There are a lot of applications that come pre-installed with your version of Windows, and while some of these applications are decent to use, most of them fall short when compared to applications that have been developed by third-party developers. Mac computers come equipped with much better built-in software than Windows computers and this is most evident in the browsers that come equipped with these systems; Safari is much better than the native Internet Explorer on Windows computers (although Edge on Windows 10 is a welcome change). Apart from browsers, there might be other applications on your Windows systems that might frustrate you so installing alternatives to these applications might be the escape that you might be looking for. So here are a few applications, Microsoft native or otherwise, that might be frustrating to the user and their third-party alternatives that you could migrate to.

Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player is not a very annoying application to deal with in terms of user-interface but is pretty annoying when it comes to codec support. Windows Media Player does not support popular file formats like FLAC (Lossless audio codec) and even supported formats like MP4 formats are not catalogued properly within the player’s library. Video support is even worse and if you have high-resolution video files like MKV, Windows Media Player just flat-out does not support it. Subtitle support is also very limited on the player so alternatives to the built-in player would be popular video players like VLC Media Player or Pot Player, both of them are free.

Adobe Flash Player

Unfortunately, there is no alternative to Adobe Flash Player but native HTML5 media support is slowly turning this bloated application obsolete. There are a lot of things wrong with Flash Player, it’s bloated and it can adversely affect your computer’s performance

by hogging quite a lot of your system’s memory. It also needs to be updated constantly making it a hassle every time you restart your computer. Popular websites like YouTube have already started using HTML5 video and Google’s Chrome Browser also comes with Flash Player built-in so that you don’t need to install an independent version of Flash on your computer. Other browsers will ask you to install Flash, however, but you can easily block all flash content by installing flash blocker extensions for your browser so that flash elements only functions if your explicitly give it permission.

iTunes

iTunes is the go-to media management software for many users on Windows because the software offers a good interface and native support for Apple products. Many user, even if they don’t own an Apple device, stick with iTunes for their great user-interface but iTunes fails horribly when it comes to good resource management. iTunes works great on a Mac computer but the Windows port is so horrible that it uses so much of your system’s resources that using it on Windows will slow down your entire computer. There are better alternatives like Winamp or Media Monkey if you’re looking for performance and compatibility but if you want amedia management software with a slick interface, go with Zune Player.

Windows Picture Viewer

Windows’ native picture viewer also suffers from the same problem that Windows Media Player suffers from: lack of support for popular codecs. Windows Picture Viewer is very basic and supports only basic picture formats like JPEG and PNG. If you have a digital camera that shoots in its RAW formats, Windows Picture Viewer won’t even recognise it. Although there are codecs that you could download from Microsoft with support for RAW formats, it is additional hassle to make your pictures work with a very basic picture viewer. It would be better to ditch Windows Picture Viewer for something much better and powerful, like Google’s Picasa or IrfanView. If you want better control over your library of photos, Lightroom and ACDSee might be better alternatives although these ones aren’t free.

There are tons of applications on Windows that might frustrate or annoy you, but luckily, there are enough free apps available for the platform that will help you steer away from these annoying applications and substitute them for better alternatives that might just improve your computing experience.

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