Useful freeware apps for Windows

[snk`]

I'm qouting this from a different forum I go to, which I found very useful and might help you folks as well.

what the title says. share if you know any good ones. must be freeware, and not ad-based, donation-ware, shareware, etc.


CCleaner
http://www.ccleaner.com
Best cleaner ever. Very thorough and can clean at least 2 GB if you have never cleaned your computer for a year or something.


Defraggler
http://www.piriform.com/defraggler
I was fine with WinXP's defrag tool. But then MS decided to further dumb down the defrag tool by completely removing any visual of the file structure, giving me no information on the structure or the progress. This app is MUCH faster and defragments your HDD even better. Best used after using CCleaner.


Speccy
http://www.piriform.com/speccy
I got fed up being answered "I don't know" when I ask someone about his "gaming" PC/laptop's specs. This app quickly shows all the information of your computer in a "user friendly" way, without losing any important details. It might be a little unstable though, since it's just recently out, and it's in its beta phase. Worked fine for me though.


Speedfan
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php
A handy tool that shows you fan speeds and temperatures of various parts in your computer. Might not be useful to most, but it can let you know if your computer is getting hot.


Paint.net
http://www.getpaint.net
Best freeware tool for image editing. There's also GIMP, but I prefer paint.net over that for being easier to use.


7-zip
http://www.7-zip.org
Yes, everyone uses Winrar, but doesn't that "your 30-day evaluation period is over" a bit annoying? I prefer this over RAR for not being annoying and for being able to compress files more than RAR (usually).


OpenOffice
http://www.openoffice.org/
A full office suite for free. Does its job pretty well, and can open and save as MSoffice's formats.


SongBird
http://getsongbird.com
An open source alternative to iTunes. It can sync with iPods and many other non-apple media players. No access to iTunes store (surprise!). Has integrated web browser, based on Firefox.


VLC Media Player
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Everyone's favorite media player. Mentioned it purely for its popularity, as I have never really used it.


Media Player Classic Home Cinema
http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/
The media player I use. Simple and easy to use, with many advanced features. I prefer installing it through the Combined Community Codec Pack project because it installs everything needed to play any video format.

Credits go to the author: khalood

I have been using PAINT.NET, OpenOffice and CCleaner.

PAINT.NET really helped me a lot with cropping images, changing image resolutions mostly. I never really bothered using it for other purposes, but sure helped save a lot of time for its simplicity and faster loading times than Photoshop.

I've got rid of almost 1GB of waste using CCleaner.

I would also like to add uTorrent to the list
http://www.utorrent.com/
Probably the lightest software used for downloading torrents, no annoying ads whatsoever. I'm still satisfied.

If you guys know more good apps, feel free to share (ones without annoying ads ofcourse).

 

[Lagduf]

Have been using Open Office since 2002.

Great suite of programs.

 

[CrackerMessiah]

Just a note on OpenOffice.org:

The load times, while having been reduced from 2.0 to 3.0, are still quite long and burdensome. There's been a different version from some other guys who have removed what they call "bloat." I while I can't find an exact list or definition of what they call "bloat," I have come to like their version a lot, as the load times have been chopped in half. You'll find it here:

http://go-oo.org/

I'm also a fan of Defraggler, which is from the same people as CCleaner. Oh- and SumatraPDF and FoxIt are great, light-weight alternatives for opening PDFs. Now if only there were some kind of alternative application to load flash stuff...

 

[rarehero]

I love foxit reader, in school some of the guys would have
some of the books on pdf, and acrobat would almost self destruct
from all the memory it would take up.
Foxit reader though? totally works like a champ.

 

[DanAdamKOF]

I don't even think I'll put my legit full version of winrar on my computers at all when I install windows 7 because 7-zip is just that awesome. Been using it for a while and I love it.

64-bit number crunching for compression/deflation operations OMG Both of my computers are running 32-bit OSes.

I also use OO a lot and I might look into that slim version, cracker.

I can probably rattle off a whole ton of freeware programs I use for windows, I might come back to this thread later.

edit: I'm bored so here's some quick ones.

VisualWGet: graphical download manager that's a port of Linux's wget, great for recursive downloads, downloads on a crappy connection, etc.
Notepad++: nice simple text editor, mostly good for programming
JDownloader: OMG this is the best shit ever. Know how you'll get your (legally obtained goods) sometimes from a site with like 300 megaupload links? You can feed them through jdownloader with a simple copy/paste and it will download all of them for you in a row with NO intervention (not even typing a captcha). You can even limit your download rate so you don't hog all the bandwidth, and set schedules (download a lot of stuff while you're at work), tell it to shut down after, etc. ITS AWESOME.
Synergy+: lets you use one keyboard and mouse to control multiple computers over a network connection. For example my desktop and laptop are both on my desk, and I just move my mouse to the right side of my desktop and I'm now controlling my laptop, until I move it back. You can copy/paste between both computers too.
Magical Jellybean Keyfinder: It has the stupidest name ever but it lets you get license keys from computers. Go ahead and steal your public library's XP VLK!
Irfanview: Awesome image viewer and powerful batch image editor. All in one. It kicks ass.
Digsby: Multiple IM accounts with minimal hassle, with really nice e-mail and facebook and myspace integration. Lots of tweaking is possible. I like it more than Pidgin.
Miniaim: AIM client that's like 25kb total. Seriously! Keep it on your flash drive, just in case.
MadMACs: Ever want to leech your neighbor's wifi but are paranoid of being caught? Use this to spoof a random MAC and network ID, you'll be untraceable.
IMGBurn: Powerful disc image burner/ripper/etc.
CDBurnerXP: Nero/Roxio-ish disc burner, a bit more newbie than IMGburn.
lcISOcreator: no-nonsense ISO ripper. Only like 15kb. Put in your disc, run the program, you're done after it spins down.


And I'm not gonna flood this with games, but Cave Story is probably the best freeware game of all time. Give it a play. Metroidvania-ish game with old-school 16-bit-ish graphics and sound. Has a neat story and cool characters to boot.

 

[Praise the Lard]

Honestly I can't think of much that hasn't been mentioned already. I'll echo OpenOffice and ImgBurn as must haves though. Do things like Virtual PC and DosBox count? I consider them pretty crucial for playing my old DOS/Windows based games.

mIRC - I've used this IRC client for something like 14 years. I've tried others but just always went back. Amazingly it's still actively supported by the original creator.
WinAmp - You're some kind of raging n00b if this isn't your MP3 player on a Windows machine.

 

[Pink Spider]

TagScanner
I use this so much and love it!
Ever download some music with no ID tags? I fucking hate that "Unknown Artist" and "Track 04" bullshit! All my music is super duper organized, and alot of that is thanks to tagscanner!
Download a CD with no tags on the mp3 files? Open it in tagscanner and you can search the internet for the proper tags just as if you were ripping the cd yourself!
Dont like the file name format? Or files not named at all? Rename them to the format of your choice with one click! (Example: Track number - Artist name - Song name.mp3)

 

[snk`]

Interesting apps there guys, I'm so gonna bookmark this.

 

[-Hibikster-]

Add a couple more:

FileZilla - Great opensource FTP program that has everything.

Format Factory - Look it up...it will literally convert any media file into anything you want.

Windows Live Mail - I have all my e-mails consolidated in one really easy-to-follow list in this program with literally no clutter. It does exactly what I want it to do.

 

[Metal Slugnuts]

I can attest to the VLC media player...it handles every filetype under the sun and loads super quick.

For malware stuff, MalwareBytes and SUPERAntiSpyware Remover work great.

 

[payment_due]

checked out songbird... no thanks. SharePod is way better, runs directly from the iPod and you don't have to authorize computers. You can take your pod to any computer and copy music to the ipod or from the ipod to that computer.

 

[KagerouSama]

I was a fan of foxit until it continuously kept trying to install trial versions of other programs that I didn't want--Wouldn't you know? Always when I didn't have time to fool with the program and needed to read a document.

kernow had recommended a program called PDF-XChange.
I like PDF-XChange a lot better for Windows machines.

I jumped to using Yahoo! Zimbra desktop sometime during the past year.
It's wonderful in that it supported just about any free email you could throw at it without extra configuration. It supports free Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail (yeah, I know that's supported in Windows Live Mail), GMail as IMAP and whatever IMAP or POP account you may have.

Zimbra is a configuration time saver, but there are parts I don't like.
It doesn't synchronize with online-side address lists yet.
It also has an Ajax interface that likes to take focus on the desktop. So, if I open it and go to type, it'll reach a new stage of loading and steal focus again.

Instead of Winamp, I've jumped to using Foobar2000 Maybe it's just become a change of preference. I used to really like winamp. But, having used Gnome for so long now, I like a rhythmbox style interface better.

Windows Live Essentials is a free-for-windows-users suite that's more than decent.

I stopped recommending AVG for Avast! antivirus. Eh..

irfanview is a nice, little image viewer. The could be better out there now. When I was running XP, it was far better than Windows picture and Fax viewer.

I shy'd away from Defraggler when it ate data off of a removable thumb drive. It could be an isolated event. But, it effected my trust of it.

...and there's where I draw a blank. There's probably other stuff I could recommend. I just can't think of any.

EDIT:
Thought of one. Xchat2 for Windows. It's a fork of XChat. But, it's a free fork. To heck with seeing that nagware register page when starting mIRC.