20 Most Useful Free Software for Windows Only! 2026

Over the years, I've tested hundreds of free programs available for the various platforms, including Windows. So coming up, based on a viewer's suggestion, in alphabetical order, I've compiled 20 of the most useful free software made exclusively for Windows and not available for any other platform. Let's get started. Auto Dark Mode is a must-have for me. I just started using recently. It was a winner of the Microsoft Store Awards a few years ago. It automatically switches between light and dark modes in Windows and your programs that you have open at specific times during the day. While Windows does offer the ability to manually switch between light and dark mode, it does not offer automatic switching. That's where Auto Dark Mode comes in handy. After installing it, it's off by default, so you'll have to enable it. I prefer to have light mode during daylight hours and dark mode at night. Here you can set custom hours from sunset to sunrise based on your location. You can have it set from sunset to sunrise based on geographic location. And you can have it follow Windows Night Light, which is that feature that reduces blue light emitting from your display. I've been primarily using the default settings. In the left pane, there are various settings you can change to make it work best for you. I've mentioned several code editors in the past. CodeWriter is one I recommend for those of new to coding. While not as feature-rich as my personal favorite, Visual Studio Code, it's good for those people that get overwhelmed with too many features. It's a definite step up from using Notepad, which is built into Windows. It supports more than 20 file types and comes with active syntax highlighting. In the settings in the lower right, it can be customized to fit your needs. CPU-Z for Windows only is a great way to find out information about the hardware on your computer. With a system profiling and monitoring program that detects the CPU, GPU, motherboard chipset, RAM, and other hardware. With the program open, there are tabs for CPU, Mainboard, Memory, SPD, which stands for Serial Presence Detect. This gives you additional information about your memory and graphics. In the Bench tab, you can benchmark your CPU or run a stress test. All of this information is useful when wanting to upgrade components on your PC or when deciding if you should upgrade. Crystal Disk Info is a long-time trusted free utility with the option to donate that monitors the health and status of your computer's storage drives, including hard disk drives and solid disk drives. It reads self-monitoring analysis and reported technology data to provide information on a drive's health status, temperature, power on hours, and other key metrics like the number of reallocated sectors. If you have more than one drive, which most of you do, you can click here at the top to switch between drives. There are full tutorials online that will teach you exactly how to use this. I'll just point out a couple things. You can change the theme if you want. I'll go with dark. The default temperature is in Celsius. To switch it to Fahrenheit, go to Function, Advanced Feature, Temperature Type, and select Fahrenheit. Crystal Disk Info is available for Windows XP up to Windows 11 and for Windows Server 2003 up to Windows Server 2025. In addition to x86 and x64, it now supports ARM. The developer is Japanese and really into anime. If you're not into cartoon characters on the user interface of your software, then I'd recommend downloading the standard edition. Ear Trumpet is a great alternative to the volume mixer built into Windows. Instead of having to click into several places to access it, Ear Trumpet is available in the system tray with a single click to access the volume controls for the various programs you have open. It couldn't be any easier to use. I like to keep Ear Trumpet on the opposite side of Windows' built-in volume control. All you have to do is click on it and adjust the volume using the sliders for your system and all of your open programs. When searching for files and folders in Windows, the experience is atrocious and an outright embarrassment for Microsoft. Everything is an open source program for Windows only that makes the experience a whole lot better. In fact, it should be built into all Windows operating systems. It's light on system resources and easy to use. With the program open, it lists every file and folder on your computer. When you start typing in the search box, it limits what is displayed to help you find what you're looking for quickly. Next up, Flow Launcher is very similar to everything but with more advanced functionality. This free and open source program acts as a fast keyboard-driven launcher and productivity tool. It allows users to quickly search and open applications, files, and websites, perform calculations, run system and shell commands, and much more through a single customizable search bar. To launch Flow Launcher, use the keyboard shortcut which is the alt key and space bar. This is where you can do all those things I mentioned earlier. For example, if I wanted to open the Handbrake program to convert a file, simply type Handbrake. You can use the arrow keys here if you want to go up and down, but since it's the first one listed here, I would just hit enter on my keyboard to open it. To customize it, it has support for plugins along with the plugin store to enhance the functionality. There are various themes that you can choose from and you can find those here and it also has hotkeys to make using it quicker. When installing Flow Launcher, you might get this warning that says running this app might put your PC at risk. I assure you that this program has been used by those that work in IT and security professionals for many years and is completely safe. To move forward, click more info and then you would click run anyway. Fused is a cool blending app that can help you to create interesting effects for your photos and videos. The results can be hit or miss as you'll see in this example. Here's how it works. First, select your background photo. You could leave it square or choose original. Click the check mark to move on. Now select your foreground photo. To accept it, hit the check mark again. Now you'll have a blend of two photos. This one is not so great. Selecting blends will give you several types of blends to play around with. Adjust will let you change the contrast, exposure, and brightness. It includes masking tools along with tools to crop, rotate, and flip your image. And when you're done, in the upper right corner, you can save your project to your computer. Up next is Glary Utilities, which may be the most suggested utility software mentioned in the comments of the previous videos. It's only available on Windows computers and offers an excellent set of tools to clean your system and boost your PC performance. Now I'll give you a brief overview of the software. When you launch Glary Utilities, you have three tabs. One for overview, one-click maintenance, and advanced tools. On the overview screen, it will show your boot time. Another great feature is the one-click maintenance by selecting scan for issues that will run a registry cleaner, shortcuts fixer, along with other options you've selected. In the advanced tools tab, you have several more tools for cleanup and repair, optimize and improve, privacy and security, files and folders, and additional system tools. There are so many features with the software, I could spend 15-20 minutes going over all the features. But to save you some time, I'd recommend checking them out for yourself. They do offer a pro version with additional features that may be worthwhile for some of you, but for most, the free version will be all that you need. If you need a detailed, comprehensive overview of the hardware on your computer, HWinfo is a great diagnostic tool for use by professionals and power users. It provides extensive information about your hardware. It's even used by NASA to monitor computer systems for failures. In addition to in-depth hardware information, it also has real-time system monitoring to show you the actual status to be more aware of when to upgrade hardware or troubleshoot an issue. The user interface can be overwhelming to new users, so I'll show you a couple things real quickly. Depending on how you have it set up, you'll have a separate window with your system summary of your key components. If you don't need this window, you can close it out or move it. Along the left, selecting any component will give you additional information to the right. The standard installer is available for Windows 11, going all the way back to Windows 7. There's also two portable versions available, one for Windows 95 or later, and another one for DOS. HWinfo is available to use for free for both personal and non-commercial use. In commercial environments, it does require a pro license that starts at $29 per year, and they also have a lifetime license for $199. If you've ever used Microsoft's built-in Photos app, then you already know it's terrible. ImageGlass is a great lightweight alternative that's not bloated and sloppily coded like the aforementioned program. It's free and open source and supports more than 70 image formats like PNG, JPEG, SVG, and many others. It loads images quickly with an easy-to-use interface. You'll find all the necessary tools on the bar at the top, with additional tools located in the menu on the right. Theme packs can also be installed to change the look. ImageGlass is available for Windows only because, quite frankly, most Linux and Mac users already have a decent image viewer built in. This will be a quick one. Media Player Classic Black Edition for Windows only is a fork of the original Media Player Classic. It's free and open source, light on system resources, and is great for those of you that have issues with VLC Media Player or don't like the built-in Media Player in Windows. Unlike the original Media Player Classic that discontinued development years ago, the Black Edition is still updated on a regular basis. It's easy to use with all the controls located here at the bottom. Next up is the Microsoft PC Manager for Windows 10 and Windows 11. This includes a collection of tools to clean up your computer and boost its performance. While I prefer doing most of this stuff on my own, PC Manager is still better than using Crap Cleaner, which in itself turned to crap with numerous issues over the years. Journalists posing as tech experts that don't know anything still recommend using it. Very sad. Then there is Bleach Bit, which is an excellent program, but for novices can be difficult to use. When you open Microsoft PC Manager, its user interface is very easy to figure out. In its home tab, you'll see its most popular tools. In the other tabs on the left, you'll find other tools that are quite useful. In Protection, you can do a virus and threat protection scan. In Storage, you can do a full cleanup scan. In Apps, you can easily enable and disable programs at startup and it'll offer suggestions. And Toolbox includes an assortment of useful tools. So if you're on Windows 10 or 11 and you're still using Crap Cleaner, uninstall it and use Microsoft's very own PC Manager, which is available from the Microsoft Store. We also did a beginner's guide video for it. That link is in the description as well. Next up is Microsoft Power Toys. I'm sure there are some of you getting tired of me mentioning it, but not mentioning it in a video like this would be tech malpractice. This app includes a ton of useful tools geared towards power users to enhance the experience on Windows in various ways. Some of the tools I use include the Color Picker, which allows you to select a color to find out what color it is, which is useful for artists and designers. Fancy Zones allows you to personalize the layout of your desktop. This comes in handy when working with a multi-monitor layout or large monitor. Image Resizer allows you to resize images in bulk. And the Shortcut Guide lets you quickly see the most popular keyboard shortcuts associated with the Windows key. To open the Shortcut Guide, use the keyboard shortcut Windows key plus shift plus slash. To use any of these, hold down the Windows key plus the corresponding key or keys. If you want to learn more about how to use Power Toys and its various features, I'll put the link to our beginner's guide in the description of this video. Mouse Pointer Highlight is for those people that ask me what I'm using to highlight the cursor in our videos. This can also come in handy when doing presentations for work or anything else. It's highly customizable depending on your needs. You can change the size, opacity, and color. You can also adjust the click highlight size, opacity, display time, and color. Next up is Pop Player, which is a multimedia player that is similar to VLC and KM Player. In fact, it was created by the same team that created KM Player. Pop Player supports just about every audio and video format that you can think of. It will also optimize your media for seamless playback. When you first launch Pop Player to play any of your media, you'll notice it has a minimalistic style without a lot of clutter. Along the bottom, it has all the typical playback options. To the far right, selecting the settings icon will bring up the control panel where you can quickly change the audio, video, subtitle, and playback settings. If you want to access even more features, just right-click anywhere inside the window to easily get to the settings that you want to change. Revo Uninstaller Free does what you'd expect. It removes programs from your computer you no longer need, along with the junk that sometimes gets left behind by a program's uninstaller. To remove a program, select it from the list and click on uninstall. It will create a system restore point, then proceed with the uninstall process. I'll check the box to delete the user data, then click on uninstall. I'll ignore this window and click on uninstall. And then yes. And when that's done, you can have it scan your system to look for leftover files, folders, and registry items. ShareX is a free and open source screenshot and screen recording program I've mentioned quite a bit in our free software series of videos. For productivity, nothing matches its feature set. It's packed with a lot more tools than the built-in snipping tool in Windows and others like GreenShot. Selecting capture on the left, you have several choices, including full screen, window monitor, region, screen recording, and my personal favorite for capturing an entire webpage is scrolling capture. And if you go into tools here on the left, there's a color picker, image editor, and video converter. Sumatra PDF is a free and open source document viewer that supports many document formats, including PDF, EPUB, CHM, and many others. It's lightweight and extremely fast, making it a great alternative to Adobe Reader. The design is minimalistic with no clutter. One of the first things I do when buying a new appliance or vehicle is download the owner's manual. The files open quickly, and for PDFs with bookmarks, makes it a breeze jumping to each category with ease. TreeSize Free is a disk space manager to visually see with a chart what is taking up space on your drives. This can save time by not having to open each folder one by one, since Windows does a horrible job of letting you know which specific files and folders are taking up storage space. When you first launch the program, you'll want to start it up with administrator privileges. After that, you'll want to scan your drive by going to select directory here in the upper left and selecting your drive. I've already done that. There are various filters here at the top for name, size, etc. Most important being size, which is the default. Double clicking on any folder will show you what subfolder or files are taking up the most space. Thanks for watching. Links are in the description. If this video was useful for you, give it a thumbs up and share it with others. If you know of any free software for Windows only that you think are useful, let us know about them in the comments. And if you're new to our channel, subscribe and click the bell for more free software videos and other tech related stuff right here on Brett in Tech.