Notepad++ is one of those apps that you didn’t know you needed, but once you use it, you can never go back. Best of all, it’s available through the GNU license and is completely free! It auto-saves, has line numbers for looking at code or referencing text, a cool autocomplete feature that will save you from retyping previously entered text values, full customization, and much, much more. Notepad++ is the ultimate text editor/coding/idea jotter/scratchpad application. Do yourself a favour and replace it with Notepad++. But Notepad has downsides: it doesn’t save anything automatically (I wish I had $10 for every time Windows crashed and I lost unsaved information in notepad) and it’s extremely feature-bare. Don’t forget to download the LAME MP3 encoding DLLs to enable exporting your audio as MP3s! Notepad++įor years I used to use Notepad to jot down ideas, copy and paste text, or as a scratchpad to keep multiple pieces of information on hand. Thanks to Audacity, an open-source audio editor, this is all quickly and easily done through an intuitive UI. When you’re preparing audio for upload, you want it to be as clean as possible, and so it’s very helpful to be able to normalize volume, combine clips, and reduce noise. M ore people are recording audio than ever these days for meetings or podcasts. If there’s one legitimate criticism about Windows 10, it’s that a lot of the agency and control have been taken away from the end user. The one downside is that a license for Reflect costs a bit of money if you want all the features, but, honestly, I think it’s worth every penny for personal use: I have saved hundreds of hours of my life by using Reflect to restore disk images onto new machines rather than setting everything up again. One of my favourite features is its built-in recovery disk creator, which allows the creation of a USB recovery disk running its own version of Reflect to allow recovery or other work from a standalone environment. Macirum Reflect is a user-friendly and functional way to backup, restore, or recover images of partitions or entire disks. In the digital realm, there’s nothing more important than your data, and there’s nothing worse than losing it. “Windows 10: It’s better than nothing!” - Microsoft (Image credit: own) Macrium Reflect

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