Any good pc programs?

What are your interests?

You could start with a good productivity suite giving you spreadsheet, word processing, etc. programs to work with.

I am interested in programms to help me with simple tasks such as picture editing and media players. Any ideas would be great (for example your favourite programs), especially if they are free.

Another Windows 8.1 user here. Three freeware programs I find incredibly useful are:
CCleaner, which keeps the unneeded temp files, broken files, obsolete log files etc. cleaned off the hard drive.

Speccy, which can be configured easily to keep the current CPU temperature resident in the system tray; it also is a very reliable source for hard drive S.M.A.R.T. data, if your hard drive is so configured.

File Hippo’s App Manager, which monitors the currently installed versions of many free programs & utilities (like Java, Flash Player, etc) and then provides a list of programs that need to be updated.

All three of these programs can easily be downloaded from filehippo.com.

In addition I also keep Sysinternals Process Explorer active & resident in my system tray as well, where it gives me a graphical look at CPU activity, physical memory use & commit charge use. In addition, its full display gives detailed info on all of the currently running processes, and provides an easy way to close programs that have frozen & quit working.

For a browser, I recommend Firefox over Internet Explorer, which is officially being replaced by something new in Windows 10, out later this year.

As far as productivity suites, if you are ok with Word, then stick with it. However, Word Perfect is much easier to use.

Here is my list of essential software, all of it free (at least for home use):

Avast! – Free antivirus… that actually works, unlike McAfee or AVG.
Spybot S&D v1.6 – For blocking non-virus malware. The old version is better than the new one because the new version is “scan on demand” while the old one is full-time passive protection. That is also why I prefer Spybot over AdAware; I prefer active blocking over disinfecting after the fact, and I prefer it for free.
PDF-XChange Viewer – Better than Foxit Reader, and a vast improvement over Acrobat Reader.
Libre Office – Why pay hundreds for MS Office when you can have all of the features and full MS Office compatibility for free?
Notepad ++ – Far more power and features than Notepad, but without all of the bloat of Writer (LibreOffice’s equivalent of Word). As one who edits XML files a lot and who opens enough TXT files to prefer a program that opens almost instantly over those that take a minute to load, it’s indispensible to me.
Jarte – I prefer Jarte for word processing as it has features that Notepad ++ lacks while also avoiding the bloat of LO Writer
Firefox – Because it’s awesome. Faster, more secure, more customizable, more features… just all-around better.

Note – Using Jarte, LibreOffice, and NPP for isn’t redundancy so much as using the right tool for the job. Jarte is pretty but lacks a few obscure functions that I need for some tasks. Notepad ++ has tons of functionality and is faster than Jarte, but far from pretty. LibreOffice Writer is overkill for the sort of stuff I do with Jarte or NPP, but those two programs cannot deal with spreadsheets, databases, or other things that LibreOffice can.

Firefox
AGV anti-virus
Gimp
Open Office
Audacity
Skype
CYGWIN
.....for starters

+1 for GIMP for photo editing, it’s very capable, and free.
If you have $100 to spend for a photo editor, Adobe Lightroom is excellent. Photoshop is a lot more expensive, harder to learn, and way overkill for most photo editing.

7Zip – freeware for compressing and decompressing files

ScreenCapture – freeware, very simple and useful program for capturing screen images

There are a few password saving programs that work on the same general idea. You use a password to enter the program and that allows you to save other passwords. I use one called Password Corral, which is okay, but there may be better programs.

FoxIt Adobe file reader freeware. The only thing I use it for is to create bookmarks in a pdf file. After that I use Acrobat to read the file with the bookmarks.