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The useful freeware programs thread!

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WYSIWYG: http://www.nvu.com/download.php -- best free html editor i have ever used (comparable to dreamweaver or frontpage)

burning app - burnatonce http://www.burnatonce.com/ -- free burning application (no trial / upgrade nags etc) + burns FLAC. lacks features but is pretty solid ++ burns FLAC (i have a hard time finding free burning apps that do this).
 
List updated with all proposed changes! The list is getting a bit too large for its own good unfortunately and I notice that it is getting difficult to navigate. I'm considering duplicating it on my university web space so I can put an index on it to facilitate navigation, but of course I would keep a copy here too. It is just my thoughts that somebody who actually wants to look through the list will be frustrated by its size when trying to navigate to a specific element.

@ FeuerFrei: I don't have a problem with this persay but I don't really think that application compatibility is in the domain of this thread. If an application for whatever reason doesn't work in x86_64 I can certainly annotate that, although somebody will have to inform me.

Also, I am of the opinion that many of my descriptions are, shall I say, less than stellar, which is further excaberated by the fact I have not used many of the applications you guys are suggesting (see, it's a learning experience for all of us). So if you can write a good couple sentence to short paragraph blurb on any application I'd be more than happy to include it. Unfortunately, I will be the sole arbiter of whether or not the description is good. Things I am looking for: good overview of functionality and what makes this particular application better than the rest of the crowd (i.e. a "killer" feature). Grammar is not so much of a consideration (as this post demonstrates). It doesn't take much to produce something superior to many of the descriptions I've added lately.
 
Last edited:
SuperFar,

CCleaner goes to the top of my utilitiy programs. Thank you for the link and recommendation. Used with some care, it's the best I have ever used or seen for its purpose.
 
Synergy is a great lightweight program for sharing a keyboard and mouse between two computers that are next to each other. It works with more than one monitor per computer as well.
 
Microangelo - A little ms paint type of interface that allows you to make your own fully animated pointers, cursors, icons, etc. Rediculously easy to learn and limited only by your imagination. One thing that surprised me is much easier your browsing is when when you add some rotation or color pulsing to your pointers you dont lose track of them on the screen. And being able to trigger animation when an icon is hovered over or selected is cool too. I have some more to throw at ya but gotta go do the family thing right now. Reminds me- Merry Christmas Everyone!!! L8R
 
Tranzcode
It seperates 6 channel DTS files into 6 mono WAV files. It does this VERY well and very fast. I use it alot when making videos with 5.1 sound. I make all my videos with multiple AC3 5.1 ..DTS 5.1...and AC3 stereo soundtracks.

I like to use songs already encoded in DTS if I can. It is complicated for me to explain, but the only way I know how to make these 2 hour plus videos in 5.1 SS is to make each audio channel seperately...edit it into the video...extract the 2 hours worth of audio...and then re encode it using Minnetonka.

I can do this pretty fast now with the C2D...but, man what time it took with my old Gateway 478 socket 2.2ghz and 1gb RDRAM.

Anyway it is Tranzcode and it seperates 6 channel DTS into 6 mono wavs
 
how does one disable prefetch data clearing for ccleaner? also, could someone please post how much ram process explorer takes up? finally, which of the 4 free firewalls uses the least system resources? i'm currently using comodo which seems to use about 10mb of ram.

my submission: ATF-Cleaner does a pretty good job of clearing out temp files, is only 46kb and doesn't even have to be installed! it's quick and easy for everyday use. give it a try!
http://www.atribune.org/content/view/19/2/
 
Prefetch cleaning is disabled by default in crap cleaner but if you turn on the advanced option it enables "Old Prefetch Data." Windows does clean out these old unused prefetch files periodically (say an application is uninstalled) so there is no reason to have CCleaner do it, which is more aggressive about it. Process Explorer uses more resources than the default resource monitor (about 15 MiB). It can consume a non trivial amount of cpu time depending on how you're using it as well. IMO its worth it.
 
SuperFarStucker said:
List updated (after a long hiatus on my part) with suggestions!

@ObsesivComplsiv Microangelo is not freeware :(
Click to expand...

Sorry about that, I guess my train of thought got de-railed :)
How about SysTool. Its from the same folks that made AtiTool and has an impressive array of features. Hardware monitoring, RAM timing adjustment, benchmarking (RAM & CPU), stability testing, and clock frequency settings for ATi and NVIDIA all in one place.
 
SuperFarStucker said:
That's a good point. Does anyone know of a freeware program that handles as many formats as WinRar?
Click to expand...
http://www.izarc.org/
IZarc can pack/unpack (IZarc can also unpack *.exe archives):

7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CDI, CAB, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MBF, MDF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO.

Main features:

* Create an archive
* Add files to an existing archive
* Delete files from an existing archive
* Extract files from an existing archive
* Test an archive file
* Convert archive
* Convert CD Images
* Repair broken archive
* Searching for any files in many archives
* Favorite Folders
* Obtaining a detailed list of files and information like compression rate, path, or size from an archive file
* Supports both long and short 8.3 filenames
* Disk spanning from and to multiple diskettes or other removable media
* Implementing the possibility to sort the list items by name size, date and etc.
* Full Drag & Drop support
* CD/DVD Images support (ISO, BIN, MDF, NRG, IMG, C2D, PDI, CDI)
* Integrating in Windows Explorer context menu
* Automatic installation of most software distributed in archive files
* Add/View comments in an archive
* By double-clicking onto a file in the file list, it's opened with the program associated to this file type
* CheckOut feature
* Create a self-extracting archive
* E-mail an archive
* Checking for new updates
* Build-in multilanguage support
* Virus Scan feature
* UU/XX/MIME Encode/Decode
* Create Multi-Volume Set
* Merge Multi-Volume Set
* UnSFX (Convert self-extracting (SFX) .EXE files to standard archives)
* Encrypt files using Rijandael - AES (256-bits) encryption
* Zip encryption (WinZip 9 compatible)
* BZip compression for ZIP archives
* Decrypt (.ize) files

Screenshots:

main.png


add.png


extract.png


options.png
 
a mere suggestion

No offense to anybody but I would find these suggestions more usefull if they were rated by the members of oc forums as oposed to being mentioned by one person.
mainly because i've installed as many good programs by suggestion as i have bad.
some of the programs listed i personally know to be top notch such as spybot and ccleaner like I said i hope this doesnt offend anybody I would be more likely to listen to the majority of an established bunch of computer enthusiasts than lets say cnet or file hippo who may be just a little too commercialized.
 
Could we have each program set up in a separate thread, and a poll on each for use/don't use?
Have a main sticky link to each program, and each sub-sticky have the poll and commentary on the program.
 
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