These 3 Windows apps deserve to be called the greatest of all time

Published Sep 12, 2026, 5:30 PM EDT Dibakar Ghosh is a tech journalist at How-To Geek, where he focuses on Linux, Windows, and productivity tools. His goal is simple—help readers at every skill level get more done with the tech they use every day. He began his writing career in 2016 with WordPress tutorials, later moving into digital marketing, where he spent years reviewing complex tools for marketers. His work has also appeared on Authority Hacker, where he’s shared in-depth guides on digital workflows and online productivity. That experience now shapes his journalism, blending analytical depth with practical, real-world advice. When he’s not writing or testing software, Dibakar is usually watching movies or playing video games. He’s a huge Christopher Nolan fan and a strong proponent of the theater experience. In gaming, he has sunk hundreds of hours into Insomniac’s Spider-Man series, Returnal, Prototype, Darksiders, and Final Fantasy titles. An operating system is only as good as the apps you can run on it, but some apps go beyond that and end up defining the operating system. You seek them out, usually on day one of setting up a new PC, because Windows just feels incomplete without them. Here are three such apps that are so good that they define their entire categories — earning them the title of “greatest of all time.” The unofficial default media player for the masses To truly understand the excellence that is VLC media player, we must travel back to the distant past — the early 2000s. Back then, streaming wasn’t really a thing. Most content wasn’t distributed online, and whatever was available had to be downloaded. Now, imagine waiting an entire night for a video to finally finish downloading — because dial-up internet speeds were abysmal — only to discover that when you double-click to play it, Windows Media Player throws a “missing codec” error. That’s when most of us stopped trusting the system defaults and started looking for better alternatives. But finding good, reliable software was a chore. Back then, How-To Geek didn't publish roundup articles, and YouTube didn't have videos walking you through different apps. You had to find these apps yourself, risk downloading them, and test them yourself to see if they were any good. Often, the best-case scenario was that the app was buggy, whereas, more often than not, it ended up being adware or malware. This was when VLC made its grand entrance. It was the app that just worked. It could play almost any video you threw at it. It was also incredibly stable and never annoyed you with ads. It has been one of the most reliable pieces of software over the years that perfectly does what it claims — play media. However, media playback is just one of its many features. You can also use VLC to convert media files, turn it into a makeshift media server, play IPTV streams and internet videos, apply video and audio effects, and so much more. It’s basically a super app and something almost everybody installs right after setting up a new Windows PC. In fact, odds are you already have it installed on your system. Google Chrome (or Chromium) You either use it — or something based on it Credit: Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek If you were using Windows in the early 2000s, Internet Explorer was likely the browser that you used. After all, you open your computer and see a program literally called Internet Explorer — so obviously, that’s what you use to explore the internet. But Chrome came along and completely changed how people accessed the internet. I remember one day I visited an internet cafe and was searching for Internet Explorer when the owner came up and told me to use Google Chrome instead. So I did, and I never looked back. It was a complete overhaul of what you’d expect from a browser. Design-wise, it collapsed the address bar and the search bar into a single omnibox, which felt a lot more modern and minimal compared to IE. It was also incredibly fast. You could open the same website on Chrome and IE side by side, and 9 times out of 10, Chrome would load it faster. Crashes also became much less frequent. That’s because Chrome treated every tab as an individual process, so if a web app in one tab froze or became unresponsive, only that tab died — not the entire browser. Chrome basically redefined web browsers overnight, and gradually, everybody moved over until it just became the default. Now, would I say Chrome is the best browser today? Well, that’s debatable — I personally use Brave. But Brave is built on Chromium, the open-source project powering Google Chrome. So technically, you could say I’m using Chrome. Even Microsoft retired Internet Explorer and built Microsoft Edge on Chromium. That’s just how revolutionary Chrome was. Steam The definition of modern PC gaming Before Steam, PC gaming was still heavily tied to physical media. You'd buy a game on a CD or DVD, install it on your computer, and keep the disc around if you ever needed to reinstall it. If the disc got scratched, which happened more often than I’d like, the game could become unplayable. As such, even though it’s an unpopular opinion, I always preferred digital games, and Steam was arguably the platform that made digital games mainstream. Granted, digital game distribution existed well before Steam, but it was fragmented and nowhere near as convenient. As publishers began distributing games online, you'd often end up visiting different websites and installing different launchers to play titles from different companies. Game discovery was a problem, too. Then Steam came along and streamlined the entire experience. It made gaming more accessible with easy digital distribution and more affordable with regular discounts and sales. On top of that, you got access to achievements, cloud saves, and library sharing — all of which turned Steam from a mere storefront into a proper gaming platform. The distribution system was also so strong that it enabled a whole community of indie developers to build a career doing what they love. In fact, I’d go a step further and claim Steam has become more important to PC gaming than Windows itself. Sure, you can argue that Microsoft is what made PC gaming as dominant as it is today, with tools like DirectX, decades of Windows-exclusive titles, and its massive install base. However, while most of that is still true, there’s a growing number of people ditching Windows and building a Linux-powered gaming PC. And that’s largely possible because of Valve (Steam’s parent company) and its growing investment in Linux, particularly through the Steam Deck. It has made it possible to bring a huge library of existing PC games to an entirely different operating system. To me, that suggests PC gamers aren't necessarily tied to Windows — they're tied to their Steam library. If their games work on another platform, Windows becomes considerably less important.