The gdal library is an excellent source of tools that help you query, process and manipulate spatial data of varying formats. It can be used directly from the command line in both linux and windows environments and is also accessible through its own windows command line set up, downloaded here.

Some particularly useful tools I’ve found are:

gdal_translate

gdalinfo

gdal_warp

which let you: convert between raster formats, list info relating to a given raster and reproject raster data respectively.

To use it with Python - assuming that python is already installed and you know which version you have - you require the gdal bindings which can be downloaded here. If you have windows 7 and Python version 2.7, then you want to scroll down to the GDAL list and run GDAL-1.11.1.win-amd64-py2.7.exe

Importing the gdal library into your python environment is then possible using:

 
from osgeo import gdal, gdalconst 
from osgeo.gdalconst import * 

An example of its application can be seen in this post.