Links
Free games thread by randumb
Spyware removal thread by Schadenfroh
Snapfiles - Tons of freeware on this site.
Update 8/29/04: I've been out of the country for a month so I haven't been updating. I'll add the new suggestions soon.
** means that I've recently updated the catagory.
As far as I know, none of these programs have spyware. Please let me know if I'm wrong.
Computer protection and maintenance
Antivirus software:
Panda Antivirus - Free for IT Professionals.
Panda Antivirus Link #2 - Free to just about anyone who is affiliated to a school, corporation, or government institution.
If not, then take a look at E-Trust EZ Armor Security Suite - According to Virus Bulletin, this AV suite is better than Avast Antivirus Home Edition or AVG.
Firewall: Kerio Personal Firewall. Kerio seems to be the favorite among forum members. Also take a look at Sygate Personal Firewall. Both are very good and free. The firewall that comes with the E-Trust EZ Armor Security Suite, seems to be the free version of ZoneAlarm.
Spyware scanner: Try Spybot Search and Destroy and Ad-aware.
Also take a look at Schadenfroh's thread about spyware removal.
Office
Office suite: OpenOffice. It's a very professional looking office suite that is compatible (to a certain extent) with Microsoft Office.
AbiWord (Word processor) and 602Pro PC Suite 2001 are good free alternatives too.
PDF maker: CutePDF. It's pretty much the same as PDF955, but without the nag popup. OpenOffice also has an option to export as PDF now.
Email Client: Thunderbird. It's not as full featured as Outlook, but it's a great alternative to Outlook Express. If you want calendar features, take a look at the Calendar plug-in. You can import your settings from Outlook if you export them first to a more generic format (CSV maybe? Don't really remember).
Also look at these free email clients: Eudora (ad sponsored but very good), Foxmail, and Pegasus Mail.
Calendar: Sunbird. I mentioned this application as Calendar along with Thunderbird for an email client, but apparently they made it into a stand-alone application like Thunderbird and Firefox now. *credit goes to beer*
Outlook Express backup: OEBackup. This program seems to simplify the process of backing up OE. Outlook Express doesn't have an easy one-button way to backup all of your emails, settings, and address books. *Found on a website linked by Winchester*
File compression: IZArc - theAnimal suggested this to me. Up until now, I've been using AlZip which was suggested by Flashram. Both programs support tons of compression formats. Neither will let you make RAR files but they can extract RAR files just fine. AlZip is free but has a small, unintrusive ad banner. IZArc doesn't have an ad banner.
Tax software: TaxAct - They let you use their Federal Tax software for free. I tried it out last year and found it to be pretty easy to use.
Presentation/Wizard maker: Wink - (suggested by hasu)
Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc).
Internet/Networking
FTP server: Filezilla Server - A little more difficult to use than GuildFTP, but I've found it to be a lot faster.
FTP client: Filezilla. Filezilla recently replaced SmartFTP as my preferred FTP client because SmartFTP started to nag me about purchasing a license if I'm a corporate user. Filezilla is great because it supports multiple connections to the FTP server. You can still browse the FTP server while downloading several files. Drag'n'drop support still needs a little work though because you can't drag into Explorer yet.
ugh suggests BlazeFTP. It's pretty similar to Filezilla except that it supports connections to multiple sites using tabs.
SFTP/SCP client: WinSCP. WinSCP is an open source SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) and SCP (Secure CoPy) client for Windows using SSH (Secure SHell). *Found in a thread started by everman
Telnet client: Putty. It's simple, powerful, and free.
Download manager: Star Downloader. It's a nice, clean, simple download manager. My only complaint is that it uses a temporary folder for all downloads. This means that after you download a 600MB file, it still has to COPY the file to your destination folder. I'd also like an option to automatically sort downloads by file type or name. LeechGet. LeechGet is kind of like GetRight lite. Unlike Star Downloader, LeechGet doesn't save the download to a temporary file before copying to your download directory. It also lets you save to different folders based on file type. It has an FTP browser and website parser built in too. The interface is nice although somewhat confusing and there are still a few random bugs. I've tried a lot of different freeware managers such as Star Downloader and FlashGet but I think LeechGet is the best. NOTE: FlashGet contains spyware too.
BFG10K also suggests using NetVampire.
Website copier: HTTrack - An easy-to-use offline browser utility. I've used this utility before and it works great for grabbing tons of files off a website or just copying the website on a superficial level. *Suggested by Nikamichi*
Graphics
Image editing: Gimp. Gimp 2.0 is supposed to be really good, but I managed to get myself a copy of Photoshop CS so I don't really need it.
If anyone has a decent review of it, PM me or reply to this thread and I'll add it with credit to you, of course.
If you can spent a little money, I suggest Photoshop Elements. I decided to give Photoshop Elements a try and it worked fine for me. Here's a list of some of the stuff that it doesn't support compared to Photoshop CS: masks, channels, action scripts, complex batch operations, multiple anti-aliasing styles for the text tool, and complex layer effects like drop shadow and buttonizing. PSE has a single anti-aliasing option for text. It supports batch operations but only for resizing and renaming. It also only supports a couple pre-done layer effects like drap shadows, so you can't specify angles and shadow depth, etc. A few people in this thread have suggested Paint Shop Pro as an alternative to Photoshop. I used to use Paint Shop Pro and it's a great piece of software. I now prefer PSE because Photoshop is more of an industry standard and it's easier for me to just stick with the same interface. I'm a Computing and the Arts student, btw.
Vector graphics:
SodiPodi is a freeware vector-based drawing program. *suggested by ugh*
DrawPlus - Seems to be a semi-popular freeware vector drawing program. *suggested by uethello*
Layout: PagePlus - Seems to be a semi-popular freeware layout program. *suggested by uethello*
Image viewer: Irfanview. I've been using Irfanview for a couple years now. It's very powerful and supports a lot of basic image editing functions. Through plug-ins, you can view just about any media file.
I used to also suggest a program called Slowview, but it has become a commercial program now with only a downloadable trial.
Icon editor - @icon sushi - I've been looking for a good FREEWARE icon editor for the longest time now. Mk4 suggested this in another thread.
IDE's and editors
HTML editor: HTML-Kit. I use HTML-Kit for HTML and PHP editing. It has a built in FTP browser so I can edit files straight from my FTP server. HTML-Kit has tons of features and support for plug-ins to add more features.
WYSIWYG HTML editor: NVU. Finally someone made a standalone version of Mozilla Composer! NVU is excellent for a free WYSIWYG editor.
DHE Editor is another editor that I've found. It uses style sheets to position everything so it doesn't work like regular WYSIWYG editors. It seems to support a lot of optimization and general effects for images too. The interface is really easy to use because you basically "paint" the webpage.
CSS editor: Topstyle Lite. Topstyle Lite is a great CSS editor. It pretty much lets you select CSS properties from lists. I tried the Topstyle Pro HTML editor trial and it's possibly the best HTML/CSS editor I've ever used.
Java IDE: Eclipse. Possibly the coolest IDE I've ever used. Sometimes it has some weird quirks, but it works well for me. Also, Borland's JBuilder 9.0 Personal Edition is free for noncommercial use. There are several other free ones out there. Google for them.
C++ IDE: Dev-C++. It's great and it's free.
Basic (VB) IDE: SharpDevelop. I haven't used this IDE much, but it supports VB.NET. The interface seems pretty similar to that of VB6. It uses the VB.NET SDK which Microsoft provides for free.
xBasic - Never tried it since I have VB6. I heard that it's pretty good.
C# IDE: SharpDevelop. I haven't used it much but it seems to be really cool. It's very similar to Visual Basic 6.0 in the layout.
PHP Editor: phpEDIT - A good PHP editor that not only functions as a text editor but as a relatively loaded IDE. There are a lot of PHP editors but most of them are lacking one thing or another, or aren't being actively updated. phpEDIT seems to be the best all-around editor, too. They also offer a CodeBeauitifer that helps you clean up your code.
Some third party reviews that support the assertion. *Suggested by beer. Comments also by beer.*
Text editor: When it comes to text editors, you're going to get lots of suggestions. Some will suggest the power of Vim or xemacs, others will prefer the simplicity of Notepad+ or Editpad Lite. Personally, I strive for something in between the two. Some discussions on the pros/cons of vim.
*Suggested by beer. Comments also by beer.*
Some good alternatives
Crimson Editor - a generally polished product that is designed for programmers, with syntax highlighting for all sorts of languages. It's very similar to UltraEdit without the nagware or $35 cost. *Suggested by beer. Comments also by beer.*
Scintilla features collapse functions, i.e you can + and - your code, but it isn't a very active project, although it has some nifty features. *Suggested by beer. Comments also by beer.*
JEdit very nice all-round editor, has lots of nifty features, as well as a whole bunch of plugins that can be automatically downloaded and installed using the built in plugin manager. *Suggested by Sunner. Comments also by Sunner*
Audio/Mp3/CD
Audio editor: Audacity. It's a free and simple audio mixer/editor that supports mp3s.
ID3 Tag Editor: The Godfather. It supports freedb search so not only can you search for entire albums, you can also search for individual songs.
Another ID3 Tag Editor: MusicBrainz. This program REALLY helps in organizing thousands of mp3s. You can look up ID3 tags for individual mp3s.
CD/mp3 ripper: CDex or EAC. Search the software forum for mp3 ripping. These two programs seem to be the favorites. (CDex suggested by Elemental007)
Burning software:
ISO's - nsafreak suggests burnatonce. I used to have this program in this post, but it didn't seem to work very well at the time so I removed it. nsafreak reports that it works well for him so give it a try if you need a free ISO burning program!
**General burning - cKGunslinger suggests CD Burner XP.
Audio - Winchester suggests Mp3 Doctor for burning audio CDs. iTunes, recently came out for Windows and, I believe, it supports CD burning and ripping.
** Audio conversion - dbPowerAmp - Suggested by xgi.
System tools
Partition manager: Ranish Partition Manager *Suggested by sciencewhiz *
Boot loader: XOSL *Suggested by sciencewhiz *
Video/Rendering
VideoLAN: VideoLAN - A free opensource DVD decoder! *suggested by Monzie in a thread started by beer
*
DVDShrink: DVDShrink - DVD Shrink is software to backup DVD discs. You can use this software in conjunction with DVD burning software of your choice, to make a backup copy of any DVD video disc. *suggested by mr899*
3D everything: Blender3D - Description taken from their website: "open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback." Suggested by CZar.
Modeling and animation: Anim80r - Free 3D modeler and animator written by a guy who works at nVidia. *suggested by uethello*
Morphing software: WinMorph (suggested by hasu)
3D polygon mesh modeler: Wings 3D - "Wings 3D is a polygon mesh modeler inspired by Nendo and Mirai from Izware."
Winchester suggested the following video/3D rendering software:
Maya Personal edition : Nice, but leaves a massive watermark on rendered images. It still has lots of functionality of the full version though!
Gmax: gmax is a free 3D modeling and animation tool based on Discreet's award-winning 3ds max.
Avid FreeDV: Perfect for students, DV camera owners, video enthusiasts or anyone exploring video editing - Avid Free DV software is an easy, free way to join the Avid family and test-drive the industry-standard editing interface used by more professionals than any other video editing solution. This version is a Vietnam POW camp diet version compared to the full version, but hey it works.
DopeFiend's review of Avid FreeDV - "Yes, it's free and that's great. However, I tried to import some large (~16Gb) DV files into it that I'm working on, and it told me that it only supports .jpg and .mov imports. Plus, the interface goes to pot on a dual-screen setup; the program maximises itself to the width of both screens (grr) and all the palettes become corrupted."
(copied from http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=33&threadid=997283&enterthread=y)
