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*Add your most useful Freeware/Shareware

Addy

Addy

cooking...
Heres a list of Freeware/Shareware that i recomend, along with comments/reasons and download sites.
Feel free to add to this if its tried and tested freeware/shareware that you just cant live without.
Lets make this a topic worthy of being 'sticky' and let it be a help to new users.
I'll continue to add and hope you lot will too.

Firstly, now your on the internet, you need a firewall to stop the evil haXors.

ZoneAlarm from www.zonelabs.com is a great free firewall.
Take time to understand what it asks, and set permissions right and its not bad for a freebie.

Now do you have an Anti Virus programme?
AGV is pretty good for a freebie, but i'm sure theres beter for free.

Surfing can be dodgy at times and you can pick up spyware along the way, which isnt good for your personal privacy.
Some spyware is embeded into downloaded software/cd software and some can come via your web browser and active-x/java scripts in web pages.

Adaware from www.lavasoft.de will rid your computer of such spywares.

o.k now your safe and your surfing and you want to download files.
P2P is the only way to go (if you dont know your way around usenet and newsgroups)
My recomendations are WinMx from www.winmx.com and kazaa lite from cleanclients.sk or www.kazaalite.com

Why wont this ??divx?? file i just downloaded play the video?
You need CODECS..... available at www.geocities.com/addict1_uk

I wanna burn cd's?
I only ever use CloneCD and Nero
Nero came free with the writer (although its available on p2p)
and clone, well, <cough>, i'll send them a cheque one day. ;)
Along with clonecd, get Cloneyxxl from http://kickme.to/englishclony as it helps with copy protection issues ;)


Ripping dvd's?
I use: dvd2avi
smartripper
TmpgENC
all available from www.geocities.com/addict1_uk
all the help you need is at www.vcdhelp.com

"I got this wicked programme but its on 30 day trial and it wont reinstall and work again."

this reg cleaner at www.vtoy.fi/jv16/shtml/software.shtml will sort that out, plus let you do anything you want with the Registery
*note dont Fcuk about with your registery unless you have *some* idea what your doing.

Driver back-up..
need to format and re-install on your own or a friends pc?
This utility finds all the relevant drivers on a pc and saves the to wherever you want them.
Great for 'older' hardware and 'thoughtlesness' when doing a format.
www.jermar.com

Media players
I use Win media 6.1 plus all my added codecs.
Along with Winamp from www.winamp.com
 
Shitload of passwords for lots of sites and programs, difficult to remember? Don't want to write them down?

Any Password is a Windows password safe, storing passwords etc in a convenient nested format, with a master password controlling the file. You can visit sites and paste in passwords with a couple of clicks. I find it really handy.

http://www.romanlab.com/apw/

Oh, and there's always Pegasus Mail which is free and extremely powerful for lots of mail: http://www.pmail.com/

Or Eudora, more user friendly (though ad supported): http://www.eudora.com/
 
If we're talking mail clients, Foxmail is free, ad free, imports everything directly from the dreaded outlook and is (AFAIK) the only one that can handle Hotmail accounts (so you can download mail from a Hotmail account without going through the site).

For browsing, I go for Mozilla.

:)
 
Freeware etc

Apart from those listed above already, I also use ICQ for chatting shite to random foreign people, DAB Bar to run my Wavefinder and Soulseek for top quality tunage.

But what I do need is something that can clock my upload/download speeds in real time - any ideas? I used to use NetPerSec, but accidently wiped it when I reformatted my drives. One of the finer pleasures in life is witnessing my broadband flying at full throttle, and it's something I just can't do without... :) :rolleyes: ;)
 
Freeware etc

Originally posted by Judge
Apart from those listed above already, I also use ICQ for chatting shite to random foreign people, DAB Bar to run my Wavefinder and Soulseek for top quality tunage.

But what I do need is something that can clock my upload/download speeds in real time - any ideas? I used to use NetPerSec, but accidently wiped it when I reformatted my drives. One of the finer pleasures in life is witnessing my broadband flying at full throttle, and it's something I just can't do without... :) :rolleyes: ;)
Click to expand...

DU Meter, it's shareware, pull a google for it, tis very good.
 
doom9 is also good for AVI and DVD rip software.

I've also found serials2000 most handy for serials and cracks. Updates come out every 2 weeks and can be found here
 
Freeware? All my bloody software has always been free ;) :D

But seriously... my all-time favourite and most-used piece of shareware has to be Paint Shop Pro.

Favourite freeware is BS Player, as it's the simply best and most feature-rich DiVX/XVID/other media player there is. Oh, and when combined with ffdshow it's a veritable DiVX-playing powerhouse.

As for best freeware in the history of computers EVER, well, that has to go to the Stair Dismount Simulator. You get to shove a hapless dude off the top of some pretty steep stairs, with customiseable body part shoveage and shoving force, and you get more points according to how much damage is inflicted and what part of the body gets hit... plus he makes GROANING AND GRUNTING NOISES ON HIS WAY DOWN!!! QUALITY!!!!!!!!! :D :D :p

Edit: See if any of you can beat my top score of 732401 (no typo). HA!
 
It's not exactly glamourous, but I've found the free Flash Renamer a fantastic tool for batch renaming files - great for sorting out billions of digital image files.

It's easy peasy to use too.

(Note only v3 is free)
 
Network tools
Ping Plotter for a nice trace route display
SmartFTP for a very nice FTP tool

MP3
Dr Tag This is by far the best ID3 tag editor I have ever used. I have 26Gig of music and its been fantastic.

<edited to add>

Anti Browser Abuse
proxomitron - Been using it for quite some time. Great for stopping all those adds, pop-up, music and every other annoying thing people do to their web sites.
 
For superbly reliable downloading, you can't beat GoZilla.

Want a nifty little, very lightweight proxy server??? Try AnalogX - runs on Windows, works a treat connecting to other windows machines, Linux machines, etc. And, if like me you run XP on a 2nd machine, having a custom proxy allows you to control exactly what, and more importantly, exactly what not web resources XP is allowed to access.

:cool:
 
Doesn't GoZilla have spyware?

For music I recommend Musicmatch Jukebox. I've had it about as long as my computer and I still haven't found anything better.

Soulseek for downloading music. Wicked for getting full albums, uses a fair amount of processor time though.

Mailwasher is bloody good for stopping spam mail.

Trillian is a bloody wonderful instant messaging client. Combines AOL, ICQ, MSN, IRC and Yahoo in one. It is a jack of all trades, master of none but thats better than having four bloatware messenger clients hogging your systray.

BitTorrent is another P2P program, works in a quite interesting way. I've been using it to get all the firefly episodes.

UiCE is a remote control program, if you have a WinTV or a REALmagix board with a remote it can be extremely useful.

Window Washer is a privicy protection program, it also clears up a lot of crap left behind by (mostly sodding microsoft) programs.

This is a cool thread, can I second it being stickyfied?
 
Anti-virus

Avast is an anti-virus package which is free for home users. If you install it it will ask for a registeration code which you can get by filling out this form.

It has worked a treat for me and has detected loads of viruses in downloaded files. It has resident protection, which checks e-mail and your file system.

DL
 
For Windows:-

WinVNC - remote control for those who don't have Windows Terminal Services

Automachron - NTP (time sync) client for Windows

SpamPal - A local POP3 proxy that tags spam.

I'll try to post some Mac stuff later.
 
XP-AntiSpy is another free little program that keeps windows xp from doing naughty things behind your back. http://www.xpantispy.de/

(make sure you click on the british flag to make the page readable)
 
Originally posted by Dubber Dan
How about Winzip... Pretty damn usefull I find
Click to expand...

How could I forget about WinZip! Probably the one bit of s/ware I've used for longest - absolutely f'ing invaluable.

For many years I used to use the DOS version - PKZip - before there even was a Windows version.

Anyone want to play "remember the arcane command line switches to zip a directory, plus sub-directories, including paths, excluding older files, maxium compression, spanned acrossed multiple floppies" game??????

Thought not. :)

For a very capable, but lightweight, programmers text editor, you can do a hell of a lot worse than TextPad. Been using it for years - takes up 1 millionth of the memory of MicroShit editors, supports workspaces, syntax highlighting, macros, find/replace across multiple files, reg expressions, etc. It's the best "does what is says on the tin" text editor IMHO. It's so good, that after using it for 3 years, I'm actually considering paying the minimal registration fee....:)
 
It might be best to keep this Windows only, then do separate threads for Mac and Linux (does anyone use any other OSes than these three?)
 
NetAnts ...this I use about two dozen times a day and am costantly thrilled about how easy and consistantly reliable it works...especially with the irregular connections I get at the end of line...methinx the longest time in one session was 4 days...20 mins max online b4 BT would screw up the line...the resume worked perfectly on auto-redial everytime...even when I relocated to other peeps houses and filched their lines whilst socializing to get the damned thing done...well chuffed with it! :D
 
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