1Click DVD to AVI - is the most amazing, simple DVD recompression
solution I've used. Give it a dir on a disc or hard drive with VOBs
and an IFO to work from, pick a codec, framerate, resolution, aspect
ratio, and goal filesize-- and you have a result AVI in that size
with those settings at the max possible quality. It's such a time-saver
over guessing bitrates and praying it comes out
backup.
7Zip - Like winzip but better higher compression and can password protect files and filenames
Active Ports - port monitor
AVG Anti-Virus - Free Edition: Good, free anti-virus
software.
AM Deadlink - Runs through all your favorites and
checks if the url is still valid with the the option to delete if
not. Also downloads all the favicons - damn useful for a large collection
of favorites.
These guys also have some other pretty handy utils too
Amarok - LINUX - is an extremely cool music player
for KDE on Linux/Unix systems that's like Foobar with a ton of plugins
installed but without having to spend half a week customizing it.
It sports lyrics display, Audioscrobbler integration, album artwork
downloaded automatically from Amazon, smart playlists, direct burning
of playlists to CD, iPod (and eventually other media player) support,
alarm feature (start playing at a specified time), and a slew of
other neat features.
Angry IP Scanner - IP scanner for network admins
ATITool - will find your maximum gpu/mem clock speeds and has a 3d detection
feature that will allow you to clock your card down when you're on
the desktop and then ramp up the speeds when you load a game. Runs
nicely in your tray.
Autoruns - great way to remove annoying startup programs
Badcopy Pro - recovers files off corrupted floppies worked
for me full version cost $39
bbLean - Blackbox for Windows generation, windows shell
Beyond Compare - Compare two text files (or hex, pictures,
mp3s and stuff with plugins) side by side and lets you move changes
from one to the other. Think windiff but 10000 times better. Also
works on groups of files and directories, this makes it far more useful
then you might think.
BGInfo - Put this in startup and your system information is laid over your background. Great for server!!
Burnatonce - fast efficient ISO burner
CCleaner - cleaned something like 500 mb of crap off my hard drive
CD-DA Extractor - good audio ripper
Clickie - Adds "Copy Path Name" and "Open MS-DOS Prompt" to the right click
context menu.
ClockGen - I use these in combination to pick my CPU/Bus/RAM clocks and CPU voltage in realtime as I use Windows,
CoolMon - recently, and wrote a quick PHP script to grab the most 5 most recent
threads from SH/SC with links, updated every minute. I'm loving it.
Copernic Desktop Search - Like google desktop search but better
Centericq - multi instant messenger client supports ICQ2000, Yahoo!, AIM, IRC, MSN, Gadu-Gadu and Jabber protocols.
Citrus alarmclock - it loads with my winamp..so set winamp to repeat and your set..
Daily Alarm Clock - Awesome little app that is free,
wakes you up with a looping WAV of your choice, of slowly increasing
volume. So you can gradually wake up instead of waking up to a loud
shrieking sound and bash your speakers into submission. It also has
2 alarms so you can sleep in a bit.
DVD-Decrypter - for the times I need to just decrypt the disc-- but it's ALSO the best ISO Reader/Writer I have used. I can give it a disc and have an ISO in no time, then rewrite it. And often when Nero, Easy CD Creator, etc. don't find my drive-- DVD Decrypter does. Just used this for burning the Project Gutenberg DVD iso , sometimes the website is down you can get it at Betanews.
Entbloess - An alternative task switcher with a stupid name is
ELinks - text-based browser with support for HTML tables and frames, for the few 56ks left
eConsole - Allows me to pin a transparent console to the desktop. Every program running is always setup so I can always type directly to the console
to run some random program quickly. Most of the time, I just use start
to open a new console, but its nice having one pinned to the desktop.
FileZilla - good FTP client (thanks Joe!)
Firefox - Alternative to Internet Explorer Browser
Free CD-DA Extractor - is a free 2-app suite. A CD
ripper utility that encodes into any format that's common, e.g. WAV,
MP3, OGG, and (I think) AAC at any bitrate, CBR or VBR. The second
tool converts between any of those formats TO any of those formats
at your bitrate of choice. It even does batch conversion, is fast
and efficient as hell. Godsend.
Foobar - Because I don't actually look at my playlist very often, and it with
Girder - and my IR remote work great together.
ieSpell - ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell
checks text input boxes on a webpage. It should come in particularly
handy for users who do a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails,
forums, blogs, diaries). Even if your web application already includes
spell checking functionality, you might still want to install this
utility because it is definitely much faster than a server-side solution.
Plus you get to store and use your personal word list across all your
applications, instead of maintaining separate ones on each application.
Instant File Finder - Search on steriods. Ava Find speeds
up your daily computing experience by letting you find any file on
your computer instantly
IRMan - a while ago, and just used random remote controls from friend's
old VCRs that no longer work. I'm still even using their old batteries
in some of the remote controls, though the one I use the most, I have
to smack it every so often, otherwise it sends corrupted IR signals.
Konfabulator - I only use this just to see the current phase of the moon.
Lftp - solid ftp client
Logon Loader - is a program that changes your Windows
logon screen. I haven't noticed it (the program, not the logon screen)
since I installed it.
Mozilla Sunbird - Basically a barebones scheduler. Been
looking for one for a while.
MultiRes - A very small app (61k) that sits in your systray, that you can right-click
on and choose a screen resolution. Very handy when designing webpages
and needing a fast way to see if your website still looks decent at
a lower resolution.
Mutt - Linux - email client
MS XP PowerToys - that does pretty much the same
thing, although it seems a bit buggy. I might try out yours sometime,
perhaps I'll like it better.
MS GIF Animator - Old school win95 freeware to turn avi
into animated gifs still works with Windows XP.
Notepad++ - Better than the standard notepad, with
color coding and loads faster.
NetMeter - Best interface for seeing current input/output speeds of your network. It records other stuff, but my router keeps a better history for internet records.
Password Safe - My life is in here, I run it off a USb drive, and it is passworded and encrypted.
Picasa2 - but in case someone does not, it's pretty damn nice. Image viewer
of sorts, though it's more about browsing your collection than viewing
single images; it doesn't even steal file associations.
Putty - secure ssh client I use to connect to apache webservers
Quickpar - Create and reassemble Par volumes - What is par you say? Think of
it as RAID 5 for files. Usually used for transmission over usenet.
Random Desktop - Runs in the tray, switches your desktop
image from a list / directory randomly or sequentially every specified
amount of minutes.
Rainlendar - Nice little desktop calendar app. Because nothing else yet does a small calendar nicely.
Rainmeter - Developed by the same person who made Rainlender (see above). It's a computer hardware information tool, and can fetch information from
some sites, too. It can display: Memory usage, Temperatures, CPU usage,
storage, upstream and downstream bandwidth usage, temperatures, and
it has a clock. There are also tons of skins for it... here's how
mine looks:
Roboform - IE pluging password manager
SIMPLE OCR - Free Optical Character Recognition, it works
but not as good as the one that comes with Office 2003
Stumbleupon - browser plug to find and rate intresting sites
Shelltoys XP - adds a bunch more options when you right click,
time saver
Spyware Doctor - currently beating , Spybot, Ad Aware Pro,
and MS Spyware Beta.
StrokeIt - Very customizable
mouse gestures for every where
SyncBack - is a feature-rich file synchronization program. I use it to sync my
MP3 player with a mirror of its contents on my drive, so I can make
changes quickly and still use it as a mass storage device.
Sharpkeys - To remapping any key to any other key.
SpeedFan - and to monitor my CPU usage and component temperatures. Awesome shit.
Screen - Linux - full-screen window manager
StartupCPL - pretty simple, lets you edit what programs start up with windows.
Slrn - cool newsreader
TestDisk - I used version 5.6 and is saved my ass!! recovered a corupt partition for me.
Trillian - Multiple IM network and IRC prog now hit version 3.1 and has a free
version.
TweakUI for XP - Part of XPPowerToys, gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse
settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more.
ThePhoneBOT - A nice CallerID program. I run the shareware, because my shitty modem's
voice sucks ass so I don't need the answering machine mode at all. Its
kickass hearing your computer tell you who is calling, plus other nice
lookup features. Can customize the pop-up display and what their names
said when they call (ie: change "Jan Smith" to "Yo Momma").
TrueLaunchBar - It might take a bit to setup and get the plug-ins running, but it's
worth it. I never go to my start menu anymore. In a glance I can check
my HD space, uptime, netspeed, and open any program without clicking.
TCPview - Like netstat with GUI, plus it shows what process is assosiated with any given connection.
URLSnooper - helps find urls in streaming media and other websites that
hide urls
Vim - Linux - advanced text editor that seeks to provides the power
of 'Vi', with a more features.
WebMon- WebMon is a tool that lets you check a website (or
a portion of a website) for updates and notify you when the
site has changed.
Winkey - for making shortcut keys using pretty much all the keys
on your board including the window key (duh), ctrl, and shift.
I like this because it's a small download, and is small on
system resources. It resides in the tray but you can make
it invisible by right clicking the icon in the tray and clicking
"remove icon" so that nobody knows its running other than
it is in the task manager > processes.
Windows Alt-Tab Replacement - TaskSwitchXP provides
the same functionality as the existing application switching
mechanism in Windows XP today. In addition to displaying an
icon list, however, the application will also show a thumbnail
preview of the window that will be switched to.
WINSCP - Secure SSH client good for connecting to apache websites,
has explorer view for draganddrop file moves.
WinDirStat - Visually see what is taking up all your
space
WinISO - great iso creator editor
Windows Media Encoder - makes a varitey of video
formats smaller and has the ability to record you desktop
Y'z Dock - It's awesome. It's basically the
Apple toolbar but on Windows. Very cool.
Xplorer2 - A full-featured file manager which is hundreds of times
better than Windows Explorer. It has dual panes for easy copying,
does synchronization, among other things. The "lite"
version which is free for home and academic use and still
has most of the features of the full one (look in the questions
area of this page for a link to the free version).
PALUN!!
