Top 10 **FREE** Windows Applications

1. Firefox - whether or not you use it, it gains the #1 spot. Firefox has gained popularity in the last few years due to it’s easy interface that also gives users the ability to expand into internet browsing machines. For one reason or another the old Netscape Navigator has been rebirthed with loads of add ons that can make a more appealing browsing experience.
2. ccleaner - a simple utility that will help to rid Windows of the usual bloat, clean system cache, internet cookies, auto complete forms, recycle bin, and also even help to clean errors out of your Windows registry.
3. Open Office – If you like the convenience of an office application but don’t want to pay out the nose for a glitzy confusing interface. If you want a feature rich text editor, a database manager, a way to make and play presentations, a way to draw schematics, a powerful calculator, or some other feature that you would expect from a office program, Open Office has it all.
4. Avast! – If you are anything like me an anti virus program is a must in the WWW, also if you are like me you have found that Norton, McAffee, and Kaspersky are resourse hungry, bloated, expensive pieces of software. Often times these programs can slow Windows boot times and are not totally up to date. So why pay for a half rate service when you can get better protection from Avast!. Avast! offers a real time web and email scanner and can optionally be set to scan when a screen saver is running
5. Pidgin – If you are a person that uses many different chat programs to keep in touch with everyone you know but are getting very tired of having 6 different programs to log into Pidgin is your answer. Pidgin does many different chat protocols and can be further enhanced with plugins. Out of the box Pidgin will do AIM, Yahoo Instant Messenger (YIM), Bonjour, Gadu Gadu, Google Talk, Groupswise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Myspace IM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, and Zephyr.
6. Filezilla – Is simply the best open source FTP program out there. Filezilla is a fast efficient FTP program that supports standard FTP, secure FTP over SSL/TLS and SSH, supports resume and transfer of large files >4GB, transfer queueing, drag & drop support, and configurable speed limits.
7. VLC – This media player is a very easy to use media player that will play most file types with no hassles, it supports many advanced features that are not typically found in other media player applications. By far my favorite feature of VLC other than the media compatibility is that I can use a video as my desktop background.
8. Foxit – This little program is for opening PDF files and serves as a small, lightweight replacement to Adobe Acrobat, with optional plugins for Firefox and Internet Explorer. This program is fantastic compared to the bloatware that has become Adobe Acrobat, go ahead and give it a shot.
9. Wireshark – While doing some networking I have found this to be a very useful program to diagnose network connections. The ability to sort and work the data to help troubleshoot poor or spotty connections is absolutely indisposable.
10. WinRAR – An excellent replacement to the very well know and not much liked winzip. WinRAR offers many features that makes it so great. From desktop integration, split volumes, password protected, encrypted archives, to custom compression levels, WinRAR offers itself to you for NO CHARGE. Use it, learn to love it and it will love you right back \m/.(-_-).\m/ ****EDIT**** Okay so winRAR isn’t completely free (sharewareish), so if you like you can add 7zip here. 7zip is also a quality program but the shell integration isn’t as good as winRAR.

Now these above are just some of my favorites, there are many more out there that are very common for myself and the rest of the **FREE** computing community to install and use on a regular basis.

You will find some runners up in the rest of the post below.

Below you will find some of my runners up that might not be totally free, but can be very useful for one reason or another.

• Sisandra – Benchmarking and system information utility
• Winamp – Media player, good for music only.
• Sygate Firewall – An excellent firewall that is no longer in production.
• Daemon Tools – a virtual CD drive
• Thunderbird – email client that can replace outlook express
• TrueCrypt – an encryption program
• XAMPP – Apache, Mysql, PHP, FTP and smoe other stuff I don’t use. Can be used as a test bed for web applications or even for an easy to set up server.
• DSL – Damn Small Linux
• CPU-Z – a CPU ID program that will help you identify the processor in a computer without removing the HSF.
• GPU-Z – Same as CPU-Z but for your video card.
• ATI Tool – ATI and now nVidia overclocking utility.
• QEMU – Runs virtual machines (comes embedded with DSL to run on Windows)
• DVD Decrypter – Want to backup your DVD collection? This is one of the programs for that.
• DVD Shrink – Same as above but easier to use.
• POWER ISO – Lets you open and work on ISO image, also will let you mount that image instead of burning it to a disc to check if it works.
• NLite – Windows XP custome image generator, this comes in handy if you are using a RAID or a SATA interface for your hard drive and you don’t want to have to find a floppy drive to load the drivers in at install time.
• VLite – Same as about but for Windows Vista. Also they both allow you to remove windows components and set up a complete unattended install.
• X-Moto – Free Motocross type game for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OSX, and probably just about anything else you could think of. With a community driven points system and user submitted levels I am sure that you can play this for quite awhile before getting bored.
• Putty – A SSH/Telnet client that is very fast and easy to use. I personally use it daily to administer my headless Fedora server.

Well there you have it folks that was my list, I hope that you like it and find something useful on this page. As for me it’s now 10am on Sunday and it’s time to get me some coffee.

[ratings]