Hello, Trying to clean up my old laptop because some apps absolutely destroy performance 
Looking for Windows apps that are:
lightweight
stable
low RAM usage
actually useful long term
Recently switched some of my workflow to:
wps office
edge sleeping tabs
lighter PDF tools
Way smoother than my older microsoft office download setup honestly. Would love underrated app recommendations. thanx in advance.

I recieved the video archives of all file types of my relatives to sort, edit and make a family documentary. Thousands and thousands of files to go through and it is intimidating. I need to fast preview each file and move to a related folder or delete them.

I normally use vlc to watch videos but it does not allow me move /delete files while watching the video. Opening each file one at a time, close and move/delete is not very feasible and time consuming.

When open a folder with Windows Photos I can delete the file on display with simple delete key stroke or move it with right click menu but fast viewing the videos with Photos is not fluid.

In early 2000's i was using ACDSEE photo editor which had inbuilt file manager. When you select a file to edit, it opens it in editor mode with also allows to delete/move/save as while viewing the file. You can move to next file withouth going back to file manager. Video viewing is much better than Windows Photos app. I tried the newer version of ACDSEE. Same functionality remains but it is very resource hungry, especially when i open a folder with lots of files.

So can you recommend a video player or any app that can allow me to do the choir fast.

I use windows 10.

Thanks

Hey everyone,
we’re a small team working on a simple tool called AdBuster 2.0 PRO.
It solves one very specific problem: loud TV commercials.

The app detects commercial breaks and sends IR volume commands through Broadlink RM devices (RM3 Mini, RM4 Mini, RM4 Pro).
When ads start, the volume goes down automatically.
When the program returns, the volume goes back to normal.

The tool is already fully functional — now we’re trying to understand how useful it is for real users.
If you deal with loud ads or use Broadlink for home automation, your feedback would really help us decide what direction to take next.

Not promoting anything big here, just looking for honest opinions from people who know this space.

— AdBuster Team

Been building a small native app on the side and keep wondering if it's worth finishing.

Feels like AI is slowly eating everything — and the assumption seems to be that the future is all cloud, all connected. But then you also have local LLMs taking off, which makes me think maybe it goes the other way.

Anyone still building local/desktop tools? Or should we just stop and move on?

Hey everyone,

A lot of us are stuck on budget gaming laptops or PCs with 512GB SSDs. With modern games hitting 100GB-150GB+, storage management is a constant headache.

I’m looking into launching a lightweight, highly polished Windows utility app designed to fix this for casual/non-tech-savvy gamers.

How it works: It automates native Windows NTFS compression algorithms (XPRESS/LZX) specifically targeting unoptimized, heavy static assets (like audio files and cinematic videos) in games like GTA V, Forza, or older legacy titles. It automatically creates an exclusion list for critical .exe files and high-CPU scripts.

The Rules:

1. 0% Ban Risk: No code injection or RAM reading, so Riot Vanguard / EAC can't flag it. It’s entirely OS-level.
2. Performance: On slower/budget drives, it slightly improves or maintains load times because the CPU decompresses the smaller file faster than a choked drive can read a raw file.
3. Automation: It runs silently. If Steam updates the game, the tool auto-compresses the new files in the background.

There are clunky open-source scripts on GitHub that do parts of this, but they are terrifying for casual users to configure and break during game updates. We want to make it a seamless, beautiful, one-click experience for the Indian market priced around ₹99-₹149 via UPI.

Would you actually find value in this, or is it a skip? Let me know your thoughts or any technical flaws you see.

I built a tiny Windows tray app that pastes

plain text with Ctrl+Shift+V — no more

formatting nightmares.

It's called CleanClipboard, $3.99 one-time.

https://preview.redd.it/dpvhhaod042h1.png?width=942&format=png&auto=webp&s=2d30a1266e74c30402ce51a220f7cd2ce03d7e31

I put my first proper Windows app on GitHub, mostly to see what happens.

It’s called Artemis Toolkit. At the moment it’s a small tray app that watches your Downloads folder and sorts files into folders so it doesn’t slowly become a landfill.

Nothing revolutionary, honestly. I built it because my Downloads folder was constantly full of random PDFs, ZIPs, installers, images, invoices, old duplicates, etc., and I got tired of manually cleaning the same mess every few days.

The app can auto-sort downloads by file type, and there’s also a basic custom rules system. For example, you can make rules based on extension + part of the filename.

I also added a cleanup queue for duplicates / archive files, but I was careful with that part. It does not silently delete files. Anything destructive has to be confirmed manually, because I personally wouldn’t trust a random app with deleting my files either.

Current state:
Windows tray app
Downloads auto-sorting
custom rules
extension + filename matching
duplicate-safe renaming
manual cleanup queue
recent activity view
first-run setup
.exe / installer build

It’s very much an alpha. The UI is not beautiful, and I’m sure there are rough edges, but the main flow works on my machine.

GitHub:
https://github.com/mariuscuzman-max/Artemis-Toolkit

I’m mainly looking for honest feedback. Is the idea useful? Is the README clear? Would you trust/install something like this, would you use something like this ?

Small update: based on the screenshot feedback, I added screenshots and a sorting demo GIF directly to the README, and also created a proper GitHub release with the alpha installer instead of leaving the build buried in the repo.

Hi everyone! 👋

I'm excited to announce that Fontager 1.2.0 has just been released! If you haven't heard of it before, Fontager is a modern, feature-rich font viewer alternative to Windows built-in font viewer, built with WinUI 3 and the Windows App SDK.

🆕 What's New in 1.2.0

The latest release focuses on administrator elevation flexibility for system-wide font installations:

• UAC for All-Users Install - Install fonts to C:\Windows\Fonts with minimal elevation. Fontager stays non-elevated while previewing; Windows only prompts for admin when you actually install.
• Run Entire App as Administrator - For users who want the whole application elevated as the default font handler. No need to elevate just for previews anymore.
• Improved Process Elevation Checks - Smart elevation logic and on-demand helpers to keep the app lightweight when admin mode isn't needed.

🚀 Since the 1.0.0 Release...

A lot has changed under the hood:

1.1.0 brought the big redesign:

• Complete font parsing rebuild with proper Unicode block and cmap support - no more empty glyphs in CJK, emoji, or symbol fonts
• WOFF2 full-stack support - metadata extraction, preview, and installation
• Font uninstall from Settings (finally works reliably!)
• Massive glyph rendering performance fix for fonts with 10k+ glyphs
• Inno Setup installer for Windows

Hey everyone! I wanted to share a small tool I’ve been building called Writher.

The idea is simple: it lives in your system tray and gives you two things.

Hold AltGr anywhere (any app, any text field) and just speak. It transcribes your voice with Whisper and pastes the text right where your cursor is. No clicking, no switching apps.

Hold Ctrl+R and you get a voice assistant that understands natural language. You can say things like “remind me to call Marco in one hour” or “appointment with the dentist tomorrow at 3pm” and it handles the rest. Notes, to-do lists, shopping lists, reminders with toast notifications, all stored locally in SQLite.

The part I’m most proud of: everything runs 100% offline. Speech recognition via faster-whisper, intent parsing via Ollama, no cloud, no API keys, no telemetry. Once you download the models it works with no internet at all.

There’s also a little animated floating widget with eyes that react to what it’s doing (listening, thinking, error…) which is silly but I kind of love it.

It’s Python, MIT license, Windows 10/11 only for now.

GitHub: https://github.com/benmaster82/writher

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who uses voice input regularly. Still early days but it works well for my daily workflow!

Not huge software — just small things that would genuinely make daily PC use smoother or less annoying.

I enjoy building little Windows utilities for fun/productivity, and I’m curious what kinds of workflow annoyances other people have.

Would love to hear things you wish Windows had built-in, or tiny tools you’ve always wanted but never found.

Im fed up of saas ruining all qualitv software behind a subscription paywall for a tool, so i am building using ai a industry standard pdf edition software with all opensource tools and a pretty good GUI and im like 30% done but i need testers and collaborators i some ideas so would vou test it and use it once its done. Its not a wrapper its a full option, open source rival to commercia pdf tools. Or at least thats the idea

Built this because every single co-op night with my friends collapsed the same way: whoever started the world was asleep or at work, and the rest of us were stuck staring at the main menu. Renting a dedicated server for a 3-person Valheim group felt ridiculous, and "just email the save around" turned into "who has the latest save" within two sessions.

Savehop is a 6-character room code + a tiny relay that holds the save and a lock. You press Wake to download the save and claim the lock, play, then press Sleep to upload it back and release the lock. Next person Wakes up exactly where you left off. That's the whole product.

- Free, MIT, no account, identified by a local UUID

- Works with any game that saves a file to disk (Subnautica 2, Stardew, Valheim, Satisfactory, Minecraft, Terraria, Schedule I…)

- ~7 MB installer, Tauri + Rust (not Electron)

- Self-hostable in one `docker compose up -d`

- Windows 10/11 for now; macOS/Linux on the roadmap

Maker here, happy to answer anything. The whole server is ~300 lines of Node — easy to audit, easy to fork.

I realized I kept rebuilding the same desktop setup over and over depending on what I was doing.

- For work: specific apps, notes, folders, and audio devices.

- For gaming: completely different stuff.

- For development: different tools, notes, and folders depending on the project.

After getting annoyed enough, I ended up making a small desktop launcher/widget for myself so I could switch between different setups instead of keeping everything on one cluttered desktop.

I honestly didn’t expect much from it at first, but after using it daily for a while, my desktop started feeling noticeably less chaotic.

Now going back to regular Windows shortcuts feels weirdly slow.

Curious if other people organize their PC differently depending on the task, or if most people just keep one setup for everything.