White Blank Pages: Top 10 - Not so popular, free Windows PC apps

There's more to your PC besides the essentials. While its possible to hit upon a lot of popular wares like anti-virus softwares and fast browsers, I find that an additional peripheral essential list of must-haves is needed. Here's a list of top 10 not so heard, but hugely valuable applications. Bear in mind there could be alternatives to each one on the list. However, these do the job they are intended to do and they do it well. The best part, they are 100% free.

Dropbox

Ever lost oodles of valuable data because of a computer crash or a hard disk crash? Photos from the college years, scanned copies of important documents, memories locked in a format and from a source which doesn't exist anymore? We've all been there. Dropbox saves you all that pain and agony. Once installed, a dedicated folder cane be assigned for online sync and backup. What this means is that whatever you drop into this regular looking windows folder will automatically be backed up online. The beauty of the service is in their sync. You could install dropbox on all of your computers and when you log in with the same dropbox ID, it automatically makes all your files available on all your machines. So, drop it here and it appears there. The files could also be downloaded directly through their web interface. If you have privacy concerns you could just add to an encrypted zip file and sync that up. Your peace of mind guaranteed.

Any Video Converter

Helps convert any videos you have into mobile videos. It basically shrinks the video down to a size and to an audio quality which will suit most mobile devices. Be it mobiles or Ipods. It has preset settings for some of the popular down format options. You could of-course even use it to cimply convert the video from one format to the other. Down-converting to a smaller video screen size helps save you huge amounts of space. In the case of under-powered netbooks which can't support HD resolutions, you could use it to down convert the video to a more acceptable form factor.

CCleaner

Crap Cleaner as it was once called. This free app cleans up all the crap you've collected over the years. Overtime, temporary internet files, memory dumps thumbnail caches really clog up your system and this eventually leads to browsers taking longer than expected to start-up, slow rendering web pages and the like. Their registry fix option cleans up unused extensions, missing dll references, thus overall, cleaning up the system to a great extent. Highly recommended running once a month.

Allway Sync

If you are paranoid about data loss and if you expect all your data in sync across multiple storage devices, this is the app for you. I've known folks who take 3 back-ups of all their data periodically with this tool. While Dropbox helps you back data up online and sync it across various computers, this does the sync across two of your storage medias. Like your USB thumb drive and an external thumb drive. Once a sync profile is created, you plug your devices in and hit 'Sync'. The tool intelligently syncs data all across and even warns you if it finds considerable differences between the two copies.

7-zip

It does everything a compression tool would do. The only difference is that it does it for free and does so beautifully.

Cute-pdf Writer

Its easy saving any of your documents into PDF files using the latest versions of Microsoft office, but in case you haven't got one of those, this will save the day. The tool sets up a pseudo-printer with the name 'Cute-PDF'. Anytime you want to convert a document to a PDF, just select 'print' in the standard options and select the 'Cute-PDF' as the printer. It asks you where you'd like the file to be saved and voila, you have your PDF available. Works on any application which supports a 'print' mechanism. Great for creating seemingly non-editable content.

Foxit PDF Reader

A nimbler, simpler and free alternative to Adobe's native PDF reader.

Paint.net

If you are a web-developer or just a user who likes manipulating images, there isn't a better alternative than paint.net. With support for a wide variety of image formats and a gamut of extremely capable tools and touch-up options, this image processing application could keep you busy till rapture. Highly rated and highly capable.

That completes our round-up of the best applications any PC should have installed. The other worthy and much more popular applications are VLC media player, Picasa, Freemind, IOBit Malware fighter and Advanced System Care. So what else is on your list?