Indexes your whole filesystem (across all drives too) and allows you to search your whole filesystem for matching filenames, save search presets for later, and even allowing RegEx search queries if you need files of names matching some pattern.

WizTree is like WinDirStat but a lot faster.

I am an IT guy, as a general rule I don't install stuff I don't need.

That being said, we all have different requirenments for our computers, and I would be dumb to enforce my requirenments on you.

So here are some great tools and utillities that I have used and in some cases still use.

Firefox - Google Chrome needs a rival to keep the web happy, it is an excellent browser and have served me well for 20+ years.

VLC - Video Lan Client, I have yet to find a media file that this player can't play, this is less relevant since piracy have gone down, but I still keep in on my system.

digiKam - A photo organizer, works well with all formats I have thrown at it, currently manages my growing collection of photos (see my profile for a photo I took of a Lynx Kitten), it also makes me able to do light photo editing, but I mainly use Affinity Photo for that.

Strawberry Music Player - An advanced music player, based on Clementine Music Player which is based on amaroK musik player. It gives me a great album interface to managemy music, less usefull now since I buy most of my music through iTunes, but still does an excellent job of managing growing collection och C64/Amiga remixes from remix64.com

Notepad++ - This should be on every windows computer, it is an advanced text editor, it has everything you need from a text editor, plays way more. It is fast, has persistant tabs, syntax highlighting, autocomplete, themes and way more.

VS Code - Visual Studio Code, this is a source code editor, it is like taking Notepad++, making it snort cocaine and bolting a modern interface to it. This is not a general text editor, this is a program where you write and edit code, Notepad++ is excellent for reading and making quick changes to text files, VS Code is what you use to develop the code. It assists you constantly, from autocomplete, to error checking your code, I write a lot of Powershell code in VS Code at work, and it is great. It is slower to get going than Notepad++, but once you start it and have it co figured it works great.

Gimp - The Gnu Image Manipulation Program, free but less refined version of Adobe Photoshop, it is highly capable.

Libre Office, a less refined version of the office suite.

Took me about 4 fucking seconds of scrolling to find someonr basically shouting "UsE lInUx" (using it myself and find this attitude highly annoying)

Keep to the question and let people use what they want, which leads me to:

Qbittorrent, best torrent client imo

Files app by yair, pretty nice looking file manager with tans and other goodies

WUB or Windows Update Blocker.

It's one of the first things I put on a new after the initial Windows update.

It safely turns and completely turns off Windows updating and the services involved with updates.

It's practically a necessity if you use a metered or paid internet connection, or connect your laptop to a cell phone for an internet connection via a hotspot.

Windows doesn't listen to its own settings about metered connections and if it deems something worthy of killing your data plan for the month, it'll do so without your knowledge.

The best part is that when you're ready to download critical updates or something from the Windows store (Whatsapp, Minecraft, Power Tools, etc.) then it's as simple as a button press to reactivate updates without restart.

If you're still using Windows 10 you should try out Powertools by Microsoft. It adds a lot of quality of life improvements, like adding a grid to snap your windows

AutoHotkey - one of the best GUI automation and scripting tools for Windows. You could create anything from a simple key-ramapping macro to full fledged, standalone apps - it's super easy, yet super powerful. Highly recommend checking out if you ever wanted to automate something, or you wanna make your own app for whatever, but you don't wanna learn a complicated programming language.

NAPS2 (Not Another PDF Scanner) does exactly one thing, scan stuff, and it does it incredibly well. Bypass all the garbage software that came with your scanner, plus it supports batch processing and profiles.

Everything. A very small and fast search and indexing program, much better than windows search

PowerToys.

Got to mention Quicklook by Paddy Xu.

Just like the original functionality on mac, you press spacebar to inspect any highlighted file.

This was was one of those tiny things that a massive difference for me when I switched to windows.

I also use startisback to customize my taskbar and start menu.

WSL is a Windows program that opens the door to many other useful programs :)

Chris Titus Tech's debloat tool (source code)

Flow Launcher. Alt + space to open anything. Faster than powertoys run and all the other tools i used before.

Snipping Tool - take custom screenshots of your screen

Windows has a clipboard tool for caching several different pastes, you may have to turn it on though.

You can use ctrl left/right to jump whole words, this also works with shift to select.

Beyond Compare 4 - various types of file comparison and merging operations.

WinDirStat - makes it easy to identify and clean up files taking up your drive space.

Everything - I resisted using this for a long time and wish I hadn't.

Joplin - note taking app with markdown editor.

QTranslate - discontinued freeware, most recent version that I'm aware of is 6.10.0. very useful translation app that supports Google, DeepL, Yandex and others.

RapidCRC (Unicode) - file hash creation and verification

also shout out to Windows Firewall, not really a new thing but many people don't bother learning how to use it properly.

If I would have been asked to choose one really useful piece of software on Windows it would be Agent Ransack. I use it to find strings in a bunch of files, even compressed ones. I believe it can do much more but I use it for this purpose on daily basis. There's a paid version but the light one is free and does all I need. https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/