Windows 7: Top 10 Essential Softwares for Windows 7 Operating System

Even though the Windows Operating System remains the most popular on the planet, it does not come with the modern world's requirements for the everyday work. Being the most popular means the most targeted from all directions, be it the application developers or virus creators. The Operating System does not ship with itself even an antivirus. Following are the bare essentials which Windows 7:

Antivirus Essential for Windows 7

1. Avast antivirus Home edition: This is one of the best antivirus software available for the Windows platform. It comes with great user interface which allows you to customize every part of its different modules. Well, yes it does have modules. Threats for computer come from different directions. From USB drives to internet chat programs, any file which comes to your computer may have viruses. Avast does the good job of scanning files coming from different streams to the computer. It has got modules for scanning the incoming mails for programs like Microsoft Outlook and scans your downloads as they progress. If they contain any virus, the scanner will interrupt the connection and notify you about the virus being downloaded. Any files transferred over Google talk, yahoo messenger or any other messaging services are also scanned.

Avast updates itself automatically and does so every 4 hours. That said, your computer is always protected! Also, this antivirus comes in different packages. It comes with an internet protection suite; it comes as a professional edition; it also comes as a free edition. The free edition is good enough for day to day use for the common man who wants to stay protected and hence is a good choice. It is also worth a mention and a notice that the quality of this antivirus is better than the other free antivirus software.

Web Browser Essential for Windows 7

2. Mozilla Firefox: Internet has come to a standard where it is a part of our daily lives. From checking our email to checking our back accounts or paying your electricity bills is all possible using the internet. But by its very nature, internet is not secure. Fake sites, viruses and malicious hackers (crackers) are all set to put your privacy at risk. Firefox as a browser comes to rescue. It does all that a browser can do to secure you from the problems lurking around on the internet. Right from warning you about misleading sites to preventing automated addons (such as activex controls on Internet explorer) or complaining you about invalid security certificates, it does a fairly good job of letting you browse through the web. And yes, it is very fast as well!

Office Suite Essential for Windows 7

3. Microsoft Office: Right from the school student to the enterprise segment, everyone is in need of an office suite. Creating documents, presentations, balance sheets, small applications, cover pages and sharing them all is what is needed at different levels of work. Microsoft office has been one of the most famous application software, not only for the Windows operating system but for all platforms, all over the world which helps doing the above job very simple!

Media Player Essential for Windows 7

4. VLC Media Player: VLC media player is one such application which can handle any media file you can throw at it. Once you have installed it, you can be sure about one thing: you are now capable of watching to movies or videos in any format and listen to songs or music in any format as well. Its lightweight on the system and gets the job of handling various media formats easily. It is not for no reason that it is one of the most famous media players ever. And most of us might not be aware of the fact but VLC can also wear different 'skins' much like Windows Media Player!

Archiever Essential for Windows 7

5. WinRar Archiever: It's not always easy to keep and maintain thousands of small files. Especially when you have to send a small package of hundreds of files totalling worth 5 to 10 MB only via email, attaching each one of them would be a really bad idea. Also, many users would have already noticed that copying, moving and backing up multiple files is slower than one big file of same size. WinRar does the job of both compressing and packaging them in one file very well. Not only this, it is also able to open a zillion other file from .NRG, .ISO to .JAR and .GZ. It's a must have for every Windows user.

Internet Messenger Essential for Windows 7

6. Pidgin: Almost all of us use the internet now. If it was not for the internet, you would not have been reading this page right now. One of the most frequent use of internet is 'chatting'. Yahoo messenger and google talk are the gems of every user's desktop in this arena. But pidgin is one program which does the job of both of those chatting programs and does in one! So you don't have to keep switching windows! This program is also open source and has come to support many more protocols like those of MSN messenger and AOL messenger. It's one handy application when chatting comes to mind.

Image Viewer cum Editor Essential for Windows 7

7. Picasa: It's in our very nature to want to go back to those good times which is why we all love to keep capturing every other scene which looks good to our eyes. While digital cameras have almost removed the idea from our minds that clicking a picture involves the cost of developing it, it makes the management of the digital pictures a challenge. Organizing by file names, date taken, tags and ratings all help you to an extent but don't solve the problem of organizing the digital pictures. Picasa does the job easily. Not only it allow to use filenames, captions, date taken and place taken as a criteria to organize the pictures, it also detects the faces of different people in the pictures and allows you to search the picture collection by a person's name. And it does so much all by itself, automatically! Nifty feature. Isn't it? Oh, and you can also chare your pictures online with one click!
And Picasa also allows you to do some basic photo editing! Creating picture slideshows and basic movie making is also supported. Just give it a try!

Free PDF Reader Essential for Windows 7

8. Foxit PDF Reader: PDF or Portable Document Format created by Adobe has now become the de-facto standard for document sharing and needs you to have PDF reader software. While adobe itself gives adobe pdf reader for free, it is an application which when run makes the system slow because of resource hogging. Foxit PDF Reader does the job of adobe pdf reader and it does not make your system slow.

Free Compact Writer Software Essential for Windows 7

9. Notepad++: You have heard about this application. No? Well, this is a Swiss army knife version of notepad which comes with windows operating system. It supports opening multiple files at one time. It supports code highlighting. So if you open up a .PHP file with this editor, it will make the use of reading it easier! It can also read the text files encoded in UNIX format. It adds itself to the right click menu for the file. So you can see the files you want to see in their raw format. This is especially useful in case you have got a bunch of files created in Unix as traditionally Unix does not use any file extensions. Its feature list is just too long to write a short review. Just install this application and you will come to realise the power automatically!

Torrent Software Essential for Windows 7

10. Utorrent: Internet has grown in leaps and bounds. The amount of data you can get from internet is reaching infinite sizes. In this case, the utorrent helps you use the bit torrent networks around the world and get data from a distributed network of user hosted content. While it is famous for pirated software and media content, getting a Linux distribution is fully legal and is officially supported by the distribution companies. It is the use which matters, not the technology when it comes to 'law'.

So you know now what will get your job done. Don't you?

Top 10 Essential Softwares for Windows 7 Operating System