.
Thank you guys for a number of great recommends!
I suggest
http://www.majorgeeks.com/ as a reputable community where you can find lots of freewares & sharesies; good idea to visit their forum, too. I browse through regularly and use summaries as launch points to investigate what seems good. Always go to the homepage of the author ... you'll discover quickly if you want to play with their stuff or not.
This following list I'm contributing is
tailored for Windows XP, esp. pro; I also used (nearly) everything here on Win 2000 for years. I expect most probably work on Vista & Win7, but I can't vouch for 'em at this time.
First, a shout-out to these as critically important, already-mentioned in this topic:
7-Zip (my preferred), IZarc, AutoRuns, CCleaner, Foxit Reader,
IrfanView (Spread the Gospal! This cannot be beat; incredibly powerful), Open Office, Notepad++, Foobar2000, Avast, Trend Micro (using this now, good for basics), AVG Free, Handbrake, putty, RealVNC,
+
1 to every one of these. Don't install without them.
Monkey Audio - I don't particularly like, but the website is a good source to find plugins to play their formats and to convert out of it. As far as my universe is concerned, there is *.flac, with 320 kps *.mp3 as an alternate when space is a premium and quality isn't. No room for proprietary stuff like *.ape.
Filezilla I personally haven't liked much. But, it certainly works, so personal preferences issue, I guess. SEE: WinSCP below.
VLC has generally let me down; I fire it up when Media Player Classic - HC doesn't get the job done. Sometimes it picks up the ball.
YouMail looks pretty interesting ... I'm curious to see how well/if it can be integrated with Google Voice.
Some stuff I didn't see here, everything is freeware:These two perform a fair to serious anal probe of your system and spit out reports chock full of Really Useful Details:
•
Belarc Advisor -
http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html •
SIV System Information Viewer -
http://rh-software.com/ [
Hint: use the -keys switch to find all of your software keys, in case you misplaced them.
Also: this can perform a frightening array of investigations into your local network,
and any machine on it that doesn't lock you out. ]
•
WinSCP -
http://winscp.net/eng/download.phpThis is a highly secure and powerful FTP client, +more. Also does secure shell, integrates with PuTTY, lots of features, runs light, mean & efficient. SECURE. We like that.
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SequoiaView -
http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/redirects to:
http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview/"SequoiaView uses a visualization technique called cushion treemaps to provide you with a single picture of the entire contents of your hard drive." Play with the options and enable the pretty colors ... it's like viewing your hard drive in a fractal-like format. An alternate to Xinorbis, which seems more powerful (haven't tried
Xinorbis yet).
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CurrProcess - Freeware Process Viewer -
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cprocess.htmlSimilar to Windows Task Manager process viewer, but lots more information. Actually, I've spooked around the NirSoft website a bit and run across a number of useful utilities.
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StartupRun - disable startup processes -
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/strun.htmlThis is like a lite version of
AutoRuns that has a simple enable/disable menu and path listings for what is running at Windows boot, including hidden registry garbage (fuck you quicktime and acrobat); WhatInStartup
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/what_run_in_startup.html is the newer version, which I haven't needed yet, but I have some fair trust in NirSoft, so ...
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ERUNT, reg backup & optimizer -
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/This has saved my life several times. I back up my registry before running CCleaner,
then use this to optimize my registry after running CCleaner. I've restored my registry with this and I would make sweet, sweet unnatural love to it for the several times it's backed me out of some serious fubar.
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JkDefrag -
http://kessels.com/jkdefrag/I love this defragmenter, especially when booting to Safe Mode and running it.
THIS HAS CAUSED REGISTRY CORRUPTION on several occasions when used in Safe Mode ...
HOWEVER, it's been rare and on unstable systems. Since you
ALWAYS use ERUNT to back-up your registry before running CCleaner & JkDefrag, a simple restore registry (two mouse click & a reboot) has fixed it every time. Flawlessly.
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MyDefrag -
http://www.mydefrag.com/Has replaced JkDefrag; since I haven't used it yet ... I mention that it's probably more mature and probably doesn't have the issue I just mentioned. Can't promise though, so
use ERUNT before all system maintenance and major changes.
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Restoration -
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.HTMLUndelete files. Ancient and powerful, but you'll have to rub a little bit of geek on to use it. It is ancient. But quite powerful. I've pulled all sorts of stuff off of hard drives with this. When it doesn't work, then I look for other utilities, but this is my first stop.
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BabelStone -
http://www.babelstone.co.uk/This is a fantastic little project. You get a great unicode text editor that handles an amazing amount of character sets, symbols and utterly obscure languages. Also a handy little HTML editor/viewer. There are also font packs to help handle obscure languages and characters. You'll want
BabelPad as the text editor, but just as much fun is
BabelMap; both are incredibly lightweight, standalone executables that give you access to all sorts of interesting possibilities …
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ậ‰‡•‼₧€₪℅™⅔⅝↔↨∑√∩≈≠≡┤╕╩╜◙▫☺☼♫♪♥♂♀Well, you get the idea.
If you have a
Western Digital hard drive, visit
http://www.wdc.com/en/ and search for the
Data Lifeguard Diagnostic (it's a download linked to from several product pages). A good, basic diagnostic and can perform a preliminary write zeros across an entire drive to wipe it & error check. Excellent preparation prior to initializing and formatting either an old or a new Western Digital drive.
Also get
Acronis True Image -
http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119This is pretty amazing for free. All sorts of backup options, automatic sector alignment, disk clone, migrate your system install partition to another drive, resize partitions ... the only requirement is that one of the drives be a Western Digital. I've not tried to force it to work on other drives ... might work, might not. I'd look for other utilities first depending on manufacturer. There's a 100 page *.pdf manual for this; suggest you read it. All operations are fairly straightforward.
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Google Voice -
http://www.google.com/voice/You need a gmail account, and this integrates you into the googleverse of voice-over-IP. Free calling options galore, and cheap international rates to many, many places. I've just started using it and it's looking like the Future. Get a free phone number and manage it to forward all your calls and text messages to where you would like to receive them, your landline or mobile phone, your email inbox, transcribe voicemail into text, set schedules to ring one or two or five or no phones according to where you are. Much more, and it's just getting started.
Now I want to play with
YouMail and investigate combining these services, if possible.
Remember to register your phone number(s) with the national
Do Not Call Registry (U.S.):
-
https://www.donotcall.gov/Pretty much eliminate phoneSPAM. I registered my Google Voice number. That seems like an interesting detail to play with.
Speaking of *.pdf files.
Want to mention that
Open Offrice does an export to PDF function that rocks pretty solid. Great to convert an MS Office (or WordPerfect) file into Open Office and generate *.pdfs. You can also import HTML pages into Office Write (kinda shaky sometimes), edit and export as *.pdf. You can preserve (or not) hyperlinks links in the new PDF document, and the docs are usually pretty lightweight (depsnds how you set options, such as lossless or *.jpg compression (@92% helps a LOT).
This, combined with
FoxIt Reader, is a very solid solution. Haven't needed to open Adobe Acrobat Reader in something like two years; I've even stopped installing that bloatware on my systems and don't miss it.
One caveat with FoxIt Reader: it tries to install toolbars and set Ask.com as your default ... remember to opt out of this. Immediately after installing, go to Add or Remove Programs and uninstall the toolbar that it installed anyway.
Then it's gone for good.
Well, that was a post to Kill Kenny ...
And I have more tucked away in various places.
Again, thanks guys! Fantastic resource, this topic. Keep 'em coming!
