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The Big Useful List Of Free Useful Programs To Use Usually For Free

One note before all the free stuff, I learned something a few years ago. When it comes to antivirus and firewalls, the pay stuff will do what the free stuff comes short on, always.
Also antivirus =! firewall. Do yourself a favor and get some internet security suite. Yes the MS thing is good, but the pay stuff is still better. I'll take a couple seconds longer boot up for the sake of security any day of the week. Also eBay is your friend when trying to find the pay stuff for cheap (talking new here).

Now.......where do I start?

There are certain programs I don't like (Real Player, Acrobat, etc) but I don't like using a bunch of "alternatives" if I can do it with one program that just needs extensions or what have you.

K-Lite Mega and x64 (assign QT, Real, and Divx to WMP)

Foxit Reader (PDF)

DVD Videosoft does a lot but in a simple GUI. About to go pay though. (cd/dvd/media burner/ripper)

DVDFab Decryption/DVDFab so I can play and/or backup DVDs and Blu-rays on my system.

RipBot264 for converting formats. It is a x64 program and (according to the .ini) is 10% then the x86 version. Again a simple GUI. Only converts to .MP4, .MKV, AVCHD, and DivxPlus. Keeps things simple by default but also can be more in depth for those who like to tweak. I love this program and it works very, very well. Only caveat (for those who care) is you need AVisynth, ffdshow (x86 and x64) haali, and java. Fwiw ffdshow and haali are used by K-Lite so with that you have two of the four already.

Zeuapp some might find helpful.

Hiren's BoodCD the save my.....well you know... CD. Name it, it has it plus a boot from cd mini XP and Linx. Life saver a few times already for myself and other people I know.

WD Acronis edition for nice backup, recover, OS img creation, etc for those with WD drives.

7-zip

For benching and monitoring, I'm just going to list. Copy, Google it and shouldn't be too hard to find them.

ATI CF Xtensions, Blue Screenview, Core Temp or Real Temp, CPU Tweaker (for cpus with on chip memory controllers), CPUz, CrystalDisk, GPUz (of course :D), Hardware Info, HyperPI 0.99 (multi threaded SuperPI), MaxxPI, MemTest (in Windows), Open Hardware Monitor, wPrime, x264 Benchmark HD (v4.0 currently), and y-cruncher.

Sysinternals Suite (the only useful thing MS has made in a while)

edit: Oops almost forgot Google Sketchup. Yea it's Google and I don't like how they install their browser (installs like a virus) but its a free CAD like program that is fun to mess with without being overly complicated.
 
Ninite forall
 
iTunes
 
You may want to add testdisk by CGSecuirty to the recovery list.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
The free app has actually made me money when people have blown their bootsector on their USB flash drive and all it says is the drive is unformatted do you want to format it now?
As it scans for partitions which may not be visible due to bad boot sector and writes a new boot sector which has the original partitions in it.

It has been successful in recovering Vista OSes which could not be repaired by WRE.
Does some other interesting stuff too.
 
HWINFO32

I like this free program: It is a professional hardware information and diagnostic tool supporting latest components, industry technologies and standards. Designed to collect and present the maximum amount of information possible about computer's hardware which makes it suitable for users searching for driver updates, computer manufacturers, system integrators and technical experts as well. Retrieved information is presented in a logical and easily understandable form and can be exported into various types of reports.

Screenshots

Download
 
inSSIDer from metageek

Very nice Wi-Fi signal strength graphs; spot networks available and channel overlap. Open source.
 
@ hellrazor no problem I love Sumatra too. Gonna add new freeware soon.
 
Last edited:
nice stuff and Drone ... all your pics are dead
 
A lot of programs have been added since the latest post. :)
 
File (de)compression: Izarc http://izarc.org/
Once you have used this you don't want anything else. The amount of archive types being supported is massive! And I like the integration of some of the major features of the program into the right click menu of Explorer (so you can right click your .zip file/tarball and extract right away).

Audio editing: Audacity http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/

Bootable USB sticks: Unetbootin http://sourceforge.net/projects/unetbootin/
Use .iso files from bootable CDs/DVDs to create a bootable USB stick.

Disk Cloning: Clonezilla Live http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php
Linux based bootable cd used for making disk images, compatible with FAT, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, ReiserFS and if I am right also HFS+ and such. However the disks are being refered to in the Unix way, so no drive names like C:\. Available in the flavours regular and Alternative (the Alternative version uses Ubuntu as underlying OS instead of Debian, and comes with a later version of the Linux kernel), and for the artchitectures i486, i686 and AMD64 (which is of course X86_64, so it also works on all Intel CPUs from after Netburst). A comparison between the the different CPU architecture versions can be found here: http://drbl.org/faq/fine-print.php?...ive.faq#97_different_arch_clonezilla_live.faq.

Virtualisation:
Oracle VM Virtualbox http://www.virtualbox.org/
 
entropy13 said:
A lot of programs have been added since the latest post. :)
Click to expand...

here I got some more (all total freeware)

Disk Cleanup
Easy Cleaner
Program which searches the Windows registry for entries that are pointing nowhere and lets you delete all kinds of unnecessary files such as temps and backups.

System Information
SIV
General Windows utility for displaying lots of useful info

Media Players and Codecs
KMP
Excellent free multi-format media player

Security
Norman Malware Cleaner
Dr.Web CureIt


Miscellaneous -> File Managers
FAR Manager
Program for managing files and archives in Windows.

Q-Dir
Makes your files and folders easy to manage.



and just a remark: winamp, winzip and winrar ain't no freeware software.
 
Disk Cleanup

AppCleaner

Very nice tiny program. It erases all the unwanted crap. I like it more than ccleaner.


Hard Disk Scrubber

Free secure delete program designed to help you permanently destroy sensitive data from your PC. Use Hard Disk Scrubber to overwrite free space on your Windows drives, or to permanently delete files so that they can no longer be recovered.
Click to expand...

I've tried both methods (nuke and simple wipe). Both went really fast. This program is really good because it lets you choose its process priority.
 
System Stability Tester

Calculate up to 128 million digits of Pi.
Create up to 32 threads.
Recognize the CPU model, manufacturer and operational frequency.
Compare the calculation results of all the threads after each step and issue a warning if something went wrong.
Run continuously for up to 50 turns and log the results after each step and each turn.
Record the calculated digits of Pi in a human readable text file.
Single threaded calculation of Pi for benchmarking, similar to the well know SuperPi benchmark.
Click to expand...

http://systester.sourceforge.net/

Very awesome and concrete program.
 
Image Editor: Greenfish Icon Editor Pro

It's free, very capable (like GIMP) and can handle more than just icons. What's best is that it has full support of the ICO format so you can integrate many resolutions/quality into a single ICO file (Games Explorer, for example, requires this).
 
Whenever i need any kind of program i first check this page:
http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/freeware.html

So far i have got pretty much everything i've ever needed. All free and some tools are even slightly crippled versions of very expensive commercial products which still offer loads of functionality.
I'm using this page for years (even back when it was called WebAttack). It's nicely organized as well so you can really find stuff quickly. Only downside is that they sometimes need a bit of a time to update the programs and screenshots are sometimes a bit outdated. But other than that it's great.
 
Nice, but not as well balanced as our list. For example, he's got one backup utility (Bacula) but a dozen encryption utilities. Does that sound like someone who would rather see their data destroyed than be discovered? :laugh:
 
I have a contribution for a/v conversion: MediaCoder


And how about a Media server section?

PS3 Media Server is a transcoding media server that works with more than just the PS3. it is also cross platform, working on Windows, Linux or Mac.

Tversity is another one. It works better with other devices if you don't need advanced subtitle support.
 
twilyth said:
Nice, but not as well balanced as our list. For example, he's got one backup utility (Bacula) but a dozen encryption utilities. Does that sound like someone who would rather see their data destroyed than be discovered? :laugh:
Click to expand...

I am the one running the site. I update it while at work. I'm still trying to find a good theme for it. I thought about a theme that had Sauce on it Like a big splotch of sauce or something but I dont know anything about designing themes. I wanted something goofy that went with the name Awesome-Sauce. If anyone has something I can use for Google Sites Please post a link.
 
Check out the site. It has been updated and continues to be updated. Feel free to leave a comment on the home page. Suggest an application.
 
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