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Essential free apps for back-to-school laptops

This collection of must-have free apps should be among the first things installed on any new back-to-school laptop.

Dan Ackerman Editorial Director / Computers and Gaming

Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications. "Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times

Expertise I've been testing and reviewing computer and gaming hardware for over 20 years, covering every console launch since the Dreamcast and every MacBook...ever. Credentials

Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings

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Dan Ackerman

Aug. 27, 2010 12:41 p.m. PT

2 min read

Heading off to class with a shiny new laptop is one of the best things about the back-to-school season, but we have yet to find a laptop that's perfectly set up out of the box. The typical first-time-use experience for a new laptop owner can be a frustrating one, with pop-up warnings from your free antivirus trial software; annoying settings to go through the first time you launch Internet Explorer (likely the only browser preinstalled on your machine); and missing or crippled apps for burning DVDs, opening ZIP files, or playing videos.

Unboxing and setting up a couple of new laptops every week has helped me put together a solid list of free must-have appsthat belong on any new PC. I usually keep the install files for these programs on an 8GB USB key I keep on my keyring (the excellent LaCie Iamakey, if you're curious).

Browse this collection of must-have free apps for your new laptop in the gallery below, which includes download links for each program. Interestingly, a few of these, such as Open Office, get less use now than they used to (as we've moved much of our word processing to Google Docs), which hints that cloud-based computing may further erode the need for traditional software in the future.

The back-to-school 2010 edition also includes suggestions based on reader feedback from previous free app roundups, including 7-Zip for opening compressed files, and the popular free antivirus software Avast. Several of these app have free Mac versions as well, but we'll follow up with a separate OS X version of this roundup in the near future. If you've got your own must-have free apps that belong on any new PC, let us know in the comments section.

Essential free apps for new laptop and desktop PCs

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