By Ellen Mooneyham

It is a truth universally acknowledged that everyone loves free stuff, from samples at the grocery store to promos passed out at sporting events. When it comes to computers, many people think the more expensive the tool or program is, the better. This isn’t always the case. Our Software Quality Management consultants have compiled a list of the top twenty free software testing and productivity tools that we rely on every day.

 

  1. Microsoft Security Essentials – Complete and free virus and Internet security software from Microsoft.
  2. exe – Free Download Manager – Powerful, easy-to-use and free download accelerator and manager that downloads all other software.
  3. LastPass – Password encoder and manager that integrates with Internet Explorer and Chrome, giving you access to not only your passwords, but your favorites.
  4. exe – Adds a new Windows hot-key that allows you to paste text to any application without formatting.
  5. Process Explorer – Lists every running application on your PC and information about running processes and open files. Process Explorer also shows a summary of what your system is currently doing, statistics, and graphs on your PC’s CPU, memory, input, and output.
  6. com – Provides free online tools for developers and testers, including fake credit card number generator, regular expression tester, several formatters, validators, code minifiers, string escapers, and more available.
  7. Ghostery – An anti-cookie/tracking software.
  8. 7-zip – The best freeware zip program. This open source Windows utility manipulates archives. Formats 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR are fully supported and unpacks other formats, such as .ISO files.
  9. Foxit –A lightweight, fast, and secure PDF Reader capable of high-volume processing.
  10. Fiddler2 – Web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data. You can also debug traffic from popular devices like Windows Phone, iPod/iPad, and others.
  11. WinDirStat – A disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for various versions of Microsoft Windows.
  12. Unlocker — A simple tool that lets you get rid of stubborn files that can’t be deleted in the standard way.
  13. Dropbox – Dropbox is a service that keeps your files safe, synced, and easy to share.
  14. Microsoft Problem Screen Recorder – Automatically captures the steps you take on a computer, including a text description and a screen shot of each click. The software is likely already installed on your system. Find it by searching for psr.exe.
  15. FileZilla – Quick and easy FTP server and client.
  16. CCleaner – Cleans your PC and improves performance, increases security, protects your privacy and makes your computer faster.
  17. Evernote – Cloud-based note taking.
  18. Google Drive – Program with Dropbox-like features, plus shareable web-based word processing, spreadsheets, and more.
  19. Notepad++ – Free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages.
  20. TCPView – Program that shows detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the local and remote addresses and state of TCP connections. TCPView provides a more informative and conveniently presented subset of the Netstat program that ships with Windows.

 

Did we miss any great free tools? Let us know on Twitter.

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