I'm making a spreadsheet of handy freeware tool and apps. I've noticed that I'm always coming across nifty free programs, but when I actually need them I've forgotten their names, and all Google will give me are spyware ridden shareware crap fests. I've gleaned these programs from a number of freeware/open source threads around various tech sites, and picked my favorites. I've used many of them, but not all.

I'd still like a decent free VMware, but I'm open to any other suggestions. In the add-on tab I'm eventually going to put links to other sheets where I do the same thing for extensions and themes.

Here's the list. The spreadsheet has descriptions and hotlinks.


Spreadsheet Link

Hijackthis
Spybot S&D
Picasa
Audacity
CCCP
foobar2000
Got All Media
LMMS
PC Win Speaker
Super
VLC
Winamp
Zoom Player
ATI Drivers
Nvidia Drivers
X-Fi Drivers
Abi-Word
Active Pixels
Alarm Clock of Justice
CutePDF
DeepBurner
Digsby
FreeVimager
Google Earth
InfraRecorder
Open Office Org
PDFSam
squash
The GIMP
Launchy
Menu Inventor
Rainlender
Vista Glazz
ATI Tool
Blackbox
Prime95
7-Zip
ATI Tray Tools
Autoruns
Cdex
CPU-Z
Disk Digger
Display Fusion
GPU-Z
HWMoniter
Iso Recorder
JK Defrag
Process Explorer
Raid2Raid
Reflect
Samurize
Snow Bird 7
Sumo
Advanced Remote Info
Chrome
Drop Box
Firefox
Hamanchi
inSSIder
Mikago
NetWorx
Opera

I once made a thread trying to collect useful programs from Massassians, but no one liked that idea.

Nexuiz
OpenArena
Warsow

power defrag!

Defraggler

Well, this list is mostly for me, but if you or anyone else want to benefit from it, all the better. I think it's a good idea to keep a catalog of programs you use, just to save time trying to remember all of them when you format.


I'd like to hear what Jon'C says about 3rd party defrag programs. Doesn't Vista defrag in the background anyway?

Media Player Classic & K-Lite Codec Pack

The Foxit PDF reader is much speedier to load than Adobe Acrobat, so I use that. I suggest getting a 1.x version.

As far as IRC, I like Xchat2, seems to work fairly well.

Pidgin for an IM client, but I don't use it all that much anyway.

I still use Irfan View for images and the like, it does what I need it to do.

Since I have a tablet, I use "Stroke it" to program in a bunch of gestures; it's really handy but it hasn't been updated in ages.

On a smaller point, I use QTlite and "Real alternative" for quicktime and realplayer, respectively.

Guess that is about it.

Mac OSX Leopard:
- Adium (instant messenger that doesn't suck and isn't covered in ugly UI)
- Colloquy (chat)
- CoRD (windows remote desktop client)
- Cyberduck (ftp client)
- Doukutsu (Cave Story, Mac version, awesome freeware game)
- Dropbox (simple online dropbox with windows and linux clients too)
- Flip4Mac (lets quicktime play wmv)
- MacHacha (joins files of the .001 .002 variety)
- Sequel Pro (mySQL client that doesn't suck)
- LineIn (lets you hack input sources into your main sound card, i.e lets me listen to the output from my Xbox 360 and Toneport through my Mac)
- Transmission (torrent app)
- UnRarX (unrars stuff)
- ZSNES (snes emulator)

XAMPP (Comes with Apache web server, Mercury/32 mail server, Filezilla ftp server, and MySQL...all rolled into one neat package with a simple management interface.)
Crossloop (simple desktop assistance tool)
LogMeIn (great for logging into your computer at home from work or school)
Blender 3D (awesome 3D modeling program)
Malwarebytes (better than spybot, IMHO)
AVG (decent virus protection software)
Untangle (nice anti-spam server, especially against self spam. comes with basic virus protection, policy enforcer, and intruder protection)

Included in CCCP.

Blender and Irfanview should definitely be on there.