Must Have Freeware

[azrafel]

I figure this is the best section for this, if not, feel free to move it

This is a list of freeware programs that I've compiled. I origianally posted this on another forum I frequent, and I just updated it today, and thought I'd post it here.

Also, I’m going to try to reorganize this list, as I’ll be adding much more to it, thanks to my latest PCWorld magazine.

Here goes:

All following programs are high quality and free of charge.


Security and Antivirus stuff : For protecting against virii, spyware, and malware.

avast! AnitVirus - Home version is free when you register. Great protection, easy to use.

AVG. It's a free antivirus that operates much in the same way that Norton does. Provides email protection, system protection, and other little goodies like update and scan scheduling. The new version occasionally makes you download a new one once your "trial" runs out, but even that is automated.

TrendMicro Housecall - Don't want to install anything? Just want to do a quick virus scan? TrendMicro provides this service to better protect the world. Works great, but of course, requires an internet connection.

Ad-Aware - Anti-spyware program. Get rid of those malicious pop-ups.

Spy-bot - Another anti-spyware, use in tandem with Ad-Aware. Also can "immunize" your system to prevent future attacks by certain malware.

SpywareBlaster 3.3 - This anti-spyware utility prevents the installation of a lot of damaging ActiveX components in IE (and IE based browsers) and adds harmful sites to the Restricted Sites list in IE. It also features tracking cookie blocking in IE and Mozilla/Firefox. After installing this, Ad-Aware and Spybot don't have much to find and remove anymore.

Hijack This - A registry scanner that lets you easily remove offending registry entries (usually caused by spyware or the programs that funnel them into your system). You really have to know your doodoo on this one, though. Don't just go in there and delete everything the program finds, or you'll please call me Gerald up your system.

Microsoft Windows Defender – Yes, you do need another antispyware app. Though this beta software (formerly known as Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware) expires on December 31, 2006, it's worth downloading. Microsoft's tool catches spyware that other programs don't--including the dangerous rootkit carried by some Sony music CDs that were released last year.

All-in-one Secretmaker - If you must use Internet Explorer, the least you can do is plug its security holes. All-in-One Secretmaker can help. It blocks banner ads and pop-ups, filters spam, and offers a collection of utilities for cleaning up and securing your system.

Zonealarm – This firewall keeps watch over inbound and outbound Internet connections, helping avert attacks by hackers and spyware programs. It offers greater control and is easier to use than Windows XP's built-in firewall. Make sure that you download the basic firewall, which is free for personal and nonprofit use, instead of the trial version of ZoneAlarm Pro.

Anonymizer – This company hosts a free anonymous browsing service at its home page. Enter a URL, and Anonymizer displays the page you want--without revealing your IP address, your cookies, or any other information to the sites you surf.

GRC Shields Up - Think your PC is secure? Visit programming guru Steve Gibson's site to be sure. Shields Up is a convenient browser-based tool that checks for common vulnerabilities, such as open ports and hackable file-sharing services.

AirDefense Personal Lite – You should never lose sight of the security risks involved in using Wi-Fi. This simple program alerts you whenever you connect to an insecure wireless network or to a hotspot that you haven't designated as safe.


Document Creation: For the development and manipulation of text and images.

OpenOffice.org - Office suite for word processing, slideshow presentations, spreadsheets, and basic illustrations (drawing). Works with MS Office and Corel WordPerfect documents.

PDFCreator - Does the same kind of thing Acrobat Distiller does but it's free. It creates a printer in Windows that allows you to print your documents to PDF files. Seems to work pretty well from what I've seen.

Inkscape - Vector graphics program like Illustrator. Works well with the Gimp for doing graphics on the cheap.

Programers Notepad - Free notepad replacement that I'm fond of.

GIMP - Image editor akin to Adobe Photoshop and Jasc Paint Shop Pro.

GIMPShop for Windows - GIMPShop for Windows changes the skin of GIMP to look more like Photoshop, easing the use of the program while still being free. Versions available for Mac and Linux are floating around as well at the official site.

Expression 3 - A good, free vector illustration program from Microsoft? Oh yes. (Mac and Windows)

FRAPS - Good for making gif's, and taking in-game movies. Also useful for benchmarking your computer.

602 Office - Another office suite.

Paint.Net - Pretty decent and free. Requires .Net Runtime libraries.

AbiWord - If all you need is a word processor, try AbiWord, a lightweight and full-featured word processor that is compatible with Microsoft Word documents. It looks and feels a lot like Word, too.

ThinkFree Online Beta - This office software, which runs in your browser, lets you edit Microsoft Office-compatible documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from any Internet-connected system. The programs are slow to load but work beautifully once they're running.

Steganos LockNote - Need to keep a secret? LockNote is a simple notepad with strong encryption. You set a password, and once you close the file, you won't be able to see the text (which is stored inside the Lock-Note executable file) without entering the password. And neither will anyone else.

Internet Utilities: Browsers, plug-ins, and other bits for one-to-many communications.

FireFox Browser - Still using Internet Explorer? It's time you started using Firefox for most of your Web browsing--it's a faster, more secure, and more flexible Web browser.

Opera Web Browser - An alternative browser to the aforementioned Firefox. I prefer Opera mainly because of it's simple organization. If you tend to have various different applications on while browsing the web, this browser keeps a tab of all active pages within the web browser, which will keep your taskbar clutter free. As far as plug-ins and such, you may have to read up on those. Opera is a simple, tidy browser that I would recommend to anyone.

Maxthon - One of the better IE based browsers out there. It has a lot of great plugins and skins, and also uses tabs for browsing. The two downsides are that since it's based on IE you're screwed if your security settings aren't high enough, and that it has so many options that it may be a little confusing for some people. You may prefer this to Firefox, although either one is better than regular IE.

Thunderbird - You may not care for Thunderbird's simple look, but its tight security and robust stability make it the top choice for managing e-mail on your PC.

Limewire - Today's best P2P program where you can find anything.

Web Developer Extension - If you do any web design this is a very handy tool. Allows you to edit CSS on live pages without changing the files. It can also outline table cells or block elements. And it allows you to easily validate your pages.

Tabbrowser Extension - Lots of cool features. You can drag tabs around, if you have more tabs open then can fit on the screen it allows you to scroll back and forth, shows a status bar next to tabs when loading, allows you to open bookmarks in background tabs, allows you to save your current tab session for reopening later and lots of other stuff. It can be slightly buggy but it's gotten to the point where not having it installed annoys me.

Filezilla - Great FTP program.

Putty - Very nice ssh/telnet program for Windows.

Pegasus Email - A longtime favorite among e-mail power users, Pegasus takes a little getting used to--due to its many options and unconventional interface--but it provides a huge amount of control over your mail, including mail merges and a greater range of flexible filtering options than any other free e-mail client offers.

Alleycode - Here's a simple HTML editor for people who are comfortable with code but want some support for creating Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Alleycode is not for novices, but it's efficient if you know your way around a Web page and need to do some quick editing.

Nvu - Don't know much about HTML? Try Nvu, a sophisticated Web page editor that doesn't require any understanding of the underlying tags. What you see in Nvu is close to what you'll see in a browser.

Seamonkey - Mozilla.org's e-mail and browser programs have found new life in this suite of Internet tools, which includes a chat client and a capable HTML editor, and lets you sync your address book to a Palm device

Ares – Awesome new p2p program. Just Awesome.


Communications: Voice over internet protocol (VoIP) in its varied flavors, one-to-one communications, and the like.

Teamspeak - A good voice communication system for gamers or people to cheap to pay for phone bills.

Skype - People who like to gab on the phone may like Skype, which has been offering free PC-to-PC voice calls (with text chat and file transfer capabilities) since 2003. It's easy to set up and has a huge user community. The current version makes video chat available. But Skype-to-telephone or telephone-to-Skype calls cost you money.

Festoon Beta - This clever add-on for Skype and Google Talk lets users of these two services call each other. It gives video chat capabilities to Google Talk. And it includes a number of trippy visual effects for spicing up your video calls--by placing your face in the middle of a daisy, for instance.

XFIRE - Excellent for in-game text communication and game joining at the click of a button.

Trillian - Regardless if you chat on AIM, ICQ, MSN, or ancient IRC... this program acts as a client for all of them and does a damn fine job.

QNext - This universal instant messenger service includes robust music-sharing and photo-sharing features. It's overkill for just chatting on AIM--but for sharing tunes and snaps, QNext is a kick.

EFax - If you don't mind having your fax number in an area code other than your own, eFax is a big improvement on the fax machine that sits on your desk turning perfectly good paper into printed junk mail. You can receive faxes free of charge, viewing or printing them via the service's eFax Messenger software.

SightSpeed - For live video calls, it's hard to beat SightSpeed, which is simple to set up, neatly synchronizes lip movements and audio, and provides easy in-call controls. The free version permits unlimited one-to-one video calling.

[azrafel]

Miscellaneous Utilities: The assorted odds and ends, generally increasing functionality if not productivity. This section includes anything from tweaking and/or tuning up apps, to compression apps. This is basically an amalgamated category. At least until I get around to tidying it up.

Konfabulator - Does what the new MAC OS X is doing with widgets. A utility that can do 'just about anything', from local train time listings, cancellations and delays to 'to do' lists, to the current world population, all intergrated seamlessly with your desktop. Eats away at memory though. It claims to be evaluation period only but the message has started coming up for me recently and it seems to be an empty threat as with WinZip and Rar.

FilZip - Which is genuine freeware. Also supports more archive formats than WinZip and behaves almost exectly like it.

Registry Mechanic - Used to fix random blue screen errors and lag problems, likely via the Windows registry. As easy to use as Ad Aware.

IsoBuster - Very useful data recovery tool. Can recover lost files from damaged CD's and DVD's. Also a must have for compiling and extracting .iso files. Many downloads are compressed in this form, and this is the only program I know of that's able to do it.

Iso-recorder - A windowsXP powertool. Used when I had Windows; worked well.

DVD Decrypter - No fuss DVD ripping for backup purposes. Converts file into a pure ISO image.

PC PitStop - This online utility is perfect for tuning up your PC. After a brief system test, various tips and solutions will be listed to optimize each subsystem. It will pick up anything from low internet ping to a needed defragment. Great online application.

7-zip - Another free compression program. Can create 7z files which seem to run smaller then zips and can create self extracting executable (SFX) files.

Ethereal - Protocol analyzer/Packet Sniffer. Great for troubleshooting network problems. Allows you to capture all network traffic for however long you want. Run this on your network to see just how insecure email is.

Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP - Additional programs that developers work on after a product has been released to manufacturing. They add fun and functionality to the Windows experience.

Strokeit - A universal mouse gesture program with a 176k footprint, and is the greatest laziness enhancer in existence. A simple flick of the mouse in whatever movement you set will open new broswer windows, change tracks on your playlist, navigate backwards and forwards, and anything else under the sun you want it to do. There is no reason to not have this program.

ObjectDock - A very cool little program that puts a Mac-style magnifying toolbar on your desktop. You can set it to auto-hide, and have a whole row of icons in the toolbar when you mouse-over. It's great for un-cluttering your desktop (it's kind of hard to describe... give it a try). The regular version is one simple dock, and it's freeware.

Truecrypt - Free open source windows file encryption. Can encrypt an entire partition or create a virtual encrypted disk within a file. A virtual encrypted disk lives in a file on your hard disk which you mount through the program. When mounted it acts like any other partition in Windows. After you finish filling it with top secret files / p*rn* you dismount it.

Winpatrol - Free version lets you retain Hitler-like control of all startup program, system, and other similar changes that any programs you run may make. Gives you simple "approve or deny" choice for any suspect activities of anything you run.

GetDataBack Data Recovery for NTFS - GetDataBack is highly advanced data-recovery software that will help you to get your data back when your drive's partition table, boot record, Master File Table, or root directory is corrupted or lost, when a virus hits the drive, when files have been deleted, when the drive has been formatted, or when the drive has been struck by a power failure.

BCwipe - Data wiping software; because deletion should be forever.

Websites/Online Utilities: Products found on, or tied closely to, specific websites.

ImageShack - Currently a popular choice for image hosting.

OurMedia - Online media hosting for most manner of media.

Photobucket - Similar to Imageshack. I started using Photobucket when Imageshack wasn't working. As long as you aren't hosting anything above 250K it's fine.

RealVNC - Ever used PCAnywhere? Ever needed to log on to someone elses computer and help them with something, regardless of OS? Use this. It's awesome. I can't seem to find the Mac version on there anymore (a friend demonstrated it by controlling his Mac with my PC), but most other OSes are covered in the free version.

LogMeIn - If you have multiple computers or just an always on connection. This program allows you to use pcanywhere type control for free. Using nothing but an internet connection.

Google Desktop Search - Indexes your entire hard drive when you're not using your computer, and lets you instantly do a Google search on your own files through your browser or a deskbar. Apparently next-gen operating systems will have something similar, but this beats Windows' built-in Find feature by a mile.

Google Deskbar - Puts a little Google search window directly in your windows taskbar. When you type in a search, it opens Google in a little, resizable mini-browser. It's nothing revolutionary, but it's incredibly handy if you use Google as your calculator or dictionary, and is also useful if you want to do a quick GIS image search

TightVNC and UltraVNC - Totally free VNC programs with slightly cooler feature sets then RealVNC. Both have available video drivers to improve performance. Great if you have multiple computers you need to control.

The Code Project - Website for coding resources. This has been my saviour many, many times. There is a very large and constantly updated C# programming section. They have hundreds of controls and techniques. Definately worth a visit for any programmer.

Major Geeks - A great freeware site.

www.dyndns.com - A very reliable free dynamic dns service for personal use. You can use it to create a fixed domain name for your dynamic IP address at home. They provide clients you can install on your server at home to automagically update their DNS server when your dynamic IP changes. Although there are other similar web services out there. This one has not given me any problems for the last 3 years.

Unknown Devices - To help you find out exactly what that unknown sound, video, pci, or onboard "Unknown Device" is. MUST have for anyone in the tech industry.

http://www3.sympatico.ca/gtopala/about_siw.html] System Information for Windows[/url] - Run the executable, and in a few seconds this little utility will tell you more than you could imagine about your computer's hardware, operating system, installed programs, and so on. What you do with that information is up to you--the tool doesn't offer diagnoses or advice.

CCleaner – Over time, your PC gets gunked up with old browser cache files, cookies, and other bits and pieces. CCleaner finds this digital detritus and zaps it.

PuTTY – If you need to connect to your Web server for maintenance, an SSH (Secure Shell) connection is safer than old-school Telnet, because the connection--including the part where you type your password--is encrypted. This SSH client will do the trick very neatly.

OmniFormat - Want to convert BMPs to JPEGs? GIFs to PDFs? Word docs to TIF image files? As fast as you can copy files into a specified target folder, OmniFormat will turn them into the precise kind of file you want. Note: In order to use OmniFormat, you must install an ad-supported PDF creation utility, PDF995.


Photo Utilities: Keeping track of your pictures and images.

IrfanView - A simple, easy to use picture viewer. Has the ability to cut, crop, and resize while keeping a sharp picture. Many accessible effects, such as sharpen and blur. Easily capture a specific frame from a .gif file. Also, if you like to convert pictures to greyscale, it's done with a simple click. Same thing with colour depth editing. Simple and easy to use. Also supports Photoshop Filters.

Graphic Converter - Like IrfanView only for Macs

Picasa - Made by Google for photo organizing and simple editing. It's a slick, beautiful little program with the easiest red-eye reduction around. Also it automatically saves backups of any photo you edit, so you can come back years later and undo your changes.


Video Stuff: For dabbling in those fancy moving picture shows.

Virtual Dub - Good for editing and encoding videos.

AviSynth - Powerful frame server for futzing around with videos. You create text files that use a scripting language to launch and modify videos. Then you open these text files much like you'd open any other video file.

DScaler - A badass little tool for capturing live video from any, and I mean any, video input devices you have. I use it to hook my XBox up to my computer through a Radeon 9600, and it works like a charm.

VLC - For viewing video files. I have only ever had a few files that don't work in this.

AVI Codec - It's not a codec pack, but any file that you're having trouble opening, you can run the media through this program and it will specify a location to download that specific codec.

K-Lite Codec Pack - An excellent codec pack I have been using for about a year now. My codec issues have simply disappeared since installing this. It includes (or used to, when I last downloaded it) the excellent Media Player Classic, which is an open source extension of the original Windows Media Player.

Avi-Chop - A simple way of splitting .avis by file size.

Gspot - A utility for getting details on the video file you're trying to get to run or edit, including codec and frame rate information.

DIKO - "DIKO is a one click DVD/DivX to KDVD/KSVCD conversion tool. It works with many other softwares to achieve the best quality and efficiency possible. " Avisynth, mentioned already, is one of the "many other softwares" included in the installation. Includes a free DIVX-->MPG encoder, FreeEnc. I use this package when I need to convert frame rates as part of the DVD encoding.

VSO DIVXtoDVD - Another one click DIVX to DVD package, I use this software when a frame rates don't need to be converted. For some reason the frame rate conversion method used by DIVXtoDVD would cause burned DVDs to pause in my particular player, although I could find no evidence of other people having issues. It also has its own built-in DIVX-->MPG encoder

DVDShrink - An awesome utility for removing unwanted portions of a DVD you are backing up in order to fit it on a DVD-R. Also will compress video to get it onto a DVDR. Also will allow you to reauthor an already created DVD. Highly recommended.

Real Alternative - Lets you watch RealMedia files without having to install any bloated software from Real Networks. Also includes Media Player Classic, a nice simple video player.

Development: Tools for coding and testing.

Visual Studio Whidbey - Express packs are free for the beta and expected to remain that way for release. Good way to aquaint oneself with the awesomely amazing Visual C#. Or if you want o make web apps, there's a Visual Web Developer beta available.

Bloodshed Dev-C++ - A nice free C/C++ IDE for Windows.

Cygwin - Appears to be a recommended utility allowing Unix functionality in a Windows environment.

Notepad++ - Another great source code editor, with highlighting for different languages and whatnot.

#develop - A fully featured C# and VB.Net (not ASP.Net) development environment. #develop includes a gui form editor, autocomplete (intellisense) documentation tools, and uses either the MS.Net compiler or MONO. Note: the VB.Net development side of this is a little leaky. You will find it will bomb out every now and again with memory issues. I recommend you use this for C# development only (which hasn't stopped me developing a VB.Net app using it, I just won't ever be doing it again - or writing any form of VB code for that matter)

.Net Framework SDK - The Microsoft .Net 1.1 Framework Software Developers Kit. The download is a little over 100MB, but it contains everything you need to build .Net apps and also contains the full set of MSDN .Net 1.1 help files which you cannot live without.

Lutz Roeder's Resourcer - A free tool that allows you to build .Net resx or resources files to contain your icons, images and other resources. Also check out Reflector and Commandbar.Net.

MySql - An open source database engine. MySql provides a solid database with excellent performance, and most of the features that larger proprietary vendors provide. Be sure to download the MyODBC connector and the MySql Administrator and MySql Query Browser tools.

InnoSetup - A setup builder. Along with ISTool (follow the links on the same site) is one of the slickest setup program builders I have seen.

LiquidIcon - A free icon and cursor editor. Not brilliant, but free. It handles icons of the normal sizes (16x16, 32x32 and 48x48) and can handle from 8bit to true color icons (without alpha channel). I've been using this for a long time, and I'm sure there is a better icon editor out there by now. I just couldn't be arsed to find it.

Audio Utilities: For keeping your audio ripped, digital, sorted, and available in multiple formats.

Winamp - In my opinion, the best free audio-media player out there. It will also play movies, but I just use mine to play mp3's. Good equalizer, good playback, great ability to make playlists.

iTunes - For music playing.

Foobar2000 - I've tried lots of music players and this is the best one I've found. Great for large playlists. You can select Kernel Streaming for output so the Windows mixer doesn't muck up your audio. Not the prettiest but it just works really well.

CDex - Truly free (not share/crippleware) CD ripping software that offers more options than some pay rippers out there. Very robust, recognizes CD tracks amongst data, haven't found a disc it can't rip.

EAC - Very nice CD ripping program

CDBurnerXP Pro - A great CD/DVD burning program. A full list of features is located here. I also feel it's worth noting that it is the most downloaded and one of the highest ranked CD/DVD burning programs on the file download site MajorGeeks.com

Burnatonce - Another pretty good CD burning software. Kind of plain-Jane but it works well.

Audacity - An open-source audio editing tool, including the ability to work with mp3s.

MP3 directcut - A super-handy utility for quickly splitting and joining mp3s.

[azrafel]

MAC OS X LIST

If you're looking for something specific please look for it at http://www.macupdate.com or http://www.versiontracker.com:

Image Browsing: For viewing images

JView - very simple image viewer that allows you to just open an image and then scoot through the rest of the images in that folder


Interface modification and System Utilities: Change the look of OSX and keep it running with these apps.

Path Finder - alternative to the Finder for file browsing and organization.

FruitMenu - customize contextual menus.

Konfabulator - Free widget utility. I like this better than Apple's Dashboard.

Cleardock - customize the dock's transparency and color.

Candybar - icon customization app.

Desktop Manager - custom desktops for whatever specific purposes you want. Add as many as you need, and scroll through them. For example, you have an e-mail, a music, and a web desktop. At the push of a button your current desktop (say, web) is replaced by the next (e-mail is next).

Tinkertool - vital for customizing the settings of various OS-level settings that can be otherwise cumbersome.

Web Browsers and misc. Internet utilities: Internet is fun.

Safari - Apple's submission.

Opera - Very customizable browser.

Firefox - Very reliable and fast.

Acquisition - P2P App a la Limewire.

Poisoned - P2P App as well.

iChat - Apple's chat program. Simple and effective.

Adium - Customizable chat program that allows interfacing between MSN, AIM, Jabber, and Yahoo networks.

Microsoft Messenger - Duh. MSN messaging client.

Tomato Torrent - Tomato Torrent is a very light weight BitTorrent client made just for Mac OSX. Just remember, don’t use BitTorrent for anything illegal. *wink, wink*

Stuffing and Unstuffing: If you don't already have or want to buy Stuffit...

UnRarX - opens .rar and .nfo files.

UnAceX - opens .ace files.

Document Manipulation

NeoOffice - NeoOffice is a free and open source word processing program. Built off of OpenOffice just for the Mac, its like nothing that I have ever used. Unless you want to shell out the $399.95 for Microsoft Office, this is the way to go.

Antivirus

ClamXav - With a new wave of viruses and worms for OSX floating around, its even more important to have a good AV than ever before.

Video Stuff

Flip4Mac - If you didn’t know already, Microsoft has discontinued the development of Microsoft Media Player for Mac, and they are now giving Flip4Mac away. Flip4Mac is a little codec for Quicktime that forces WMP files to play in Quicktime.


Well, that's it for now. Feel free to add your own and whatnot.