Best BrowserFirefox hands down is my favorite browser, being safer than IE and highly customizable. Automatic updates, faster browsing, better pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, an integrated search bar, and live bookmarks are just some features of this browser. Another popular browser is Opera which includes many of the same features as Firefox.
FireFoxOperaBest BitTorrent ClientAzureus is a java bittorrent client offering multiple torrent downloads, queuing/priority systems (on torrents and files), start/stop seeding options and instant access to numerous pieces of information about your torrents. Azureus now features an embedded tracker easily set up and ready to use. uTorrent is a lightweight (Very) and efficient BitTorrent client that includes bandwidth prioritization, scheduling, RSS auto-downloading and Mainline DHT.
AzureusuTorrentBest Multi Platform File Transfer UtilityShareaza is a great program that connect to 4 P2P networks, EDonkey2000, Gnutella, BitTorrent and Gnutella2 (G2).
ShareazaBest IP Blacklist/Blocker
Was going to put this under Security, but it's a MUST for anyone using P2P. PeerGaurdian integrates support for multiple lists, list editing, automatic updates, and blocking all of IPv4, TCP, UDP, ICMP, etc, making it the safest and easiest way to protect your privacy on P2P<. Lite version is made to consume as little CPU and RAM as possible. It has no UI or options and consists of a single tray icon.
PeerGaurdianPeerGuardian LiteBest FTP ClientTwo amazing FTP clients that each include a great deal of features are FileZilla and SmartFTP
FileZillaSmartFTPBest Chat ProgramTwo that stand out are Gaim and Trillian, both are multi-platform. Gaim is compatible with AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise Messenger, and Zephyr networks. While Trillain is a skinnable chat client that supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC. Trillain also includes many features not included in those chat programs.
GaimTrillianBest AIM Virus RemoverAIM Fix was created to remove all known AIM viruses in one consolidated removal tool.
AIM FixBest Phone/Talking SoftwareThese programs allow you to call people for free and talk with them, all you need are headphones and a microphone. Skype adds encryption and has excellent sound quality, an addon, SAM, adds voicemail functionallity. An alternative to Skype is the Gizmo Project.
SkypeSAMGizmo ProjectBest Download ManagerThere are many, but the ones that work great are FlashGet, GetRight, and Free Download Manager. All split up files and increase the download by 100-600%, they can also resume broken downloads.
FlashGetGetRightFree Download ManagerBest Gmail File transferThere are a couple programs that use that Gmail space of yours to upload your files and make backups of them.
Gmail DriveBest Email ClientAnother from Mozilla, Thunderbird, is a full-featured email client, that includes a spam filter, anti-phishing protection, enchanced security, and auto updates.
ThunderbirdBest Blogging Posterw.bloggar is a great blogging tool that includes a template and post editor that works with many blogging sites, including Blogger. Unlike other blogging tools, this ione doesn't require you to have your blog on an ftp site, but can log in and post.
w.bloggarBest IRC ClientOther than the popular mIRC some outstanding IRC clients are IceChat and HydraIRC.
HydraIRCIceChatBest IRC Add-onNoNameScript is an amazing addon that's definitely worth installing over normal mIRC.
NoNameScriptBest Anti-SpywareA few stand out, mainly Spybot, Ad-Aware, Windows Defender, and Spyware Blaster. The first three are scanners each with their own special tools including realtime scanning, encrypted file deletion, and history erasor. Spyware Gaurd is more of a realtime scanner (Like Anti-Virus) of spyware while you're downloading. Spyware Blaster is different in not being a scanner, but prevents spyware from installing on your computer in the first place (Spybot includes a robust version of this). All four programs are recommended since each is not 100% efficient.
SpybotAd-Aware SE Personal Windows DefenderSpywareGuardSpyware BlasterBest Anti-VirusA few come to mind, but my favorite is AVG from Grisoft, which includes updates, real time scanner, and an email scanner. Another good one is AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic which includes many of the same features. Do keep in mind that free anti virus clients are not up to par with paid ones according to testings.
AVGAntiVir PersonalEdition ClassicBest FirewallMy favorite by far is ZoneAlarm which is simple for begginers and contains a barrage of features for more advanced users. Another option is Sygate Personal Firewall includes all the same functions for the same price.
ZoneAlarm FreeSygate Personal FirewallBest Anti-MalwareEwido really helps stop hijackers, spyware, worms, dialers, trojans, and keyloggers. It includes a great scanner and realtime scanner. Some features are disabled in the free version, including the realtime scanner, auto updates, self-protection, and memory scanning, but all these are included in the 15 day trial which can be reinstalled.
EwdioBest Diagnostic ToolUltimate Boot CD is an amazing bootable CD to restore a crashed computer and can fix it.
Ultimate Boot CDBest Disk CleanerI couldn't believe my eyes after I ran CCleaner, it removed around 1.5 Gigs in unused application data and internet cach (Which I thought I removed through the disk cleaner). This truly amazing utility cleans out your computer safely and even scans and removes obselete registry data, speeding up your system. You might want to turn off cookie deletion if you save your passwords on forums and such.
CCleanerBest File DeleterEraser is an advanced security tool (for Windows), which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns.
EraserBest File EncrypterThree stand out, GNU Privacy Gaurd, TrueCrypt, and Blowfish Advanced CS. GNU is a full replacement of PGP that is totally command line based, and not for beginnners. On the other hand, Blowfish Advanced CS offers multiple algorithms, efficient data compression, and safe key handling for content protection. TrueCrypt can create virtual encrypted disks, can encrypt an entire hard disk partition or a device, such as USB flash drive, and provides two levels of plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password.
Blowfish Advanced CSTrueCryptGNU Privacy GaurdGuide to GNU Privacy GaurdBest Md5 Checksum Creator/CheckerThis open source utility is used to calculate the MD5 checksum of a file using L. Peter Deutsch's MD5 code. One of the most common uses is to make sure that a file that you have downloaded is not corrupt. Some websites post the MD5 checksum of a file on their download page. Once you have downloaded the file, use winMd5Sum to get the MD5 checksum of the file on your computer. Then make sure that the MD5 checksum from the web site is the same. If they are the same, then your file is exactly the same as the file on the website.
winMD5SumBest File UnlockerUnlocker is an Windows Explorer extension allowing you with a simple right-click on a file or folder to get rid of error message such as error deleting file or folder, cannot delete folder: it's being used by another person or program.
UnlockerBest Image EditorA few stand out, mainly The GIMP and Paint.NET. GIMP is more like Photoshop and there is a seperate version that renames GIMP tools to the ones in Photoshop. Piant.NET replaces the simple MS Paint program and adds tons of features and includes many of the things Photoshop has.
The GIMPGIMP ShopPaint.NETBest Vectar Image EditorInkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
INKSCAPEBest Image Viewer/EditorIrfanView supports
many formats of images and includes some plugins that allow it to view many other formats such as videos, flash, and some audio formats. Picasa, on the other hand, differs in being able to edit photos and searches your computer for photos. Another good one is FastStone Image Viewer which is a fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor.
IrfanView>IrfanView Plugin/AddonsPicasaFastStone Image ViewerBest Digital Album CreatorInAlbum Lite is an easy you can use program to turn your digital photos into a great photo album slideshow. InAlbum Lite helps you turn your digital photos into stunning photo albums.
InAlbum LiteBest 3-D Modelling/Animation/RenderingForeget Maya, Blender is the open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback.
BlenderBest Color CapturerColor Schemer ColorPix is a useful little color picker that grabs the pixel under your mouse and transforms it into a number of different color formats. You can use the built-in magnifier to zoom in on your screen, click on a color value to copy it directly to the clipboard, and even keep ColorPix on top of all other apps and out of the way. Also, it doesn't require installation and is a tiny program.
Color Schemer ColorPixBest Virtual DriveIf you ever wanted to run that .iso or any other CD image without having the CD or DVD in the drive just use DAEMON Tools. Do not install the adware toolbar!
DAEMON ToolsBest DVD DescramblerWell the name says it all, DVD Decrypter allows you to copy DVDs to your hard drive and re-encode them to MPEG1 (VCD) or DivX. DVD Decrypter can also write most types of CD / DVD images via its 'ISO Write' mode.
DVD DecryptorBest DVD CompressorratDVD takes a full featured DVD-9 movie and puts it into a highly compressed .ratDVD container format file of about 1.x GB in size - while preserving
all the features of the original DVD.
Best CD/DVD BurnerCDBurnerXP Pro and DeepBurner are two fully featured DVD and CD burners and can create .iso's from them. Both are amazingly fast and meet all your needs.
CDBurnerXP ProDeepBurnerBest MPEG to DVD ConverterGot those mpegs from your digital video camera, off the web, etc. but always wanted to convert them into DVD's? Well DVDBuilder does exactly that, efficiently and painlessly for free.
DVDBuilderBest Video Player/Codec PackBasically, the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack will play every video file on this planet.
K-Lite Mega Codec Pack K-Lite Codec Pack Full (Less features)
Best Audio PlayerWinamp and foobar2000 comes out on top as the best audio players. ml_ipod is a plugin that uses Winamp to support your iPod. Winamp DSP Enhancer increases the quality and depth of your bass and treble, but not just making them louder but by filtering out any distortions and other bad stuff. foobar 2000 s an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats. Not to mention it's tiny size.
Winampml_ipodDSP Enchancerfoobar2000Best Audio Editor/RipperAudacity is a free and gull featured audio editor and recorder. As for grabbing audio from CDs , Exact Audio Copy is the solution, although it's not for beginners.
AudacityExact Audio CopyBest Audio ConverterOften called the Swiss army knife of audio, dBpowerAMP is able to convert your audio files to convert between audio formats whilst preserving ID Tags.
dBpowerAMP Music ConverterBest XviD/DivX ConverterAutoGK is an amazing program that converts Xvid and DivX formats of video to many others, at the same time compressing them and it includes many other features.
AutoGKBest Movie Cover SearcherHave those "back up" DVDs but no covers? Well, no fear, iCover searches its 6 databases and the internet for over 13,000 movie covers that you can download for free.
iCoveriCover Site (French)Best iPod UtilityForget iTunes, YamiPod gives you full control of your iPod and offers many other features to you.
YamiPodBest Hard Drive AnalyserJDiskReport is an amazing program that provides many different graphs and information on what's stored on your computer.
JDiskReportBest Software CollectionTheOpenCD includes many freeware programs and open source programs that are essential to anyone.
TheOpenCDBest HTML EditorBased off the firefox source, NVU, made by Linspire is a great HTML editor that is amazing for its price, much unlike the expensive Dreamweaver and Frontpage.
NVUNVU FeaturesBest CSS Menu DesignerCSS Menu Designer is a good tool to automatically create beautiful CSS menus that you can customize to your every whim.
Best CSS Menu DesignerCompression ToolAlthough there's many, a few stand out, mainly 7-Zip and IZArc. 7-Zip supports: 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB. IZArc supports many files including: 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. Both also include many other features.
IZArc7-ZipBest Benchmarking ToolEVEREST Home Edition is a freeware hardware diagnostics and memory benchmarking solution for home PC users. It offers the world's most accurate hardware information and diagnostics capabilities, including online features, memory benchmarks, hardware monitoring, and low-level hardware information. Sadly, this free version has been discontinued, since they want to make some money on their corporate version (Which is understandable).
EVEREST Home EditionBest Office SuiteThe best one out there is OpenOffice.org. It includes many of the same features as MS Office and more.
OpenOffice.orgBest Word ProcesserAbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft Word and is rapidly becoming a state of the art Word Processor. It has lots of features useful for your daily work, personal needs, or for just some good old typing fun.
AbiWordBest Process ViewerProcess Explorer is a incredible program that shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded.
Process ExplorerBest Multi-Coding ToolFor those computer programmers, PHP Designer 2005 and Notepad++ are great programs that include syntax highlighting and syntax folding. PHP Designer supports: PHP, HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, Perl, JavaScript, VB, C#, Java & SQL. Notepad++ supports C, C++, Java, C#, XML, HTML, PHP, Javascript, RC resource file, makefile, ASCII art file (extension .nfo), doxygen, ini file, batch file, ASP, VB/VBS source files, SQL, Objective-C, CSS, Pascal, Perl, Python, Lua, TCL, Assembler, Ruby, Lisp, Scheme, Properties, Diff, Smalltalk, Postscript and VHDL. And that's the tip of the iceberg for both programs, they contain tons of features.
Notepad++PHP Designer 2005Other good ones (That also work with AutoIt scripting):
PSPadBest AutoIt EditorThis custom made version of SciTE has syntax highlighting and syntax folding, autocompleting, and intellisense.
SciTEBest .pdf ReaderFoxit Reader is small (the download is less than 1MB), so it downloads quickly. It doesn't need any installation, so you can start to run it as soon as you've downloaded it.
Foxit ReaderBest LinuxUbuntu and Kubuntu are two of best and most well known linux distros out there and include a barrage of programs. Another good one is Damn Small Linux, which is 50mb and can run off your USB flash drive.
UbuntuKubunuDamn Small LinuxBest Mouse Movement CapturerWink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, mouse movements, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.
WinkBest Windows CD CreatorAutoStreamer works as a totally automated slipstreamer. Basically, all it really needs is a source that being an original Windows CD or a local share and a Service Pack file. Using this you can create another Windows CD that includes the newest service pack and all the hotfixes.
AutoStreamerBest DockbarObjectDock is the main program for this and can be highly customized. Another, Y'z Dock, has similar functions but was discontinued as a result of Apple's intervention.
ObjectDockY'z DockBest Widget EngineYahoo! Widget Engine is your solution to Windows widgets, it's highly customizable and there's thousands of available widgets.
Yahoo! Widget EngineBest WallpapersEarthView replaces your background with realtime photos of Earth. Another great on is Holding Pattern, Holding Pattern turns your idle computer screen into an airplane window, complete with a moving aerial view. Each time the screensaver plays a unique sequence. Hint: The plane does have a destination.
EarthViewHolding PatternBest Desktop SearcherThere are many, but my favorite is Google Desktop Search, with a plethora of features. Such as searching (Duh?), news, maps, notepad, gmail notifier, and many other features.
Google Desktop SearchBest Earth ViwerObviously Google Earth makes it, but NASA's World Wind is another program worth a look at.
Google EarthWorld WindBest Bootskin ChangerThis tiny and free program allows you to easily change boot skins that you download from various theme customizing sites.
BootSkin
