Free - Self-described "audio swiss army knife", does tagging, renaming, transcoding, encoding, and a bunch of other stuff.

Free - Digital audio player OF THE GODS. Playlist-centric, rather than shiny-button-centric like Winamp. Also features a ton of plugins, like a file transcoder, MassTagger/MassRenamer, and a bunch of other stuff

Shareware ($20, free version available) - Full-featured tagging, library management and player sync. Scriptable/skinnable/supports Winamp plugins; free version supports most tagging/library features.

Free / Open Source - Foobar2k, iTunes and amaroK had a giant mp3-player orgy and this was the glorious result.

Free - Audio File Manager. Tags, Renames, Moves, Searches, Filters, Etc.

Free - Winamp, the definitive music player for Windows. Winamp 5 is a continuation of Winamp 2.x, with Winamp 3 skin support and video playback. You're better off using a different video player, however.

A "software relaxation tool" much like a sound spa. Real recorded audio that loops seamlessly. It has many different environments to choose from, including MIDI windchimes that you can configure yourself.

portable, very small and fast for playing full directory

replaces Foobar2K/iTunes - Whereas most of the GTK+-based library-style players like RhythmBox and Muzik are unstable, slow, and memory hogs, the Qt/KDE-based JuK is beautiful, fast, and flexible. Sensible sorting, fast searching, and a tree view that shows all of your artists and albums. What more do you need?

internet radio

the tool you need to extract individual MP3s from an AlbumWrap album archive (typically, these files have a '_ALBW' notation in the file name). AlbumWrap is extremely easy to use, much like any file extractor. But the features are impressive... You can list, rename, and even preview the MP3s in the album! And extracting chosen tracks is painless!

Free - Mp3 analyzer and database. It will help determine what your mp3 is by running it against their huge database of music.

Free / Open Source - Sound Editor. Not a whole lot to say. It's free and it's about the best you'll get for free.

Another alternative for MP3 editing.

simple MP3 editing

This is the only program that can edit-down MP3s accurately 100% of the time. It can handle the files that MP3directcut chokes on. It also accepts cuesheets as input, so you can auto-cut rips that are in cue/MP3 format.

tool for creating audio CDs with CD-Text from various audio files from wav, mp3, mpc, ogg, aac, mp4, ape, flac, ofr, wv, tta, m3u, pls and fpl playlists and cue sheets

Free / Open Source - Another good CD Ripping application. Compatible with numerous codecs. Very simple to use.

dbPowerAMP is a Win32 GUI frontend for encoderes like LAME (you can use any version of the dll you prefer) and Ogg that integrates with Explorer so that you can simply right click and select an encoding method. It also adds more information to the tooltips for audio files and other goodies. It's quite useful.

convert music files from audio CDs

Shareware ($20, free version is crippled) - CD to anything ripper/encoder.

Free - Best CD Ripper ever created. Can be made to interface with your encoder of choice. Uses secure mode to practically guarantee perfect rips.

free drum synthesizer program

Ever needed to record a radio concert? This is the tool for that. No need to record to wave and then encode to another format afterwards. This program handles that on-the-fly. It supports mp3s and oggs, it can be scripted and it does normalization should you want that. Recommended++.

Full featured, open source AC3 codec.

lossless audio codec

mp3 encoder

Loseless audio compression.

Arguably the best lossy audio compression out there. It encodes fast as hell, too.

open source audio encoder (better than mp3)

Another flavor of lossless audio compression.

AC3 decoding (and other de-/encoding).

Free - Works in conjunction with most players, including Winamp and Foobar2000 - runs off to the internets to acquire lyrics for whatever's playing.

great graphical frontend for LAME mp3 encoding.

text-to-speech. good quality, does not output to file.

text-to-speech with definable parameters; poor definition. No output to file

Free - Replaces the default Windows sound mixer with a new one, with customizable hotkeys, and other bonus features.

tag editor

Awesome tag editor.

Shareware ($29.95, Free trial available) - a great tool for editing data tags in audio files of different formats

Shareware ($30, Free trial available) - Incredibly powerful Mp3 tagging and renaming software.

Free - Powerful tagging and renaming software. Interface can be a little tricky to learn, but it's fantastic once you understand it. Coded by Russians.

A lightweight ID3 tag editor that is really easy to use for cleaning up all of your crap mp3 files.

Analyzes mp3 files to determine which codec brand and version created them.

Easily gauge the sound quality of your computer if you don't feel like taking the audio snob Pepsi challenge.

Free / Open Source - Plays back almost every video format known to man, many sound formats, captures video from sources, and plays several different types of video streams. Good software to have around just in case, although other things are better as your main player (due to some bugs in VLC).

Play quicktime compatible movies as your background picture

Free / Open Source - Remember Windows Media Player 6.4? This is that but with modern features.

Multi-platform video player with support for dozens of formats.

Movie codec and player

most common formats (except Quicktime and Real) "with nice integrated design."

replaces Windows Media Player - Support for XviD/OGM, DivX, RealPlayer, QuickTime, WMV, and a slew of other formats, in addition to DVD playback with the d5d plugin, and your choice of interfaces like kxine, gxine or Totem. This is the definitive video player on Linux.

Free - Zoom Player is a video player which relies on external codecs and filters.

multitrack video editor

A program that can do everything that Virtualdub doesn't, such as keep audio sync, edit between keyframes and run on other platforms. It can also fix lots of AVI problems that hardware players are known to choke on.

Works great with the above for editing and applying filters to videos.

audio/video muxing.

Video compositing.

DivX/XviD encoding

VirtualDub with vcd, svcd, vob and experimental .wmv/.asf support. For those that have know the versatility of the regular VirtualDub, it works great for ripping small segments off of many DVD's for animated GIF's or AVI's or whatever.

DivX/XviD encoding

Free - Video editing software

Outputs AVI. (For making video files to be used in computer tutorials)

join SWF files

Free / Open Source - Bestest TV Tuner App ever created in the history of ever. If you have a TV tuner, you are required by law to trash whatever piece of shit you're using right now and switch to DScaler immediately.

Free / Open Source - Tool for capturing off a Digital Video Device.

script generator and dvd audio demuxer for use with virtualdub.

contains all you need for DVD2SVCD conversion (exept for SP/TMPG, but here's a CCE demo and a TMPG demo ): vStrip 0.8f, mpeg2dec.dll (one by Dividee and one by trbarry), Avisynth 2.08 & 2.52, BeSweet 1.5b16, IVTC Plugin 2.2 for Avisynth, Decomb 4.05, Madplay 1.5, Pulldown v0.99c, SimpleResize.dll, WinSubMux 0.1.0.1, VCDImager 0.7.12, DVD2AVI 1.76 CLI, bbMPEG 1.24b18 modified.

Video capture software, primarily used for recording gameplay.

A wonderful package of tools to use to rip DVD video and audio

A free universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution.

paste together media files; change format and compression

Translate any video format to any other video format

Today's Gordian Knot. If you are looking to encode your videos into high quality mpeg-4 this is what you would use. Easily encode x/h.264. Megui also has an audio encoder, avs creator, one click encoding ala AutoGK and plenty of other great features.

tool for streaming and archiving video screen captures

Free - Video capture software

Video file format conversion

Free - Convert damn near anything to MPG.

Free - Converts DV Type I to DV Type II. If you know what this means, it might be useful to you.

outputs SWF

Free - Video playback pack targeted mainly at anime watchers, but works great for anybody. Has filters and codecs to play back almost every video format on the planet and includes MPC and ZoomPlayer. It is updated regularly and extremely well tested and stable.

Free - The DefilerPak is a goon-made (sup Defiler, :cool:) package containing just about all you should ever need to play back any kind of video file ever. Uninstall K-lite, uninstall Divx 5 or 17 or whatever version they're up to, and install this. It is all you need. Works wonderfully with MPC.

Can decode DivX 3.11a, DivX 4, DivX 5, XviD, MJPEG, and more.

Media Player Classic can play Quicktime files, and fullscreen too!

Media Player Classic can play Real Media files too, you know

Open source and excellent video codec.

Optimized builds of XviD for your CPU, compiled from the latest CVS.

turns your PC into a very advanced Multi-Media Center / HTPC

Download ASF streams to your hard drive.

Does loads of useful things with ASF files, including lossless conversion to AVI and file joining. Good for basic AVI tasks too.

A powerful tool for dealing with problematic codecs.

media file codec identifier

Repair incomplete DivX AVIs.

Remove corrupt frames from DivX:-) movies.

Free / Open Source - Desktop customizable TV-Guide.

image browser/simple editor. can acquire from scanner/camera.

Free - THE image viewing program.

view and convert graphic files, really simple to use, with support of more than 400 graphics formats!

a Comic reader based on CDisplay. It use the popular 7-zip plugins to read many archives types like cbr cbz cbt rar zip tar 7z lzh arj cab tar.gz tar.bz2. It supports jpeg png gif and bmp images.

the perfect free image viewer. If you're like me and IrfanView always kind of bugged you, this is what you're looking for.

Picture and Fax Viewer for Win2K. over 100 formats.

Win95+

Awesome image management

The best HTML photo album software in existence.

Free - Google-owned image viewing / management software.

image editor. Win95+

creating or editing images, simple .avi or .gif animations, photos, picture albums and screensavers.

Lossless JPEG cropping is possible and it's free.

OSS PNG image optimizer

batch-style conversion with command-lines such as "peg_it.exe /45 filename.bmp", which will compress filename.bmp to a jpeg of 45 (out of 99) quality

advanced paint program

shrinks GIFs without any noticable reduction of picture quality.

Virtual Reality mountain generator

Create high speed 3-D animation

paint and animation program for image creation, viewing, and animation. DOS

diagrams and flowcharts.

vector editor graphics program which can serve as a flow chart tool

Fractal image generator.

make/edit animated GIFs.

Free - Advanced screenshot-taking utility.

Free / Open Source - Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor. It saves to .svg by default, and is really quite nice.

render Julia fractals using quaternions numbers

3D animation and effects software

3D animator

Free - MSPaint from the future.

Seamless background texture creator

replaces Adobe Illustrator - An absolutely excellent vector graphics editor. I haven't used it much since I really suck at this, but it seems quite feature-rich.

Free / Open Source - Not a whole lot to say about the gimp, it's the gimp. It's free, and people tend to claim it's "just as good as photoshop", but I don't believe them.

Image thumbnail creation utility. This program will scan an entire directory and create thumbs based on the max height or width that you specify. It also creates a html index so you can view all of your thumbs at once.

Free - ColorCop is a color picker. It can zoom, sample and average samples, and do a number of other neat things.

which I think has probably saved me about 6 years of my life.

For those who use FireFox/Opera. This version also now supports themes, Illustrator AND Photoshop output with some more abilities.

Free - ColorPic is another color picker. It works slightly differently than ColorCop, but it does the same basic thing.

Digital Dream Software. 3D image generating and editing software

Free - Another global colorpicker.

One-click scanner-to-printer copy software.

Enlarge images without pixelation. Standard edition is free.

Free - Checks images in a directory and determines if there are duplicates. Even checks "near" duplicates or resized duplicates.

Free / Open Source - WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor. W3 compliance DEFINETLY known, since they MAKE IT.

Free - Lets you sync bookmarks across multiple computers over the INTERNETS.

GUI for TinyWeb Server

Free (Pro version $55) - Web development centered editor - includes integrated FTP providing remote editing

Free / Open Source - Mozilla Composer! Rise from your grave!

Free - WYSIWYG HTML editor. W3 compliance level unknown.

a tool for on-the-fly conversion of compiled HTML help(chm) to full-blown online help system, ready for publishing on the web within several seconds.

Design your own web pages without any HTML knowledge.

creates an .html file of your selected directory.

drag-and-drop website building.

An alternative interface to the Internet Explorer rendering engine.

Free / Open Source - If you need an explanation, you have been living under a rock for the past four years,

Free - A portable web browser that fits on a floppy. Not really for home use (it doesn't have a permanent address bar) but great for kiosks, etc.

full-featured web browser

Another very powerful internet content filter thing. Privoxy is open source, and cross platform. I've used it on OS X, although I still use Proxomitron on Windows.

IMNSHO, the absolute best web proxy for Windows. Fairly easy to set up and use, with a graphical interface for managing filters. Stops most popups and ads, as well as blocking the irritating ActiveX and Flash garbage infesting the web these days.

Caching web proxy. Indispensable on 56k and slightly less so on broadband. Runs on anything with an "x" in the name, and also Windows NT/2K/XP.

Free / Open Source - full featured web server

The quick, easy way to make your machine a web server. Its just a toy compared to something like apache, but it can be useful.

Complete web server, WWW supports MIME file typing, CGI, common log format, and multi-hosting

Shareware ($40-$100, Free trial available) - Streaming or still-capture webcam software.

Free - The one true malware detection and removal device. Logfiles can be parsed by the, to give you an idea of what should stay or go.

Open link in any browser that's installed on your system.

For those who don't want to deal with configuring proxomitron and other similar programs

This utility blocks ActiveX spyware from ever installing or ever being downloaded.

Makes it much easier to import/export bookmarks when using different browsers

these things are fantastic, once you've got things like wordcount, link listings, autofilling forms with anonymous, making new pages from selected text, and so on all just a click away, you'll never go back.

IE google search toolbar

Free - Too much of a mouthbreathing retard to learn how to spell? Let computers do it for you!

Manage Firefox extensions and themes.

A framework for building web applications.

EZPics is a sequential image downloader. What does that mean? Well imagine a website hosts a set of images named: image001.jpg, image002.jpg, image003.jpg, and so on. EZPics can be used to easily download all the pictures in the set. EZPics works with what I call EZCodes. EZCodes contain all the information needed to download an entire series of images. And now with the new EZCode format, making EZCodes is even easier. The idea is that people can trade EZCodes for easy image downloading. Now with the newest version of EZPics you are no longer limited to just downloading images. Any kind of file can be downloaded.

for downloading anything & everything.

download manager

Free / Open Source - HTTrack is a website archiver. It'll spider through a site and download everything.

an alternative to EZPics

Free / Open Source - Goon-Made frontend for wget. You give it files and it downloads them for you. Use it in conjunction with the Firefox Extensionto get a really good and potentially silent download manager linked up with your browser.

Download entire web sites.

For downloading stuff.

The proxy-only version tends to run faster than the suite, but both are nice

Useful little proggie to check if the forums are up again. Also comes with system tray mode.

Free - Website Monitor, sits in your tray and checks sites on a periodic basis, informing you when they update.

Free - Checks through browser bookmarks [IE/Mozilla/Firefox/Opera/etc] and determines if links are dead.

complete POP3 email client

Free - A small and lightweight e-mail client with POP3 support. This is a modified version of the official release that has a few additional features the original lacks.

Pegasus Mail is a free, standards-based electronic mail client suitable for use by single or multiple users on single computers or on local area networks. A proven product, it has served millions of users since it was released in 1990. It is extremely feature-rich and powerful, yet remains small and fast.

Free / Open Source - A Mail/News/RSS reader. Built in adaptive spamfiltering plus an easy-to-adapt-to ui, along with the established theming and extension power of Firefox.

a small application that allows you to check your Hotmail account e-mail from a normal POP mail client (such as Eudora, IncrediMail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Opera, Netscape, etc). Unlike standard mail accounts which allow users to retrieve their e-mail through a POP mail client, Hotmail can normally only be checked on the web. With Hotmail Popper, you can use your favorite POP mail client to retrieve your e-mail from your Hotmail account. In addition, Hotmail Popper allows you to send e-mails through Hotmail's service, as if it was a normal SMTP (outgoing mail) server.

Checks all your mail from multiple accounts before you download it and lets you bounce it back if it's spam.

Free / Open Source - Another free adaptive spamfilter program. You train it, It learns, Spam Goes Away.

Free / Open Source - Standalone Bayesian Spam Filter Proxy. It sits around and gets mail run through it before it gets to you. If said mail sucks, it goes away. Useful if for some reason you can't be bothered to use Thunderbird.

Free POP3 access to Yahoo! mail

Mercury is a free, standards-based mail server solution, providing comprehensive, fast server support for all major Internet e-mail protocols. It is supplied in two versions, one hosted on Windows systems, the other running as a set of NLMs on Novell NetWare file servers.

A free GTK LDAP client. I have trouble finding commercial products that match this.

A free open source implementation of LDAP.

Free - Program that lets you map a Gmail account as a windows drive. Note: Google appears to be more or less blocking this utility now, and using it may result in a temporary "security lockout" on your gmail account.

POP3 compliant email notifier for Windows

Fast, friendly, and efficient email checker which resides in the system tray. It can check several POP3 accounts at regular intervals, it can preview mail, and it can even decide what to do based on rules you give it. Plays sounds or changes its icon to reflect the number of new messages.

Free - A tool for recovering messages from Outlook Express databases (.dbx files). It even works on damaged databases ... this is a "must have" for my toolkit CD when I go to fix someone's system.

Voice chat application from Google.

IM client for those who don't like Trillian

Free - AIM client. No ads, and just 85 kB.

Awesome alternative to Trillian, supports all the same things Trillian does and more. Especially good since it is open-source and has good plugin support, as well as a good plugin-making community. Nightly builds of the core program are also very good at eliminating bugs AND they run pretty stable.

OSS multi-protocol IM client, formerly known as Gaim.

Free - VoIP for the masses. Also IM. You know, for good measure.

Great little AIM client. No ads, wicked small. Awesome.

Free or $25 for one year - Sorta it's own style of messaging, but again for every service ever

Chattin'

Free - PC answering machine and caller id. You've got a spare modem sitting around, right?

alternative to DeadAIM, with features such as remote control, idle control, buddy list appearance options, selective user ignore and blocking, talking while away, safety away, chat logging, automatic screen name formatting, extra information storage, scripting, and the display of various statistics.

Free / Open Source - Yet another great IRC client.

Free - Another really good IRC client.

Free / Open Source - A standalone windows port of arguably the. Though, all the cool kids run it over ssh.

very slick Windows IRC client.

Free / Open Source - Super-good GTK-based IRC client. "Official" Windows builds are shareware, but it's opensource, so "Unofficial" builds are free.

replaces XChat - It would replace mIRC if you ran it on Windows. But if you're running such an old, featureless, bug-ridden and ugly application on Windows anyway, what are you doing?

Free / Open Source - RSS Reader for Windows.

Binary News Reader / Binary News Reaper, software specifically tailored for binary newsgroup articles.

UseNet binary downloader

replaces GrabIt - The best all-in-one Usenet program ever. Has support for both MIME and yEnc-encoded binaries, and will make downloading from your MP3 groups very, very simple.

Newsgroup reader.

KorrNews supplements MorVer and allows you to do snazzy stuff to your headers among other things.

I happen to prefer OE when reading newsgroups (yeah, I'm odd like that). The problem is that OE is pretty careless about Usenet standards such as signature seperators[1]. MorVer fixes that. It acts like a proxy and filters both the inbound and outbound connection for things like unwrapped lines and stupid people who toppost.

a nice simple FTP client, I've been using for years.

Free / Open Source - Standard two-pane (or four pane, if you count the trees) FTP client. Supports SFTP via PuTTY.

Nagware ($25) - Best two-pane ftp client ever created by man.

Nice FTP client for OSX, supports one-way mirroring

Nagware at random times of the day ($36) - Crazy FTP client with 37 different queues which for some reason certain people really enjoy.

Send/receive files over a LAN or the Internet and have it actually work consistently! Amazing! Easy to set up and has fun features like virtual file systems (Why can the Windows file sharing still not do this? ) and remote administration.

a free FTP server for the Windows operating system

A very secure/robust/stable FTP server. It can use LDAP/Active Directory/NT domain security and user groups for authentication. Freeware/GNU

Shareware ($39, free for 6 weeks) - Like WebDrive but cheaper and easier to use. Also actually worked for me, unlike WebDrive.

Shareware ($49.95, free for 20 days) - Seamlessly makes ftp, sftp, or WebDAV servers appear as Windows drives.

A freeware utility that lets you upload files to an FTP server of your choice with just a few clicks. It also outputs the URL of the uploaded file and you can have certain tags appended to it, so if you wish to upload an image and show it to the forums, you can right click on that image and have the world see it in just a few clicks.

shell-extension ftp uploader

Free implementation of the SSH protocol.

Free / Open Source - Suite of SSH-related goodies, including a SSH terminal, an SCP client, an SFTP client, and a bunch of other stuff. Like PuTTY, but want clickable links and the ability to minimize to tray? Check out, a fork that adds these capabilities.

a free software terminal emulator (communication program) for MS-Windows. It supports VT100 emulation, telnet connection, serial port connection, and so on.

A decent yet bloated BitTorrent client. Written in java, so it's cross-platform.

Completely open source Limewire replacement client. Think what Kazaalite++ was to Kazaa.

Free - A quick and simple way of transferring files, especially to people who don't "get" computers.

The best BitTorrent client ever created by man.

Free / Open Source - FREESCO (stands for FREE ciSCO) is a free replacement for commercial routers supporting up to 3 ethernet/arcnet/token_ring/arlan network cards and up to 2 modems. Why should you use Freesco? It's insanely easy to set up. It's thoroughly documented. It runs off one floppy and 6MB of RAM, and it has a unique Web Control Panel.

Quick and easy VPN solution.

Free, easy to use FreeBSD-based router/firewall package. Requires a PC with a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, and two NICs to run. Features include web interface, wireless support, stateful packet filtering, NAT/PAT, DHCP client, PPPoE, PPTP, IPsec VPN, PPTP VPN, static routes, DHCP server server, caching DNS forwarder, DynDNS client, SNMP agent, traffic shaper, host/network aliases.

Routing software (OSPF,BGP,RIPv2,IS-IS,etc)

Free - a utility to link LANs together over the Internet for network gameplay. It can also be used to bridge many configurations of IPX or IPv4 packets and frames from once point to another. Formerly known as the Gamer's IPX tunnel, GIT now tunnels TCP and UDP ports as well, in order to work with modern games.

Free / Open Source - Yet another VNC Client/Server. It's the real deal.

Shareware ($2-15 per PC) - software allows the user to view desktop of remote computer and control any programs remotely using keyboard and mouse.

Browser-based remote desktop.

Free / Open Source - Another VNC Client/Server. Also Doesn't suck.

Free / Open Source - Ever wanted to run your very own phone system at home? No? Are you sure?

Free / Open Source - VNC Client/Server (remote desktop) that doesn't suck.

nice IP scanner, small & fast

Packet Sniffer

Network security tools.

Network/Host monitoring application.

Security tool.

Security tool.

Network/Host monitoring application.

internet connection speedup toolkit

Free - ANM tells you what seems to be accessing what port and what it seems to be doing with it.

Down2Home is a program that monitors your ADSL/Cablemodem/Dialup traffic and provides you with useful statistics about the amount of data your PC has transferred. Use it to see what's happening on your Dial-up/DSL or Cable connected on your PC. Check if there is data transferred when you don't want it (Spyware, backdoors, whatever). Or use it to keep control over your transfer volume

Free - Tray Application that shows your current upstream and downstream speeds. Also logs total throughput, and can be used to alert you to when you're about to hit your monthly download/upload cap.

Free / Open Source - Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor which has stood the test of time since 1975. It is geared mainly toward programmers but it can also edit any type of other file. The learning curve can be somewhat steep due to heavy use of unconventional shortcut keys but in the long run you can code very efficiently and fast using emacs compared to other editors.is a good Windows build.

Free - Another Text editor out there. Standard advanced features: syntax hilighting, tabs, etc.

green on black, full screen (good for old school tech nerds or people who need to concentrate)

Free text editor

Free - Another super light-weight text editor. Just about as many features as you can possibly cram into 30k.

For quick editing or when X11 is not available.

and its trusty plug-in buddy !

A simple MDI Rich Text editor

As much as I used emacs with the TeX modules, this just save me pain++.

Free - Yet another super light-weight text editor. metapad sells itself as a notepad replacement--and indeed you can replace the notepad executable systemwide with this program--with a number of small but useful features added.

uses the font Terminal 6x8, white on black, other features.

Free - Barely any features at all. It's notepad, but with tabs.

Free / Open Source - Scintilla-based text editor with syntax hilighting and code-folding.

Free - A simple text editor designed to be a notepad replacement but with a few extra features.

text editor with blowfish encryption

Free / Open Source - The ORIGINAL Scintilla-based text editor.

full featured notepad replacement with unicode.support

Free / Open Source - Again another super light-weight text editor. Like notepad, but with few extra features (among which tabs and syntax highlighting for many programming languages).

Free / Open Source - Notepad. But with UML.

Free / Open Source - The text editor for manly men. A GUI verison (gVim) is available for those of you scared by the commandline. If gVim is still a bit too scary for you, check out, a set of addon scripts that makes gVim look and work like a regular normal windows text editor, while still preserving all the wonderful power of Vim. Both gVim and Cream have an optional rudimentary tabbed ui.

Free / Open Source - It's a notepad, but with wiki-style text formatting and interlinking . . and now it's open source! Hooray!

Shareware (~$30-70, free trial available) - Text editor with strong LaTeX abilities, including code highlighting and integration with MiKTeX for Windows.

provides a quick, easy-to-remember way of creating accents like é Ü ç î æ and special characters like ƒ ² ‰ © £ ± ß ° 1/2 ¿ « » ™ „ in most Windows programs.

An improvement on Microsoft's Character Map not least because it allows you to see the characters at a decent (i.e. readable) size.

Free - Well, it's text editing RELATED. PureText strips all RichTextFormatting from a selection. So you can paste it into word or whatever and not have word shit itself over trying to format it however the source was.

premiere-quality, freeware string-replacing utility for Windows. At its core, ReplaceEm is essentially a text search-and-replace program. However, unlike the search-replace functionality of a standard text editor, ReplaceEm is designed to operate on multiple files at once. And you need not only perform one search-replace operation per file -- you can setup a list of operations to perform. If different groups of files need to have different operations performed on them, this is no problem either. You can also specify a backup file for each file processed just incase the replace operation didn’t do exactly what you wanted.

stickies/notes

Free / Open Source - A Calendar / Reminder utility in the same vein as Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. NOTE: still in VERY EARLY stages of development.

Free - A Calendar Program of a different sort

Free / Open Source - Full office productivity suite, and a free one at that. Native export-to-PDF capability.

Acrobat now loads in about the same amount of time as Foxit, but has more features.

Free - Super Fast Lightweight PDF reader.

PostScript / PDF viewer

a graphical interface for Ghostscript.

If you can't install Office, you don't have to.

allows MS Word to read MS Works text files

Xpdf is an open source viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files. (These are also sometimes also called 'Acrobat' files, from the name of Adobe's PDF software.) The Xpdf project also includes a PDF text extractor, PDF-to-PostScript converter, and various other utilities. Xpdf runs under the X Window System on UNIX, VMS, and OS/2. The non-X components (pdftops, pdftotext, etc.) also run on Win32 systems and should run on pretty much any system with a decent C++ compiler. Xpdf is designed to be small and efficient. It can use Type 1, TrueType, or standard X fonts.

directory software for names, addresses, photos, etc.

Free (Beta) - Another note-taking program with support for actually writing notes with some kind of tablet input device.

Shareware ($30-$90, depending on version. Free "lite" version exists) - It's a basic notepad, but with tree-based structure. Great for taking notes or organizing hierarchical text documents. This Wiki post was initially entered and organized using TreePad Lite. Thanks, TreePad!

Free / Open Source - Ximian Evolution® is the award-winning personal and workgroup information management solution for Linux and UNIX-based systems. The software seamlessly integrates email, calendaring, meeting scheduling, contact management, and task lists, in one powerful, fast, and easy-to-use application. Ximian Evolution is also powerful collaboration software that connects to popular corporate communications architectures like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and other messaging systems. Ximian Evolution supports a broad range of leading Linux distributions and UNIX variants.

Free / Open Source - For when all you need is a nice free Word replacement.

spreadsheet. allows objects to be stored in cells.

Free version of the Atlantis Word Processor.

replaces Microsoft Excel - Why would you even think of using Excel after touching this? It supports every Excel worksheet function, as well as several that Excel doesn't have. Excellent.

an up-to-date implementation of TeX and related programs for Windows (all current variants) on x86 systems.

Presentation.

a VERY nice word processor. More powerful than WordPad but less powerful (and a lot less bulky) than regular Word.

page layout, desktop publishing.

an integrated development environment (IDE) for developing LaTeX-documents on Microsoft Windows (Windows 9x/ME, NT/2000)

Free / Open Source - Print-To-PDF, lets you make PDF's in any program that can print.

text-PDF conversion

a complete TeX distribution for UNIX compatible systems.

An interpreter for the PostScript language and the PDF file format

free CAD program

it's good for looking up words without opening a browser.

Shareware ($20) - Font management tool

personal information manager (PIM). Use it as a combined calendar, diary, organizer, and reminder.

an electronic database system with which you can manage text and image documents. You can arrange the documents chapter wise and open them directly over a hierarchical table of contents like in a book. The integrated full text search engine helps you to retrieve all documents fast and simple. You can also use the program as a digital photo album. So you can enter a description text and the date and time when the photo was taken. The information is stored together with a small preview image in the database. In addition, it is possible to insert hyperlinks directly into the images and to create a hierarchical picture overview.

Free / Open Source - Another tree-based notepad like TreePad and WikidPad, but it's saves as rich text, has encryption, and it's free.

tree style notes with a handy index.

Self-explanatory, task management tool.

personal database program,store all your notes, emails, texts, hyperlinks, etc. into a single file. With the look and feel of the familiar Windows explorer, editing, storing, browsing, searching and retrieving your data can not be easier! TreePad can be run directly from a floppy, if necessary, including data. To find any article you previously created or imported, you can browse the tree, in the same way as you browse directories/folders in the Windows explorer. You can also use the internal search engine.

MySQL GUI. Unfortunately it seems to have been removed from the Internet after it was bought by MySQL AB or bullied around too much or something but you can still find it in some places on Google.

The world's most popular database server.

contacts database. all entries saved automatically.

Free - A nice little contacts/personal finances database.

Simple database for many purposes.

programmers text editor

Best programming environment ever! Some of the plugins are commercial, but the majority of it is open source freeware. A must-have for any programmer.

super light and functional Java editor.

Free Java IDE

Free - Scite-based text editor, supports syntax highlighting and code-folding among many other common features.

A freeware programmer's editor.

a method for single stepping of a Win32 x86 binary without processor support (without TF flag). Its main goal is efficiency of gathering of large quantities of information about process state.

Free / Open Source - A collection of Windows specific header files and import libraries combined with GNU toolsets that allow one to produce native Windows programs that do not rely on any 3rd-party C runtime DLLs.

Free / Open Source - This is a file_id.diz and anything.nfo file viewer for windows based computers. It also supports zip files so you can simply right-click your zip files and view all (nfo/diz/txt/1st/me) files contained within the zip without un-zipping the file.

A right-click shell extension that displays all ASCII strings in a binary file. Same idea as the UNIX "strings" command. It's old, but it works in XP for sure. I've used it for years.

Free - Nice little dualpane file manager/unpacker with lots of features and un-flashy interface.

Norton Commander file manager clone.

Shareware ($27, Free "lite" version available) - Windows Explorer replacement, with a TON of built in extra features.

Like xplorer², a file manager for Windows. XYplorer is shareware, but there is a direct link to a download of the last freeware version on the site.

Executable file editor.

Always Useful.

great file splitter for shipping large things over small media

allows deletion of files that don't want to be removed.

Exactly what it sounds like.

skip the bytes which are not readable from file and copy all other bytes

Allows you to create hard links on Windows NT, 2000, and XP. A hard link is like a shortcut, but it's a file system-level shortcut for a given file. By creating a hard link to an existing file, you duplicate neither the file nor a file-based reference (that is, a shortcut) to it. Instead, you add information to its directory entry at the NTFS level. The physical file remains intact in its original location. Simply put, it now has two or more names that you can use to access the same content!

A junction point (also known as a reparse point) is a technology for a folder to be grafted into another folder on the same local computer. Junction points are transparent to programs. This might not seem like a big deal, but it can remove a lot of clutter. It also helps a lot when moving programs from one place to another, since just about every program in the Windows world expects to never be moved from the directory it was installed in. Junction points can only be created on volumes formatted with NTFS 5.0 or higher. NTFS 5.0 is supported in Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 and higher.

NTFS Link is a Windows Shell Extension, which hooks into Windows Explorer Drag&Drop Actions to provide extended functionality for creating hard links and directory junctions on NTFS file systems.

Free - It's . . another desktop search tool.

Free - Desktop Search / File Management tool. Advanced tips are available.

Free - Another Desktop Search Tool

Free - Google Desktop Search scours through all kinds of different files, either by filename or content.

one of the most powerful text retrieval programs currently available for Microsoft Windows. With its built-in converters, it's excellently suitable for searching and previewing HTML and RTF documents. In pure text files, the found text passages can be replaced after the search is over. The search and replace process can be automated with the help of batch files to replace several phrases in one step. The found documents can be opened in a preview window, in which the matches are highlighted. A special feature is that InfoRapid can use Microsoft Office converters to search WinWord, Excel, Lotus and other documents and preview them in their original layout.

fast and functional

Shareware ($25) - Another set of diff/sync tools.

Free - Another File synchronizer, written by Justin Frankel of Winamp fame.

A tool created by developers at Microsoft and included in the NT 4.0 Resource Kit.. this is a nifty little app that has robust copying capabilities... I've used it to automate backups at work, copy files gigs of files from web servers that are geographically far away without any problems... (other utilities had problems with corruption or timing out, but this one has settings for retries and timeouts) lots of command line options, log files. You can even copy the directory structure first before copying the files (helps with HD fragmentation since directory structure is written sequentially). This thing works like a charm... it's an oldie but a goodie..

Shareware ($30, Free 30 days) - File Synchronization program, for syncing files to an mp3 player, a thumbdrive, a remote hard drive, etc.

pause/resume file copy/move in Windows

Free / Open Source - File Synchronization Utility for keeping files up to date on removable devices.

Free - Data migration tool. Basically, a more secure, faster way to copy many files from one hard drive to another. Very simple, and that is why it is great.

my favorite file renaming tool.

Bulk file remover with a simple interface.

does exactly what it says on the tin.

Mass file renamer. It can do regexes, traditional wildcards, tag reading and manual filename edits.

rename multiple files in a single step

Renamer is a command-line utility that allows you to perform mass renaming of files based on a UNIX-style regular expression.

batch renaming utility that should have been built into Windows in the first place. Useful for managment of massive hentai pr0n collections

Mass file renaming.

Shareware ($30, Free trial available) - for people too good for diff.

Parity file utility.

file CRC checker

Press Button, Receive Hash.

Par2 utility. Par2 expands on parity file usefulness.

Checks and creates SFV checksum files.

Free - Can't get enough graphical hard drive space analyzers.

Free - Also another graphical hard drive space analyzer.

Free - Another graphical hard drive space analyzer. It has the bonus of being self-contained, so you can put it on a thumbdrive.

for finding out just where all that hard disk space is going.

Free / Open Source - Graphical hard drive usage analyzer. Shows you what is taking up the most space and where it is.

quick and simple disk cataloging utility.

gets rid of garbage on your drives

It supports resizing, reformatting (quick and thorough), and handles Linux and FAT partition (no NTFS support, though). You need to boot to DOS on a startup disk to get it to work, however.

better tool to format floppy disks than WinXP's built-in formatter.

HDD temperature meter

Access Mac and Atari disks, CDs, and disk images from Windows.

clone drives/backup from within XP/2K3

Shareware ($45, Free trial available) - Is Windows defrag just too good for you? Do you require big happy graphs to make sure your bits are perfectly aligned? Well, then PerfectDisk is for you!

Free / Open Source - A tool that allows programmers to create installers for Windows. Includes easy to use installer creator, but can be used to make more complicated installers with ease.

very small zip program.

Free / Open Source - Super Mega Ultra Compression Program of Doom. Seriously. 7zip will make the smallest files humanly possible using their own special crazy compression algorithm. It can also decompress damn near anything.

*Free* winzip clone

unzipper, good for Win2K.

Supports many archive formats like 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CAB, CDI, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MDF, MBF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO. With a modern easy-to-use interface, IZArc provides support for most compressed and encoded files, as well as access to many powerful features and tools. It allows you to drag and drop files from and to Windows Explorer, create and extract archives directly in Windows Explorer, create multiple archives spanning disks, creating self-extracting archives, repair damaged zip archives, converting from one archive type to another, view and write comments and many more. IZArc has also build-in multilanguage support. "

This is a great program for anybody who downloads from usenet. It will sit in your system tray and monitor a directory for par2/sfv files, and attempt to verify and repair the data set. You can set it to extract to a different folder and delete the rar/par set. It has its flaws (no unzip support, catching sfv over par2's), but overall it's very useful.

Zip utility with a nag screen.

Free - Multi-format archiving tool

"Unziplify provides an easy one-click method of extracting an entire folder full of ZIP, RAR, and ACE files."

Best Compression app I've ever used. I have tried every other one I've heard of but always come back to WinRAR.

Free zip/rar utility.

Grip is a CD player and CD ripper/MP3-encoder for the GNOME desktop. It has the ripping capabilities of cdparanoia built in, but can also use external rippers (such as cdda2wav). It also provides an automated frontend for MP3 encoders (presets for lame, bladeenc, l3enc, xingmp3enc, mp3encode, and gogo), letting you take a disc and transform it easily straight into MP3s. The Ogg Vorbis format is also supported. Internet disc lookups are supported for retrieving track information from disc database servers. Grip works with DigitalDJ to provide a unified, "computerized" version of your music collection.

Extract from damaged CDs and CD images.

I prefer a seperate CD player and this one is ace.

BurnAtOnce is a cdrdao/mkisofs GUI for Windows. It's quite nice.

Scans your directories and generates a listing of perfectly optimized cds so that the most amount of data possible fits onto a cd. It even generates .isos.

Free - CD and DVD burner. More features than you can shake a stick at.

CD and DVD burning package.

Shareware ($25, demo can't export discs) - Dvd Reauthoring program, lets you take sections out of a dvd, split to several discs, etc.

Free - Rips, decrypts, edits, shrinks, reencodes and reauthors dvds to your liking, generally so they'll fit on DVD-R's. It'll even pipe the result off to nero to burn it for you.

ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit.

Nero no more. InfraRecorder has all of the most useful features of your major burning programs, only its free and completely open source.

powertoy to burn CD and DVD images; create an ISO from any folder.

replaces Nero Burning ROM - Essentially, this is Nero for Linux. Burning CDs is easy, yet extremely powerful. Very customizable interface.

Free - Free CD -> ISO Ripper. Only 14k!

CD/DVD, all types.

make autorun CDs with menus.

Free / Open Source - a DVD Shrink clone for those of you who don't feel that DVD Shrink is Free enough.

Free - Rips dvds to unencrypted dvd images. Recently killed by legal threats from Macrovision, but it's still available. if the .org.uk mirror goes down, it's still hosted at.

Mediapipe VCD templates

MMB allows you to burn VCDs without Toast and MMT is a nice addition to Mediapipe.

Pull video data off VCD disks without getting file corrupted errors.

Fix non-compliant mpeg files for VCD burning.

Burn SVCDs and VCDs from bin/cue files and mpeg1/2 files

ASPI Layer for CD-R drives.

Mount CD Images as virtual drives so your games run faster.

checks your cds for errors

Free, Depending on version - The other of the best malware detectors and cleaners out there.

One of the only virus scanners proven to detect all known viruses and trojans. Avast! Antivirus 4 Home Edition is free for personal use.

Free - It's antivirus! It's free! The Pro-version ($30 for 2 years) is absolutely worth the money, but is not necessary for most users.

Adware Spyware tool. Dosnet remove them, but gives you a link with tutorials on how to remove each one it finds (I use this as a redundant check after runing Avast, or Spyware Doctor)

antivirus

a Free Anti-virus software for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP and 2003.

Free - One of the best malware detectors and cleaners out there.

Shareware ($30), Freeware Version can only *scan* - Yet Another Spyware Utility.

Generate random passwords for all your junk and store them, encrypted.

Free / Open Source - Another Password Safe. Works just like the rest of them, but this one has a slightly-less-shit UI.

Free / Open Source - It's a safe . . for passwords. Lets you organize your passwords and keep them all in one place, which is then HEAVILY encrypted.

Free / Open Source - Yet Another Password Safe. Still works like everything else.

Free / Open Source - Simple file encryption. Right click, Encrypt, Enter password.

AES/Rijndael file encryption

Shareware ($30 and $60 respectively) - Hide or Hide and Encrypt folders on your hard drive. You've got stuff to hide, right?

Replace Windows Firewall.

Winsock firewall is a filter which checks all the network packages against the specific rule set. can be used to check and block Spywares, Adwares, etc.

Find and eliminate your hidden personal data before hackers and snoops do.

Free / Open Source - Secure drive wipes from within windows.

Free / Open Source - Program which allows you to create virtual drives with on-the-fly very-strong encryption. Also lets you hide these virtual drives, or . . do whatever you want with them, great stuff.

a small utility that runs transparently (it doesn't even use a tray icon) and notifies you when any program registers itself to run at system startup. It prevents those utterly useless tray applications from registering themselves behind your back, and it acts as a security tool against trojans like BackOrifice or Netbus.

Shareware ($18) - An application launching program, like Quicksilver for OSX.

Free - Application launcher like Quicksilver for OSX. Can also interface with certain program settings and has common user actions built-in, such as Google search.

It's a quicksearch tool. For people who for some reason don't have a browser that has this feature by default.

Free - Gaudy chrome, Longhorn Style

Free - Like Konfabulator, but not.

Free - Everyone's favourite widget runner. Made irrelevant for Mac by the advent of Dashboard, but still works perfectly fine on Windows. Now owned (and set free) by Yahoo!.

enter in the name of an application and it finds it.

MobyDock DX is a fully customizable freeware launchbar / taskbar program that allows you to control your applications and folders while displaying some cool mouse-over animations. It can check your POP mail account, displays thumbnails for the running applications, displays popup menus for your favorite media-player allowing to control it from the dock itself, as well as a functional Clock and Recycle Bin etc. The integrated Microsoft Messenger support, weather checker, auto-focus and several other features will help you to explore, interact and keep your system under control in a fast and acessible way.

allows you to have a nice animated launchbar/taskbar on your screen that reacts to your mouse when you mouse over it. In short, it's a task bar and program launcher that does it with style.

QuickCommand allows a user definable hot key to pop up an instant command window, with the same functionailty as Start/Run. This allows swift access to a prompt for frequent command line users. QuickCommand also allows users to create aliases to access commonly used commands quickly.

Free - Another OSX-style bar for Windows. This one takes docklets from both Y'zDock and Objectbar and is in fact based on Y'zDock! Still in Beta, but MUCH better than Y'zDock. Does not support dual monitors and has not been updated since 2005.

Free - Same as the above two except for a few critical differences. It doesn't seem to be bugged completely, it supports dual monitors and it appears to be still in development. Supports all current docking skins.

Free - Floating window that allow you to open any program in about 4 keystrokes with user defined shortcuts.

Free - A launchbar/box but shiny and translucent.

Shareware ($19.90, 30-day "free" nagware trial period) - Super Ultra Beefed-Up Taskbar of Doom.

Shareware ($20) - Provides you with a little Window full of icons. How it is better than the start menu or some hotkeys, I do not know.

Free - OSX-style dock, for Windows XP. Widely accepted as the best of the assorted dock utilities out there. Note: there is no official site for Y'z Dock due to legal issues with Apple.

it basically makes Windows look like blackbox.

Dexpot 1.4 turns your monitor into up to 20. It creates and manages virtual desktops and enables you to work far more efficiently and comfortably with many simultaneously opened windows.

Windows shell manager

window manager (explorer replacement)

virtual desktop manager

Free - Virtual Desktop Program.

because if I keep minimising things to the tray I need something to organise them and this program has the nicest, simplest interface of all the tools that do that.

Free / Open Source - Another Virtual Desktop Program, very powerful and flexible.

Multiple desktops for Windows.

Windows automation utility

Swirling desktop background.

Win32 ports of nearly all the Linux GNU command line tools.

Shareware ($40, 30 day free trial) - MacroExpress lets you make complex macros that do all kinds of crazy multi-step things easily.

This is a small, but powerful screen capturing program.

window controls - hide/minimize-to-systray

for wallpaper swapping.

Free - Wallpaper Randomizer for all versions of Windows.

Shareware ($15, Free Trial Available) - Like the default windows magnifier, but not shit.

Allows you to view and disable items in the right-click menu.

Free - Lets you resize any window to a specific exact customizable size.

Free - Little post-it note program

Patches the windows shell with alternative icon sets.

Free - Lets you shove any program into the systray, if they like it or not.

patch Windows XP to use unofficial themes.

Free - Another Freeware Wallpaper changer. Customizable, to change wallpapers whenever you want it to, either automatically or on-demand.

A cool, dark Windows theme.

like tweakUI but better

Free - Logon Screen changer for Windows XP

clipboard history residing in the Windows system tray.

Free - AllSnap adds window-snapping functionality to all windows. It's neat and tiny and good.

Free - Adds "Copy Path Name To Clipboard" and "Open MSDOS Prompt" to your context menu.

Free - Expands the capability of the clipboard, allowing for multiple clipboards, permanent clips, etc.

Free - A tiny program that forces desktop icons to look like Listmode view (tiny! And all lined up)

folder bookmarks in open dialog boxes

a screensaver for Mac OS X. But, Fluid isn't just any screensaver. It is a realtime fluid-dynamics model that renders to your screen using wave velocity color-coding and reflections on the surface of the waves. Fluid also has its own particle engine so that it can visualize particles within the liquid medium. Add to that the ability to show the streaklines of the currents and you've got yourself one really intense screensaver.

OSS Windows explorer plugin to show folder size

shell-integrated zip program for Win2K.

a small little program that allows Windows 2000/XP users to make any window transparent. Right-click on any window or press the keyboard shortcuts (Control + Shift + [0-9]) to make any window transparent. It's that simple.

Free - //Ridiculously// customizable global hotkey program.

Free - Another keymapping app. Requires VB 6.0 Runtimes.

Free, open source and sexy hotkeys, the shortcut editor (and more) that should be in Vista but isn't.

Free - Lets you save and restore your desktop icon layout in two clicks.

Free - ANOTHER Alt+Tab enhancer.

full control over your keyboard 95/98/NT

keyboard remapper NT/2K/XP

Free - Latest in the ongoing suite of neat little apps Microsoft has released to go along with Windows. Of special note are,, and.

extend taskbar to second monitor

Change the universal open/save dialogue boxes that you see in almost all Windows programs. Choose the details view, sorting, windows size, input focus, etc.

Free - Command-line Program launcher like Quicksilver for OSX.

Shareware ($10, free for 100 uses) - Yet another task switcher for XP and 2000, brings OSX's Exposé feature to windows. Formerly called Entbloess, which was a horrible name.

Free - Lets you remap any key to another key.

Shareware ($37, 45 day trial available) - Collection of context-menu . . things . .

It's like Growl for windows. Customizable unified toaster-style notifications. Can replace all Windows Balloon Tooltips.

Free - OS-Wide customizable mouse gestures.

faster copy with pause, accurate progress display, etc.

Free / Open Source - Pretty Alt+Tab replacement tool with previews for XP

a small shell extension for Windows95/98/Me/NT/2000, which will allow the user to have transparent background color in the icon caption area, thereby getting rid of the irritating one-colored rectangles covering your nice background image. The program also allows the user to set the icon text color. TransText resides in the system tray bar, and is only active when the background image is updated in connection with changed resolution or other system changes (the tray icon can be removed).

Free - Explorer extension that lets you figure out what program has a file in use, thus preventing it from being deleted.

Expose clone for Windows. Much better than any alternative I've used. Currently in development, but the betas work great.

Windows shortcut key mapper.

Free / Open Source - Adds "Rolling" or "Windowshade" mode to all windows.

desktop icon arranger

Windows clipboard extender/memory- now in its third generation. Handles Pictures, Richtext, URLS, etc - any size. Features printing, drag and drop, optional permanent storage of clippings. Familiar 'Outlook' interface.

Free - Huge Collection of really good utilities, for doing a rather wide range of really useful things. Notable mention:,, and. SysInternals was recently purchased by Microsoft, the links now go to their new homes. They also have a blog, which discusses updates and other new SysInternals goodies.

virtual machine for testing OS or apps.

Win9x/ME task manager

$19.99 - Remote Control Software. Get some manner of a remote control for your pc, and this will interpret the signals and do whatever you want with them.

Shareware ($35, free trial available) - It's not-VNC. does the same stuff as VNC, but not-VNC. Also not free.

make it easy to set up, safeguard, and manage reliable shared computers. Requires WinXP

a small utility for dual-CPU workstations that allows the user to finely tune how Windows balances the processing load between the two CPUs.

Streamline Windows the easy way! Requires .NET framework. (A special runtime is available on the site that you can use instead--it's smaller)

a comprehensive third-party patch-and-tune-and-update service for Windows machines. It scans your system to see what software you have installed (and unlike M$'s Windows Update it detects almost everything) and then allows you to check whether updates have been issued. It also watches for common problems in system tuning and security, and can provide automatic, one-click fixes for these problems.

Free - "System Optimization Tool". Sometimes, it can be a bit overzealous in it's "cleaning".

Save and clear the NT event log.

See how much RAM you have free.

change product key of Windows installation

A great performance increase if you have a static swap file.

One of the greatest programming languages on Earth. Very useful in text processing and web programming.

mouse sampling rate changer

Fantastic OO programming language.

Add/Remove Programs replacement.

Free / Open Source - Native Windows ports of assorted GNU utilities. They're native, unlike cygwin, which runs through an emulation layer.

Schedule Windows shutdown times.

msconfig replacement & task scheduler.

Optimize Win9x cache settings.

Free - Advanced control over exactly what programs run at startup.

Shareware ($15 yearly) - Comprehensive Windows tweaking tool. Gives you access to tweak a ton of stuff TweakUI doesn't list.

windows customizer/tweaker with a million options.

Free / Open Source - ANSI/POSIX compatibility layer enables UNIX/Linux apps on Windows. Many useful packages are available prebuilt. Great toolset for folks who feel constrained by the native Windows command-line environment.

share your mouse and keyboard between two computers (or yor PC and laptop)

VDMSound is a program that overcomes what has probably been the most exasperating limitation of DOS boxes since Windows NT -- sound support. VDMSound is an open, plug-in oriented platform that emulates an MPU-401 interface (for outputting high-quality MIDI music), a SoundBlaster compatible (SB16, SBPro 2, SB2, SBPro, etc.) implementation (for digital sound effects and FM/AdLib music), as well as a standard game-port interface (for playing games with joystick support). In development are improvements to the existing joystick emulation, and possibly VESA support.

Windows Update replacement.

Use Cassandra to track all of the software that you install, by vendor/product name. That way you can know right away when to upgrade programs that you have installed.

operating system and hardware informations

a realtime physical memory management program that automatically ensures that you always have as much physical memory available as possible.

Osiris is a Host Integrity Monitoring System that periodically monitors one or more hosts for change. It maintains detailed logs of changes to the file system, user and group lists, resident kernel modules, and more.

Sysinternals tool deserving mention on its own. Replaces Windows task manager.

a small Windows utility that displays the amount of available memory in an icon in the System Tray. It can also free memory; by double clicking the tray icon, or by setting a threshold that activates the program automatically, or by having it run automatically when an application exits.

System information, diagnostics, and benchmarking.

System Info for Windows. Full system report.

Free - What's that? You want another bar statistic application? You're in luck!

Free - a system status bar which allows you to quickly get an overview of your system's condition (memory, CPU, uptime, and much more).

Free - Hardware and Software Enumerator, Detector, and Reporter.

Free - Another system device monitoring / hardware diagnostic suite.

system analysis

look up running processes for info online

tool for permanent Windows components removal and pre-installation Windows setup. Windows 98

Advanced Windows Care. PC care tool to protect, repair and optimize your computer, "one click"

This is the most powerful tool to increase boot speed. It analyzes the areas of your drive accessed at bootup and defrags them to load faster. The results are amazing.

Crap Cleaner (aka ccleaner). System optimization and privacy tool. Removes unused and temporary files from your system

Remove leftover reg keys

Free - It's a registry cleaner! Amazing! Free!

Free / Open Source - like a transparent Eterm, but for Windows, so you're limited by the WONDERFUL Windows commandline.

an assembler targetting the Intel x86 series of processors, with portable source.

DriverGuide toolkit. Back up/update your drivers! Free trial.

ext2 filesystem driver for Windows

Frequently updated Cell phone software with broader device support than commercial apps.

a file manager for those of us who still have the old Diamond Rio 300 MP3 player but can't access it from Windows 2000 or XP. It's small (about 700k), elegant, imminently useful, and doesn't require installation. Just download and run it from any folder.

a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod or your Motorola mobile phone (any model supporting iTunes). It's a standalone application that can be run directly from your iPod.

a simple program that allows you to interact with the Rio300 or Rio500. Think of it as a handy alternative to the RioPort software. RIOsitude supports windows 98/ME/2000. It supports sending and receiving files, and internal and external memory (via SmartMedia cards).

YamiPod is a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod under Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It can be run directly from your iPod and needs no installation.

Free - X-TREEM 0V3RCL0KING UTILZ

because most -- if not all -- "official" joystick and gamepad remapping software SUCKS. This is also good for use with joysticks and gamepads that either don't have official remapping software for it, if the remapping software isn't compatible with your Windows version, or if the manufacturer decides that you shouldn't be able to download it and instead you must pay for it you lose the CD that came with your device.

Free - Tray Application that lets you quickly switch resolution and colordepth.

Lets you undervolt your notebook. Undervolting decreases heat and power consumption, which gives you better battery life and less noise.

Free - Ridiculously powerful application that allows you to do all kinds of crazy things with your display. Lets you set custom resolutions, custom refresh rates, advanced color-correction, etc.

nVidia tweaking utility

Shareware ($40, Free 30 days) - Utility for keeping making multiple-monitor setups Not Suck.

Explore PCI buses and connected devices. Equivalent of lspci or Apple System Profiler's PCI browser.

Free - Yet another hardware monitoring tool.

In case you forget some of your system specs.

Free / Open Source - Another bar monitor thing, but written by former goon ctz. His domain died, so the link now goes directly to a file extracted from the internet archive. Details about CrowBar can be found in.

Shareware ($20) - Like Rainmeter, Samurize, etc, BUT IT'S A BAR. That makes it totally different, right guys?

Free - Notebook battery monitor that gets less transparent as the battery discharges. Sits in the bottom corner of the screen and jumps to the other side when hovered.

Free - "Computer Hardware Information Tool". Like Samurize, but made by the guy behind Rainlendar.

Free - You need to know your hard drive free space percentage all the time, right?

Free - Voltage, Fan speed, Temperature, and S.M.A.R.T. monitoring utility.

identify add-in cards in system

Free - Like Rainmeter, Samurize, CustomBar, Crowbar, and 8 billion other applications.

change systray clock to display date, seconds, etc.

Alarm clock program.

Free - Another Mp3/Wav/Etc alarm clock, for people too good for taskmanager OR citrus.

Free - Another Systray Clock Replacement.

Free / Open Source - Taskbar Enhancer. Lets you mess with the start menu, your clock, set alarms, etc.

computer clock time synchronisation mini-app.

time synchronization

great game server client (better than the POS that is gamespy)

Because keeping your MAME ROMs organized and verified is a good thing.

game server browser

Shows full-length crosshairs at cursor's point on WinXP. Does not work on a non-administrator account.

A Glide wrapper for your old 3DFX games. It's under development today.

The fastest DOS virtual machine. This is best way to play old games.

A fairly good alternative to Project 64. Available for Windows. Open-source. #2 emulator on NGEmu's N64 emulator rankings. Uses Zilmar's plugin system.

Free / Open Source - Marathon engine

Free - FPS-like tank warfare with emphasis on powerups

amusing game similar to Plato's Cave

open sourced and improved Doom II engine

Best PlayStation emulator out there, hands down. Available for Windows and Linux. Closed-source. #1 emulator on NGEmu's PlayStation emulator rankings. Uses the PSEmu Pro plugin system.

Best NES emulator out there, hands down. Available for Windows and Linux. Open-source.

open source free Civ II clone

Frets on Fire is a game of musical skill and fast fingers. The aim of the game is to play guitar with the keyboard as accurately as possible.

jDoom is an enhanced win32 port of DOOM. It uses the Doomsday Engine, works with all Doom/Doom2 WADs, has customizable controls and mouse look, a resizable status bar, enhanced menus, and XG line/sector types.

keyboard training.

Best arcade emulator out there, hands down. Officially available for Windows and DOS, but there are a ton of unofficial ports out there for a countless amount of OSes. Open-source. Supports tons of different arcade games and machine types, because as its name implies, it's a (M)ultiple (A)rcade (M)achine (E)mulator ;).

mouse training.

NetHack is a single player dungeon exploration game that runs on a wide variety of computer systems, with a variety of graphical and text interfaces all using the same game engine. Unlike many other Dungeons & Dragons-inspired games, the emphasis in NetHack is on discovering the detail of the dungeon and not simply killing everything in sight - in fact, killing everything in sight is a good way to die quickly. Each game presents a different landscape - the random number generator provides an essentially unlimited number of variations of the dungeon and its denizens to be discovered by the player in one of a number of characters: you can pick your race, your role, and your gender.

Best N64 emulator out there, hands down. Available for Windows. Closed-source. #1 emulator on NGEmu's N64 emulator rankings. Uses Zilmar's plugin system. Discontinued.

the wildly popular and addictive puzzle game

Best Game Boy/GBA emulator out there, hands down. Available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BeOS. Open-source. #1 emulator on NGEmu's GBA emulator rankings. Supports all incarnations of Game Boy and GBA games, including Super Game Boy and Game Boy Color.

Best SNES emulator out there, hands down. Available for Windows, MS-DOS and Linux. Open-source.

Have as many projects as you want.

A front-end for RRDTool.

Mathematics tool.

an interactive periodic table of the elements. But it is more than simply a computerized version of the standard periodic table. It takes full advantage of your computer's capabilities to give you an in-depth look at the elements that make up our earth, the solar system, the galaxy... well, let's just say everything.

a RRD for data collection. It can graph just about ANYTHING.

Mathematics tool.

Life would be so much more difficult without this.