10 Free Software That Should Never Be On Any PC 2026

Hi folks, Brad here. Recently in another video, I showed you our 10 favorite free software from developers that do things the right way. In this yearly roundup, I'll show you the 10 free programs from developers that don't, that could be doing more harm than good. I'll let you know why they should never be installed on any PC, and for some of these, I'll let you know about free alternatives to those programs. Let's get started. First up, after taking a few years off from not being on this list, let's give a lukewarm welcome back to LastPass. This password manager, offering both free and paid plans, allows users to create, save, and manage their passwords across multiple platforms. They've had several issues over the years. In August of 2022, a hacker stole a copy of their customer database, along with some copies of their customer's password vault, much of which was unencrypted. Later that same year, in December, it was revealed that they were hacked again. In September of 2023, experts believe they had linked a LastPass security breach to a string of cryptocurrency heists. The amount stolen was more than $35 million for more than 150 victims. More recently, in January and March of this year, hackers seeing LastPass as a vulnerable target with lax security have launched major phishing campaigns to steal the master passwords of its customers. The sole purpose of a password manager is to keep their users' information safe. Obviously, LastPass does not appear to be doing a good job of doing that. A great alternative to LastPass is Bitwarden. It's what I use. They have a fantastic reputation and track record with no breaches ever. Their free plan will be all most people will ever need. If you're an unfortunate person still using LastPass, they make it really easy to export your data from them and import it into Bitwarden. On the subject of security, real quickly, McAfee is the first of two antivirus suites that should be avoided like the plague. This overly bloated software these days does a decent job of protecting your PC and an even better job at slowing it down. The other overly bloated, resource hogging, antivirus suite to avoid is Norton. Just like McAfee, you'll often see Norton bundled with new PCs. While they both come with free trials, it's best to immediately uninstall them. If you want better choices than those two that are not resource hogs with actual free plans, I'll put the link to our recent top five in the description of this video. To simply view PDF files on your computer, Adobe has a free program they call Adobe Acrobat Reader. While it's also bloated and slow to open PDFs, that's not why I'm not recommending it. It's the shady tactics Adobe uses on their install page. Most users in a hurry to install it will just see and click the download button here in the top left without noticing below that they'll also be installing Adobe Express Photos and McAfee Security Scan Plus. Both of these are checked by default. This was a garbage tactic by some developers 10 to 15 years ago. Competent developers learned that doing this builds mistrust with its users. Either Adobe doesn't care or has not learned that lesson yet. As a free alternative, there's Foxit PDF Reader. It's very lightweight so PDFs will load quickly and it includes other useful features to mark up a PDF and lets you fill and sign forms. After six years of not being on this list, Ccleaner makes its triumphant return. Now owned by the same company that owns Avast Antivirus and Norton mentioned earlier, Ccleaner is used to free up PC storage and boost performance. It's debatable if it really does the latter. Here's a quick rundown of their history. In 2017, it was revealed that its own installer available on their site was hacked to distribute malware affecting millions of users. In 2018, they included a data collection module in the software that was enabled by default and could not be disabled by the user. After receiving a ton of criticism, they finally gave their users the ability to disable data collection in privacy settings. And more recently, they were caught installing Avast Antivirus onto users' computers without their permission. Just wanted to point those things out because what used to be respectable publishers with writers posing as tech journalists are still recommending this crap. Fun fact, the first C in Ccleaner stands for crap, which is what this program has turned into. If you need an alternative, BleachBit for all three major platforms is a good choice for power users. And for Windows only is Microsoft PC Manager. This one's only available in selected regions at this time. Real quickly, I no longer recommend installing shopping extensions like Honey from PayPal in your browser. In Honey's case, several lawsuits were filed accusing them of ripping off customers who installed the extension, offering inferior deals, and they were accused of link swapping, capturing commissions that should have gone to the influencers. Most of the lawsuits were dismissed, and Google has updated its Chrome extension policy banning background link swaps. Also, Honey updated its extension to comply. Then there was the 2025 class action lawsuit accusing the Capital One Shopping extension of stealing affiliate commissions from content creators by hijacking their tracking cookies, allegedly doing the same link swapping that Honey was accused of. While that lawsuit was eventually settled, I've just lost all trust in shopping extensions like Honey and Capital One Shopping. In my experience, it's just best to vet the deals on your own on your favorite sites. Next up is CapCut. This Chinese-owned photo and video editing platform is developed by ByteDance, the same company that makes TikTok. Offering free and paid plans, it can be used in your favorite browser with apps that can be downloaded for Windows, Android, and iOS. Here's the rug with CapCut. Their terms of service is the most exploited power-grabbing terms of service I have ever read, making those from Google, Microsoft, and even Facebook look good in comparison. A post by MJ Perkins on LinkedIn sums it up perfectly. CapCut's new terms of service are a red flag for creators. If you edit content in the app, you're now agreeing to give CapCut full rights to your videos, voice, face, and likeness. They can even use your work in any way they want, for free, forever. No royalties, no notice, no way to revoke it, even if you delete your account. This isn't just about TikTok clips. It affects branded content, client work, influencer campaigns, and anything you create using their platform. As an alternative to CapCut, ClipChamp, with a free and premium plan, lets you edit online in your favorite browser, and it's also available to download on Windows. For those looking for something more professional, there is DaVinci Resolve, offering both free and paid plans. It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. While there are good free VPNs to use, HolaVPN has to be the worst I've ever known of. It's used by people to access domains that are known to use geo-blocking to access otherwise blocked content. It has desktop apps for Windows and macOS, along with browser extensions. It consistently makes CloudWard's list of the worst free VPN services. Here's some of the complaints. Hola logs user information. Some of that information is shared with their trusted partners and third parties. The big issue with HolaVPN, by using it, you're consenting to having your computer be part of a botnet where your bandwidth is shared with other users, unless you upgrade to their premium plan. If you're looking for a more trustworthy free VPN service than HolaVPN, I'll put the link to our recent top five in the description of this video. Next up is RealPlayer. Some of you old-timers will remember this one. This nearly worthless media player that was first released in 1995 is surprisingly updated on a regular basis and it's used by people that don't know any better. Having tested it again recently on Windows, I can confirm that it's still terrible. Support for video and audio file formats is limited and when playing video clips, it's still sluggish. A popular free alternative to RealPlayer is PopPlayer. The primary reason I don't recommend it as being the best media player is that it collects data from users' computers that is sent back to the developer. Otherwise, it's good. The best free alternative to RealPlayer is VLC. It's open source with no ads, no user tracking, and will play just about any audio or video file available. A popular Chrome and Firefox browser extension is Adblock Plus. When installed, this small program runs in your web browser that will sometimes block ads on websites. I say sometimes because they have what they call an acceptable ads policy to allow ads that aren't intrusive or annoying. I'll skip with the rest of Here's what this really means. Exposed more than 10 years ago, Adblock Plus allows companies to pay them to unblock their ads. Known companies include Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. This is the default setting. There is a setting to block all ads in settings, but many novice users will not know how to do this. The best alternative to Adblock Plus is uBlock Origin. It's available for Firefox and still available on some of the Chromium-based browsers. When Chrome updated its browser to Manifest Version 3, the next iteration of web extensions, uBlock Origin, was no longer supported. So, the developer released a new extension called uBlock Origin Lite, which also does a good job of blocking ads. Zoom is another one that made our list of never to use software back in 2020. This cloud-based video conferencing platform gained popularity when most of us, back in that year, were forced to work from home. Just like back in 2020, 6 years ago, they're also still having a problem here in 2026 with Zoom Bombings. Zoom Bombings is the unwanted, disruptive intrusion into a video conference by hackers or trolls. Also earlier this year, this company known for having terrible security had yet another data breach. It's still not known how many users were affected or how they were affected. Their data back in 2020 was pretty bad, with half a million users affected, exposing emails, passwords, and other information. Sadly, when it comes to services like Zoom offering both free and paid plans, there's not many to consider, but I do have a couple here to consider with better track records when it comes to security. There's Microsoft Teams, which I use personally, offering both free and paid plans. Also with free and paid plans, there's Google Meet. I don't use it, but friends I know say it's better than Zoom. Thanks for watching. Links to the free alternatives can be found in the description. If this video was useful for you, give it a thumbs up. If you know of a program that should be avoided, let us know about it in the comments. And if you're new to our channel, subscribe and make sure to hit that bell to not miss out on our latest free software videos and other tech-related stuff here on Brett in Tech.