Good FREE programs everyone should know about

[Personable]

Post good programs that you use regularly and think everyone should know about.

Only post free or open source programs and not trials. There is one exception though; a trial is acceptable, if it's true shareware, meaning you you don't lose functionality after the trial period ends. An example of this would be mIRC. Include a link to the program and a brief description.

That should be about it, lets make this a helpful thread.

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Tray it!

TrayIt! allows to save precious Taskbar space for minimized windows. For each application which applies TrayIt! it creates a small icon in the System Tray. (System Tray area is located near the Clock). When application's window is minimized this icon represents the application on the Taskbar instead of the regular "minimized rectangle".

It is particularly useful for background tasks you typically keep running on your PC all day long like your favorite E-mail client, Real Player, etc.

WinRoll

Make a window roll into its title bar, send it to the back or make it stay on top. Minimize, maximize or close all visible windows, including minimizing to the tray area. Make a window translucent on Windows 2000 or above. WinRoll is lovingly hand-crafted in 100% pure assembly language to give the fastest response and the smallest memory footprint.

Stroke It

System wide mouse gestures for Windows.

PDF Speed Up

Speeds up loading PDF files in Adobe reader. This will keep your browser from crashing when opening a PDF file.

Foobar 2000

Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include ReplayGain support, low memory footprint and native support for several popular audio formats.

By far my favorite audio player for Windows. It's highly customizable, more stable than Winamp, takes up hardly any memory at all and supports almost all common audio formats by default.

Here's a screenshot of my setup:

Miranda IM

Miranda IM is a multi protocol instant messenger client.No bloat, it's Easy and Small! Miranda IM is designed to be resource efficient and easy to use. It uses very little memory and requires no installation. Just unzip and run! This also makes it ideal for users that want to run their messenger client from a removable storage such as an USB memory stick. It can even be stored on a floppy disc if not too many plugins are used. Supports ICQ, AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, Gadu-Gadu, Tlen, Netsend and other protocols.

Restoration

Restore files which are deleted from the recycle bin or deleted while holding down the Shift key by mistake.
Conversely, this program has another function that makes it almost impossible to restore all deleted files.
You can use it after deletion of confidential documents, embarrassing files and so on.

Sequoia View

Ever wondered why your hard disk is full? Or what directory is taking up most of the space? When using conventional disk browsing tools, such as Windows Explorer, these questions may be hard to answer. With SequoiaView however, they can be answered almost immediately. SequoiaView uses a visualization technique called cushion treemaps to provide you with a single picture of the entire contents of your hard drive. You can use it to locate those large files that you haven't accessed in one year, or to quickly locate the largest picture files on your drive. The screenshots below give a first impression of the original cushion treemaps:

That's all I can think of for now, I'll try to come up with some more later.

[Murkosaurus]

CCleaner -

Download

CCleaner (formerly Crap Cleaner) is a freeware utility used to optimize a user's computer and clean its registry. It allows the user to remove unused temporary files from Internet browsers and other supported applications along with browsing history, cookies, recycle bin, and AutoComplete form history. It allows for the cleaning of the recycle bin, memory dumps, file fragments, log files, system caches, application data, and various other data. The program also includes a Registry Cleaner to locate and correct problems in the Windows Registry such as missing shared DLLs, unused file extensions and application paths.

Good Job btw, those are some awesome programs, I love the Miranda IM! Im going to download the Foobar 2000 and ill let you know how it goes.

[unknown]

CCleaner is a very good program.

[Dahari]

I see no mac apps. THIS IS BULL____.

[Doku]

Oh man, that PDF optimizer is so pro.. ____ing firefox always crashed cause of my damned professors putting up monster pdf's for homework.

Also I have Registry Clean Expert (full version), is Ccleaner better?

[jefftheworld]

A) Stroke It = lol

B) If you're a gamer who uses any sort of contoller or gamepad with your PC, xpadder is an absolute must have. Does everything the $20 competition does, but it's absolutely free.

[Amylacetate]

CCleaner is a very good program.

[hurfsomedurfs]

X-chat 2

X-chat 2 is a great windows IRC client if you are into graphics and mouse support and all that ____. This is an unofficial Windows binary, since the official one is 20 bucks after thirty days (it's OSS, so this isn't a crack, just an independent guy compiling the source)

[Personable]

Unlocker

Ever had such an annoying message given by Windows?
Cannot delete file: Access is denied
There has been a sharing violation.
The source or destination file may be in use.
The file is in use by another program or user.
Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

Unlocker is the solution!
1. Simply right click the folder or file and select Unlocker

MusikCube (Not as good as Foobar2000, but better than iTunes in my opinion.)

musikCube is an mp3 player
for the
modern generation. It helps you just listen to what you want to hear,
while offering innovative features not seen elsewhere. For the
technical user, musikCube is based on an embedded SQL database engine
known as sqlite. For the non technical user, that means its fast.
Really fast. "Dynamic playlists" allow fully automatic, randomized
playback of songs based on your observed listening habits. The more
you listen, the smarter it gets. It also features browsable, user
reorderable playlists.


Cube also makes transferring
audio between home and
work very easy with it's unique support for
removable storage devices. A "removable storage device" is any flash
memory, thumb drive, or portable mp3 player that acts as a hard disk
when you plug it in.

Code::Blocks Studio

Code::Blocks is a free C++ IDE built specifically to meet the most demanding needs of its users. It was designed, right from the start, to be extensible and configurable.

Built around a plugin framework, Code::Blocks can be extended with plugin DLLs. It includes a plugin wizard so you can compile your own plugins! (Free SDK downloaded separately)

HDTVtoMPEG2

This program converts HDTV MPEG2 tansport stream files to standard MPEG2 video files playable (mostly) by media player, many software DVD player programs, and readable by video converter programs like FlaskMPEG and Vidomi.

NullPacketStripper

NullPacketStripper is a small utility designed to merge segments and remove null packets from MPEG 2 transport stream files received from a D-VHS deck.

[low tech]

Restoration, Sequoia, xpadder, and Unlocker are all thing I was in dire need of. Thanks Person and Jeff! All I could recommend is vixy.net which lets you download videos from YouTube and other streaming sites in a variety of formats. But honestly, who didn't already know how to do that? (There's the online version and a downloadable offline version.)

[Personable]

LogMeIn

A free, secure remote access service that works with PCs or Macs and all major web browsers. This service is great for anyone looking for an alternative to Terminal Services/Remote Desktop for their home, or even work, PCs.

Taskbar Shuffle

No hotkeys, no extra steps, just rearrange the buttons on your Windows taskbar by dragging and dropping them. Allows you to rearrange your system tray icons by dragging and dropping as well (but that does require a hotkey).

No need to get all nervous when an application crashes or if you need to reboot; you can reorder your programs exactly as they were anytime by just dragging and dropping them directly within your Windows taskbar!

Core Temp

Core Temp is a compact, no fuss, small footprint program to monitor CPU temperature.

The uniqueness of it is that it shows the temperature of each individual core in a each processor in your system! You can see in real time how the CPU temperature varies when you load your CPU.

Intel and AMD recently published detailed, public information about the "DTS" (Digital Thermal Sensor), which provides much higher accuracy and more relevant temperature reading than the standard thermal diode sensors do. (How it works).

This feature is supported on all Intel Core and Core 2 series of processors as well as the whole AMD's AMD64 line of CPUs. (for a full list of supported CPUs: (CPU Support List).

Core Temp also has a logging feature, allowing a user to easily record the temperature of his processor(s) over any period of time, then the data can be easily transfered into an excel datasheet for easy graphing.

Core Temp works on Windows 2000, XP and 2003 (both 32bit and 64bit versions).

[unknown]

Personable, remind me to +rep you, because I've needed a lot of this ____.

Thanks.

[ALPHATT]

LogMeIn is the ____!
+rep

[unknown]

I still remember when people fell for that big GoToMyPC pay scam, lol

[WeTPaiNT]

7-Zip - Unzips everything. Has it's own archive format as well.

7-Zip is an open source file archiver designed originally for Microsoft Windows. 7-Zip operates primarily with the 7z archive format, as well as being able to read and write to several other archive formats. A user can use the command line interface, graphical user interface, or Windows shell integration.
7-Zip supports a number of other compression, and non-compression, archive formats. Supported formats include ZIP, Microsoft cabinet (CAB) files, RAR, ARJ, Z, gzip, bzip2, LHA, tar, cpio, smzip, JAR, rpm and Debian deb archives. Versions of 7-Zip from 4.42 onwards also support ISO CD/DVD images.

DVDShrink - Copy DVD Movies to DVD-R's

DVD Shrink is a versatile freeware tool for fitting a DVD-Video disc on a single DVDR disc.

DVD Shrink is capable of both re-authoring and re-encoding the movie. It features an intuitive user interface which makes it easy to choose what to keep, and what to lose.

DVD Shrinks allow the user to select compression level for each video track separately to obtain the desired disc size (which is usually below 4.38GB). The software is capable of producing either an ISO image of the ripped DVD, or a VIDEO_TS folder for further processing, viewing or burning.

Daemon Tools - Virtual Drive

Daemon Tools (styled DAEMON Tools by its creators) is a disk image emulator and optical disc authoring program for Microsoft Windows. Daemon Tools was originally a furtherance in the development of another program, Generic SafeDisc emulator, and incorporated all of its features. The program is able to defeat most copy protection schemes such as SafeDisc and SecuROM.

Hamachi - Simulates a LAN connection

Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private network (VPN) shareware application capable of establishing direct links between computers that are behind NAT firewalls without requiring reconfiguration (in most cases); in other words, it establishes a connection over the Internet that very closely emulates the connection that would exist if the computers were connected over a local area network. Currently available as a production version for Microsoft Windows and, as beta, for Mac OS X and Linux.

OpenOffice - Free Office Suite

OpenOffice.org (OO.o or OOo), commonly known simply as OpenOffice, is a free cross-platform office application suite available for a number of different computer operating systems. It supports the ISO/IEC standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) for data interchange as its default file format, as well as Microsoft Office formats among others. As of November 2008[update], OpenOffice supports over 45 languages

Pidgin - IM Client

Pidgin (formerly named Gaim) is a multi-platform instant messaging client. The software has support for many commonly used instant messaging protocols, allowing the user to log into various different services from one application.

The number of Pidgin users was estimated to be over 3 million in 2007.[1] Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Pidgin is free software.

[Colt]

Recuva - Dada recovery program

Recuva (pronounced "recover") is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses!

Defraggler -Defragment tool

From everyone here at Piriform, the company that brought you CCleaner and Recuva... we now bring you a file defragmentation tool... Defraggler! It differs from other defrag tools on the market, by enabling you to quickly and simply defrag the files you want to, without having to process the whole drive. Simply run it, select the file and defragment in seconds. No more struggling with the Windows defragmentation tool! And remember like all Piriform products, Defraggler is completely free for both corporate and individual use.

Active ISO Burner - ISO burning program

Active@ ISO Burner is a freeware application that will allow you to burn an ISO image file to CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R, CD-RW, DVD-RW, DL DVD+RW, HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

Notepad++ - Enhanced notepad

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL Licence. Based on a powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendlyness, Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment.

[unknown]

Pidgin - IM Client

I've been using this for years. Whether windows or linux, it does what it is meant to.

[hurfsomedurfs]

Foobar 2000



By far my favorite audio player for Windows. It's highly customizable, more stable than Winamp, takes up hardly any memory at all and supports almost all common audio formats by default.

Gotta second foobar. For the web designers or anyone else who needs to put code on a machine that ain't theirs, here's a couple:

FileZilla

Free, Open-source graphic FTP client. Also has a server download.


Notepad++

The best and only webpage creation tool around. It is a tabbed text editor. Highlights syntax for like 30 different markup/scripting languages.


Putty Tray

Great telnet/ssh client for Windows. Minimizes to the tray (optional), and allows clickable urls which is useful if you are connecting to a shell account somewhere for text-based IRC.


uTorrent

The only torrent program you need for windows. Tiny, feature-packed, stable, perfect. Also has a Mac beta.


GIMP

Open-source image-editing software. Saves you the hassle of cracking Photoshop if all you need to do is some basic/intermediate tweaking or hilarious macros or whatever it is you want to do. Also, much smaller than Photoshop.


XdN Tweaker

Tired of shortcuts named "Shortcut to "? Try this out. Has numerous other UI tweaks. Compatible with everything from 2000-7 Beta.

edit: damn you, colt! notepad++ deserves two mentions, then.

[unknown]

GIMP

Open-source image-editing software. Saves you the hassle of cracking Photoshop if all you need to do is some basic/intermediate tweaking or hilarious macros or whatever it is you want to do. Also, much smaller than Photoshop.

I also have this. Very good program, I give it an A.

Great for if you're running a game or something else memory expensive and want to do some GFX.

[low tech]

Cool I forgot about Gimp. I'll get that until I can find another Photoshop.