If you can find your desired software in one of these three sources, don’t look elsewhere. You’ll always be guaranteed to find the right product without any malware, advertisement, or bloat concerns.

We call the websites below “completely safe” because they are the most authentic sources for software downloads. We have categorized our choices accordingly. Not all websites claiming to be safe for downloads are equal.

Direct downloads: all websites below provide a direct download link to the latest version of any software.

These are very popular with malware authors. But intrusive adware during software downloads is to be avoided at all costs.

No adware during downloads: it’s one thing to have advertisements displayed on a web page.

We had to weed out such websites no matter how popular they are. No bloat or crapware: often the freeware developers don’t even know that their package is being bundled with all manner of other things.In listing our recommended safe sources for Windows software, we took the following factors into consideration: Our Criteria to Assess a Source’s Safety for Software Downloads Our Criteria to Assess a Source's Safety for Software Downloads.To get to the direct ISO file downloads, your browser will claim it’s on a non-Windows operating system. If you spoof the user agent, you can access a site that claims it’s incompatible with your system. If something on the website isn’t compatible with your setup, the site can serve you a different page. The browser’s user agent is a short string of text that tells a website which OS and browser you’re using. This requires spoofing your browser’s user agent. To get those direct ISO file downloads on Windows, you’ll need to make your web browser pretend you’re using another operating system. If you access the website from another operating system-like macOS or Linux-you’re sent to a page where you can directly download an ISO file instead. Microsoft’s Media Creation Tool is only for Windows. RELATED: What Is An ISO File (And How Do I Use Them)? Here’s how to download Windows ISOs without the creation tool. Microsoft makes Windows 10 ISO images available to everyone through its download website, but if you’re already using a Windows machine, it forces you to download the Media Creation Tool first.

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