Here's a list of my favorite freeware.
Click on the icons to go to the relevant homepages. Be sure to check them out if you like their software as sometimes there are also paid versions with more features. There are often ways to support the authors as well.
The homepages will also contain a lot more information about the software and system requirements. The descriptions are mostly taken from these sites.
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| Trendmicro Housecall
eset online scanner
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If a 'bad-guy' gets on your system then they can often mess with any installed antivirus or antispyware software, stopping them updating or hiding itself from them. So it is a good idea to run a scan from an outside service. Here are a couple of good ones for you to run if you think your computer has been compromised.
If you have trouble getting to these sites, or running these scans, it could be a further indication that your system is infected. Don't ignore the signs because if malware gets into your computer it may be logging your keystrokes. Recording bank account information, social security numbers etc. and sending them out to the bad guys.
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Driveimage XML & Todo Backup
Here are two free programs for imaging whole partitions or drives on your system. I have used both, both are great but Todo has a few more options. Check out my writeup elsewhere on this site to find out why I prefer Todo over Driveimage XML, your needs may differ.
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illustrate's range of audio applications are the benchmark in their respective fields, over 10 years of expertise perfecting CD Ripping & Audio Conversion.
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Foxit Reader 2.0 is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 1.5 M download size), breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set. Foxit Reader 2.0 supports Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.6.
Version 2.0 introduces many exciting new features, including interactive form filler, multi-language UI support, on-demand download of add-on, self upgrade, Javascript support, improved printing speed, streamlined UI and much more.
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WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows (all current variants).
Run this software against your hard drive or a folder and it gives you a graphical representation of the files it contains. Makes it really easy to spot those large files that are eating up your space.
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Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.
Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
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Having so many books (many of them being eBooks), wouldn't it be nice to have a software application to manage all of them? eLibPro is such a software utility to manage your personal book collection (for both print books and ebooks).
Note: If you decide to use this software, and you have a lot of books, do a search on eBay for a cuecat USB barcode reader. I got one for a few bucks and it works great with this software.
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This software has recently taken a turn away from just a desktop application. It used to be a very useful alternative to Microsoft's OneNote especially popular with tablet users to easily capture, store and quickly access typed and handwritten memos, webpage excerpts, emails, phone messages, addresses, passwords, brainstorms, sketches, documents and more!
Now they have changed this into a 'cloud' application where your notes are stored on the internet. This has the advantage of keeping all your notes synchronized across all your computers, laptop and even your smart phone. One thing I really like is that I can take a picture with my smart phone, send it to my Evernote account and it is immediately available on all my other computers. Follow the link on the left and check this one out.
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CDBurnerXP Pro is a free CD/DVD burning solution.
With this software you can burn CD-R, CD-RW DVD+R/RW DVD-R/RW discs. |
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Play movie DVDs, video & audio files right on your computer with FREE AVS DVD Player. AVS DVD Player is a compact and easy-to-use program that has a simple user-friendly interface allowing you to start watching DVD movies with no additional software.
One more pleasant thing about it - it is absolutely FREE SOFTWARE!
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Ant Movie Catalog is a free (really free, i.e. the source code is available) program made to manage your collection of movies DVD, CD (VideoCD, DivX, ...) and tapes |
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CDVista enables you to scan your removable drives or photo CDs and store thumbnail images of the pictures on your PC. The software offers special browsers to consult your disks easily by file types (video, mp3, image, program, ...), as well as extensive search functionality to quickly locate any kind of file. |
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PDFCreator is a free tool to create PDFs easily from nearly any application. With the PDFCreator Printer driver you turn any program into a PDF-machine
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7-Zip is a file archiver with high compression ratio.
7-Zip is free software distributed under the GNU LGPL.
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CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. That removes unused and temporary files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster, more efficiently and giving you more hard disk space. The best part is that it's fast! (normally taking less that a second to run) and Free.
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Now you can get control of data without technical skills! Design databases and reports for just about any situation and get organized. All common data types are supported as well as very large note fields and storing files (images, documents, etc.) in records. Use FileAmigo for customers, prospect lists, projects, membership, defect tracking, trouble tickets, maintenance schedules, event planning, and much more...
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For those who don’t already know, the Gimp is a powerful, open source image editing application. For more info on the Gimp visit gimp.org. GIMPshop is essentially the same program with some cosmetic changes.
If you’ve never used Photoshop before, you may not appreciate my GIMPshop hack. What I’ve done is renamed and reorganized GIMP’s tools, options, windows, and menus to closely resemble Adobe Photoshop’s menu structure and naming conventions. Many of the menu options and even whole menus were recreated to faithfully reproduce a Photoshop-like experience. After running my GIMPshop hack, you’ll find that Photoshop and the GIMP are strikingly similar.
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Envisioneer Express enables you to easily create 3D home designs using a variety of drag and drop elements including walls, windows, stairs, home furnishings, kitchen appliances and many other home objects. You can create the initial design as 2D floor plan and the program will automatically render it in 3D, allowing you to do a virtual walkthrough in a fully rendered 3D environment. In addition to the rendered 3D view, the program also offers wireframe and outline views, and even a 3D Stereo Vision display, that you can view with standard 3D glasses. You can zoom, rotate and pan the display, change the camera angle and more.
New info - this is related but not an actual software program you download. If you have a good internet connection and want to create floorplans try out this online service at www.floorplanner.com
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I have used this program a few times now to resize partitions on my XP machine, works great. They have a free version for home users of XP & Vista 32-bit OS's and paid versions for other systems.
Easeus also has a free version of their Disk Copy software:
The high-speed sector-by-sector hard disk copy software. EASEUS Disk Copy is a freeware that allows you to copy your disks or partitions regardless of your operating system, file systems and partition scheme.
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The Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is a freeware utility that retrieves your Product Key (cd key) used to install windows from your registry. It has the options to copy the key to clipboard, save it to a text file, or print it for safekeeping. It works on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Office 97, and Office XP. This version is a quick update to make it work with Windows Server 2003.
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Lupas Rename is a FREEWARE program developed to rename a big number of files.
It works on Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT, Win2K and WinXP.
It is a simple .EXE file and doesn't need any other external libraries.
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Money Manager Ex© is a free, open-source, cross-platform, easy-to-use personal finance software. It primarily helps organize one's finances and keeps track of where, when and how the money goes. It is also a great tool to get a bird's eye view of your financial worth.
Money Manager includes all the basic features that 90% of users would want to see in a personal finance application. The design goals are to concentrate on simplicity and user-friendliness - something one can use everyday.
Money Manager Ex is a complete rewrite of the original Money Manager .NET.
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This link will take you to the Mozilla Foundation site where you can find the latest editions of Firefox, Thunderbird and other applications.
If you are still using the old Outlook express for your email that came with your computer I'd definitely suggest you give Thunderbird a try. And for an alterative to Internet Explorer download Firefox.
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Easy web authoring
KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing.
KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.
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IcoFX is an award winning freeware icon editor. It is an all-in-one solution for icon creation, extraction and editing. It is designed to work with Windows XP and Windows Vista icons supporting transparency.
With a wealth of tools and more than 40 effects at your fingertips, there’s virtually no limit to the icons you can create. You can convert your favorite images into icons, or icons into images. With IcoFX you can extract icons from other files, including Windows Vista files. You can easily work with multiple files using the batch processing capability of IcoFX.
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A free software download from Google.
Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized.
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This is an incredibly useful add-on for Windows XP. It adds an extra option to the sub-menu when you right click on any image where you can resize the image to anything you like. By default it will create another copy of the file so your original is safe.
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This utility displays the list of all applications that are loaded automatically when Windows starts up. For each application, the following information is displayed: Startup Type (Registry/Startup Folder), Command-Line String, Product Name, File Version, Company Name, Location in the Registry or file system, and more.
It allows you to easily disable or delete unwanted programs that runs in your Windows startup. You can use it on your currently running instance of Windows, as well as you can use it on external instance of Windows in another drive.
WhatInStartup also supports a special "Permanent Disabling" feature - If a program that you previously disabled added itself again to the startup list of Windows, WhatInStartup will automatically detect the change and disable it again.
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The JR Directory Printer Utility allows you to print a listing of every file contained within a directory and/or subdirectory(ies).
The result displayed in NotePad or default text editor as "dirprint.txt" file. This file is created in "JR Directory Printer" installtion folder, each time you click "Start" button.
This program runs without installing so you can either run it directly from this cd or copy the files in the 'JDirPrint' folder to your hard drive.
(probably better to copy the files to your hard drive as the program needs to update a settings file before you close it, and it can't do this to a cd so you have to 'end-task' the program to get out of it)
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Every hard disk is too small if you just wait long enough. TreeSize Free tells you where precious space has gone to. TreeSize Free can be started from the context menu of a folder or drive and shows you the size of this folder, including its subfolders. You can expand this folder in Explorer-like style and you will see the size of every subfolder. Scanning is done in a thread, so you can already see results while TreeSize Free is working. The space, which is wasted by the file system can be displayed and the results can be printed in a report. TreeSize Free is Mailware for Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP.
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Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.
You can use Audacity to:
Record live audio.
Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files.
Cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together.
Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
And more!
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Autostitch is the world's first fully automatic 2D image stitcher. Capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input whatsoever, Autostitch is a breakthrough technology for panoramic photography, VR and visualisation applications. This is the first solution to stitch any panorama completely automatically, whether 1D (horizontal) or 2D (horizontal and vertical).
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Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.
This program requires .net framework v2.0 be installed, this is an update to Windows XP available from Microsoft and I have included it here.
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iDailyDiary provides a simple interface that immediately gets you started taking daily notes, creating a journal, putting your thoughts into writing and much more.
The iDailyDiary editor is "richtext" with the ability to insert graphics, URL's, Hypertext links and links to other diary pages. iDailyDiary is fully searchable so you can always track down those important dates and reminders.
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FileZilla FTP Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive interface.
This free FTP solution. Both a client and a server are available. FileZilla is open source software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
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OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.
This software is a must have if you haven't already paid out mega bucks for one of those expensive Office Suites or if you are hanging on to an older version of something like MS Office.
To make this product's download file a reasonable size it does not include any clipart so after you get this installed pop on over to www.openclipart.org where you can download a whole load of, opensource, free to use clipart.
And if you're new to the whole Office Suite thing check out In Pictures that has some free tutorials. [Rickybee]
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Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded.
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SyncBack is our multi-award winning freeware program that helps you easily backup and synchronize your files. |
| USB Image Tool |
There are now USB Flashdrives everywhere, they've replaced floppies, zip disks and a ton of other portable media types. Very handy things, robust, large capacities and now very cheap. But they are not bullet proof, they can get corrupted, lose their data or, because they are so portable, easily get physically lost. So how do you back them up? Well you could just copy the files off every now and again but here's a more elegant solution. This utility will make an image of your drive very quickly and easily into a single file that can be restored to another device should yours fail. Check out the website for further info. |
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Do you own mp3 files ? How about ogg, mpc, ape, flac, aac, apl, wv, mp4, ofr, or spx files ? Do you have a lot of them ?
If yes, then you probably already know that it is easier to create a chaotic budge of files with strange names and in wrong locations than to have a clean and nice collection where every file is where it is supposed to be, with a perfect name and Tag information.
Sounds like the truth... don't worry The GodFather is here to put order to chaos and put you in control.No more strange file names and endless search for "that song"!.Rename,update Tags, restructure files on hard disk, create/merge play lists, encode-decode with LAME/Ogg Vorbis/MpcEnc, export/import to/from file, play, use freedb.org & allmusic.com, catalog them in a library... with ease of use and perfect results every time.
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TagScanner is a multifunction program for organizing and managing your music collection. It can edit tags of mostly state-of-the-art audio formats, rename files based on the tag information, generate tag information from filenames, and perform any transformations of the text from tags and filenames. Also you may get album info via online databases like freedb or Amazon. Supports ID3v1, ID3v2, Vorbis comments, APEv2, WindowsMedia and MP4(iTunes) tags. Powerful TAG editor with batch functions and special features. Playlist maker with ability to export playlists to HTML or Excel. Easy-to-use interface. Built-in player. |
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Customize your invoice templates from top to bottom, print your invoices quickly, and e-mail copies of them in PDF or JPEG. You will also be able to send any report by e-mail in HTML or to control your points of sale with this invoicing system, useful for individuals as well as for small companies. Volutive includes items, customers, vendors, invoices, delivery notes, quotes, purchase orders, and receipts. Both sales tax names and the way they are worked out can be customized for non-US users (special attention to Canadian taxes).
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Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction.
DBAN is a means of ensuring due diligence in computer recycling, a way of preventing identity theft if you want to sell a computer, and a good way to totally clean a Microsoft Windows installation of viruses and spyware. DBAN prevents or thoroughly hinders all known techniques of hard disk forensic analysis.
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