Windows applications I use

As a follow-up to the 'Android applications I use' blog post from three months ago: A short post about the Windows applications I use on my private laptop.

Productivity

Microsoft Office 2013 Home and Business. The free office packages like LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org don't cut it in my opinion. Usability issues, the lack of a ribbon in particular, and compatibility issues make them a no-go.

Start8. Mainly to be able to boot straight to desktop, to a lesser degree to have a start button.

Notepad++ as better editor than Notepad. 

Adobe Reader XI as PDF reader. I've tried the alternatives like Foxit Reader, never could get used to their quirks.

Windows Powershell for the occasions when I want to use the command line. I'll admit that I have barely scratched the surface of what all Powershell is capable of.

Other apps in this category: TeamViewer for quick remote support, Snipping Tool for screenshots, Picasa as image viewer.

Internet

Web browser: Google Chrome (dev build) as main browser, Internet Explorer 10 as secondary browser. There is no particular reason for me to use Mozilla Firefox; as a matter of fact I haven't even installed Firefox. For the first time in 12 years I have no Mozilla-based application on my private PC. The reasoning why is material for a blog post of its own.

Email client: Microsoft Outlook 2013.

Instant messaging: Skype. It supports all the chat protocols I still use on the desktop.

IRC: HexChat. The best free IRC client for Windows.

Social media: MetroTwit as Twitter client. Mind you, I'm not a heavy tweeter; I mainly use Twitter as RSS surrogate by following the various news sites.

Cloud storage: Mainly Google Drive. Microsoft Skydrive is installed (via Office 2013), I hardly ever use it though.

Other apps falling under the 'Internet' category are WinSCP for file transfers, PuTTY as SSH client, Google Earth, the Hostr Windows app for quick image uploads.

Multimedia

Audio player: Apple iTunes 11 for local files and to buy music from, Spotify for streaming music. I can just imagine what some of you are thinking now - 'iTunes? On Windows? U mad, bro?' No. It works, it works well, and looks ok also. YMMV of course.

Movie player: VLC. Main reason being that it plays pretty much every movie format you can think of.

Games

I'm not much of a gamer. Yet I still have both Origin and Steam installed; the former to be able to play the 2013 version of SimCity, the latter for mostly anything else such as strategy games (e.g. the Total War series) or casual games I acquired in the various Humble Bundles. The game I'm spending the most time playing is Minecraft on mc.neowin.net </shamelessplug>.

As you can see I'm using more or less only desktop applications on Windows 8. The modern UI/Metro applications are largely ignored - I have yet to find one which offers any benefits over traditional desktop apps. Feel free to give me any example of a must-have modern UI app in the comments.