Useful tools/freeware

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What tools/freeware do you have on your PC?

I use CCleaner, Daemon Tools, Zattoo, Adaware, VLC, Spotify.
What do you people use? Any gems out there?

 

HFS - HTTP File Server...'nuff said

Zone Alarm - One of the best firewalls out there

AVG - A very good (for the price) virus scanner

CCleaner - Essential for every computer!

WinDirStat - Scans all your drives and produces blocks, representing individual files, proportional to their size. Great for finding out what's hogging up all the space on your HDD.

DVD43 - DVD decrypter...

Daemon Tools - Virtual drive software

True Crypt - Creates encrypted virtual drives that the NSA, CIA, and FBI would be hard pressed to crack. Perfect for making drives to dump sensitive data into.

VLC - best video player out there

WinAMP - My favorite Mp3 player

Trillian - I use it for IRC chat...but it handles MSN, AIM, ICQ, and others....

 

Everything running on my PC is freeware, it's an Ubuntu box

Most notable:
emacs The ultimate editor. Is easily extendable for people who know Lisp and also handles images, IRC, LaTeX, etc with the correct mode installed. The version that is coming this month will have built-in support for anti-aliased fonts.
wine For playing Starcraft and IE games.
Amarok For listening to music.
grip For ripping my (legal!) CD collection.
gnomad For putting said music collection onto my zen music player.

 

Long lis there...

7-Zip - Create and extract archives

aMSN - Freeware MSN client without all the bloat of the official one.

Avira - Anti-virus. It's supposed to be adware rather than freeware but considering you can inactivate the ads in two clicks of the mouse and without using any third-party cracks or whatnot, I count it as freeware.

Daemon Tools - Very handy for speeding up loading times of old games that constantly access the CD and don't have a "full install" option (I've got way too many of these)

Foxit Reader - PDF reader that is about 80x lighter than Adobe's and does everything.

GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program (exactly what it says on the tin ). It doesn't do everything that Photoshop does (colour management is the big missing one here) but we have a Photoshop licence at work and I can do all the regular manipulation at home using this.

ImageJ - More specialised image editing. For things like adding scale bars to my micrographs. Runs in Java so a bit slow but excellent software otherwise.

ImgBurn - CD image creation and burning. Very lightweight, fast and reliable.

jv16 Power Tools - Registry cleaner and other cleaning functions. I don't use this one often but run it every once in a while and clean all the files left by programs after uninstallation.

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack and VLC - I can't decide which one I like more. There are formats that one but not the other will play, so I keep both installed.

OpenOffice 3.1 - Who needs M$ Office? I find both Writer and Impress to be much, much, MUCH better than Word and Powerpoint. I've had less compatibility problems giving M$ Office users files created with OO than they had transfering files between themselves created with the same version of M$ Office! The Excel equivalent isn't so compatible yet, but I've not needed any of Excel's advanced features in a while and wouldn't use it for them anyway; if say I need to do statistics then I'd use SPSS, if I needed databases I'd use a database program (not Access).

Firefox - Not perfect, but the best browser I've used.

I think that covers imy Windows installation. I think the only commerical software I've got on there are my ganes

 

So far I've nicked jv16 Power Tools and WinDirStat - both look nifty as fook. Cheers lads

 

hmm lets see ive got an older version of damemon tools before they went the pay route aand have had no issues with it at all running any of my isos ive made of my games. lets see ill make a list as well.

7-zip

ccleaner

firefox

dosbox for playing daggerfall and arena

open office

vitrual box for running versions of linux and testing out the new windows features so i can tell when it will be a good time to change my main os to linux

gimp 2

defraggler free defragmentation program a lot better then the one windows gives you as it can defrag the free space as well as you can tell it to put larger files at the end of the drive and specify which types and how large which is a good thing

vlc and cccp with media player classic for movies and shows as for music i use winamp which is a good thing

comodo internet sercuity suite which is firewall and antivirus together which is much better for me then zone alarm sence the anti virus cataches a whole lot more with this one

flashget v2 for downloading the large files and for those websites that take forever to download.

utorrent for torrenting linux distros to try

spybot search and destroy for spyware

alftp for ftp sites

byond for good games that remind you of the 16bit era

super for converting music and video files

that it for me for now if i can think of anything else ill add it

 

kaspersky internet security, firefox, openoffice, picasa, nero, coretemp

 

Nero's not freeware is it? It used to be pay software (and rather expensive if I remember)

how could I forget DOSBox?

 

lol neros still pay software. as for forgetting dosbox? shame on you for forgetting such a useful program

 

ZoneAlarms

Firefox

What is cool about this Cleaner thing you all seem to have?

 

Read my guide here on SP: Kitrax's guide to cleaning up your hard drive. (I talk about CCleaner in the 6th paragraph down) CCleaner is so awesome, it should come pre-loaded on every PC!

Also...CCleaner has a registry cleaner...so I'm not sure if jv16 Power Tools if worth the time.

 

Here are a few that I use and have not been mentioned yet:

DisplayFusion - Multi-Monitor Taskbar and Desktop Wallpaper. Previously I used the desktop manager that came with the NVIDIA drivers, but it is not available for Windows Vista.

EasyBCD - A simple and useful tool to tweak the Windows Vista bootloader.

Password Safe - Store all your passwords behind a single encrypted master password list. Has lots of other features too.

Pidgin - Universal chat client. I use it as a multi-IM client. IRC needs a proper client.

Secunia PSI - Software vulnerability scanner.

SharpReader - The best RSS aggregator that I have come across.

 

I use RocketDock as well. I really like it.

 

CCleaner, Magic Disc (kinda like Deamon Tools), Firefox, AVG anti-virus, Unlocker (for when you get the irritating cannot delete, program in use messages), and VLC Media Player are my main ones.

 

Oh yes, forgot one more (Chicken reminded me of it with Unlocker). I use ProceXP to get rid of the annoying Program In Use errors. I've used Unlocker as well and it's quite good but I like some of the extra features that ProceXP has.

 

Haha, I have process explorer as well, forgot about it.

 

For Linux... I mostly use dd and gzip. See Eraser for windows for one tool that must go with them if you plan on making disk images.

But, on my actual linux boxes, evince, firefox, irssi, totem

CCleaner
Eraser portable (I used original Eraser, but Eraser portable stops Eraser's very annoying habit of adding useless context menu entries)
Firefox
GIMP - image editing
IrfanView - image viewing
Areca - backups
TrueCrypt - making said backups encrypted
DosBox
Audacity - audio editing
VLC - video playing
foobar2000 - music playing

 

Duh...backups! I knew I was forgetting something...

I use SyncBack for my backups. Very nice little program that one.

 

Auto Hotkey
lets you create small scripts and hotkeys - for example I have all my numpad keys assigned to various folders/shortcuts, and I have a few key sequences set to insert my address or email.

Folder Size
shell extension for explorer which allows you to view the size of folders and not just files. Can't really work without this one

Keynote
Notepad with a tree-file structure - very useful for jotting down quick notes or organising stuff for in the messy research phase of an assignment.

Word Web
light dictionary tool - just highlight or click on a word to get the definition, synonym, or (if you're online) the wikipaedia article.

MS power toys calculator and TweakUI
the calculator is just an improvement on the original. Tweak UI can be good for changing the appearance of a few things in windows xp.

Also everything on Taza's list is awesome

 

Komodo Edit (because it uses standard UNIX type regular expressions)
File Edit (because it has a built in case sensitive duplicate deletion function, and can sort lines in a .txt file alphabetically)
Python 3.1 (because I'm a newbie to programming)

FreeMind
OpenOffice
Scribus

Shiretoko 64bit Firefox 'Minefield' version. Sadly, Adobe so far has chosen not to provide a 64bit Flash Player