PC software collection

This is a list of programs that are the best at their job.

Windows

Audio and Video

• Music Playback - foobar2000 Advanced Audio Player (local foobar2000 page)
• Video Playback - Simplest, most powerful, and best method or CCCP Combined Community Codec Pack (worst option)
• Image Viewer - Irfanview Windows Graphic Viewer
• Desktop Recorder - BSR Screen Recorder or CamStudio

Bulk Processing

• Bulk File Renamer - Bulk Rename Utility (BRU)
• Duplicate File Finder - Simple Duplicate Finder (used to be Duplicate File Finder 3.5)
• Search Filesystem for Keywords - File Text Finder or Windows Grep

Document Editors / Readers

• Comic Viewer / Reader - CDisplayEx
• Document / File Viewer / Editor - Notepad2 or Notepad++ and Microsoft Office
• PDF Reader / Viewer - Sumatra PDF

File Management

• Search - voidtools Everything Search Engine
• Recovery File (PAR, PAR2) and Hash File (SFV, MD5) Management - QuickPar
• Quick File Hashing - HashCheck
• Archiver (RAR, Zip, 7z, etc) - WinRAR or 7-Zip
• File Splitting and Joining - HJ-Split

File Transfer, P2P, and SSH

• FTP / SFTP / SCP - WinSCP
• FXP - FlashFXP (does anything even support FXP these days?)
• SSH - PuTTY
• Torrents - uTorrent v2.2.1 build 25302
• Newsgroup Downloader - NewsBin Pro
• p2p - ApexDC++
• Remote Desktop Control / VNC - TightVNC / Comparison of remote desktop software

Hardware

• Hardware Information - CPU-Z or HWiNFO
• Graphics (GPU) Information - GPU-Z
• Fan Speed Control - SpeedFan
• Hardware Monitor - SpeedFan, HWMonitor, and GPU-Z

Web

• Website Browser - Opera Web Browser v12.17 (local Opera page) and Microsoft Internet Explorer
• In-page File Downloader - Opera's Links panel

Instant Messaging / Chat

• Instant Messaging (MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, etc) - Pidgin Instant Messenger
• IRC - mIRC (local mIRC page)
• Voice Chat - Mumble, Ventrilo, Skype (worst)

ISOs, Burning, Virtual Drives

• Disc Drive Emulator - VirtualCloneDrive
• ISO Image Burning - ImgBurn
• ISO Building - ImgBurn

Security

• File Destruction / Real Deletion - Eraser
• File / Hard Drive Encrypting - VeraCrypt or TrueCrypt

System Management

• Startup Manager - AutoRuns
• BSOD Information / Troubleshooting - BlueScreenView
• Hard Disk Drive (HDD) Defrag - MyDefrag Disk Defragmenter (don't use it on an SSD, obviously)

UI

• Start Menu - Classic Shell

App Collections

• NirSoft
• Sysinternals

Linux

If you can't figure it out yourself, install Windows.