One area where Windows lacks an in built and well featured application is for editing photos. I personally found PhotoWorks as an excellent balance: it is fast, has many photo editing features such as color correction, saturation / vibrance adjustment, etc. as well as the ability to apply these adjustments between photos - Practical when you identified the "perfect" adjustments for a given scenery and want to have the same vivid experience on the rest of the photos! It is not free, nevertheless is the ideal match for the casual photographer and publishers like myself, who was missing the experience from macOS' iPhoto / Apple Photo. [click here to download]Many of us like to have backups or other copies of important data on own external disks or network drives, nevertheless would also worry about a third party being able of easily reading these precious files. Ths is where the open source and free of charge VeryCrypt application comes to rescue: it provides secure, reliable and fast encryption on physical and logical media, so even when someone steals your external disks they will have a hard time reading what is in it. [click here to download]
FOR PROGRAMMERS
When programming or designing applications, the biggest problem you'll find is the tool to choose... Microsoft finally put online and for free their adorable development environment, Visual Studio. Ideal for ASP, Basic, C++, C#, DHTML, Java, JavaScript or SQL development! [click here to download]
Mostly programmers very often need to edit text files and therefore need a program that's small, fast and recognizing multiple languages (including keywords, show matching brackets, etc.). Notepad++, an editor based on the famous open-source Scintilla project, will probably satisfy your needs. [click here to download]