List of Must Have Applications

This is a list of applications that I believe any windows machine should not be without. All are free downloads. Some are just neat to have.

Mozilla Firefox

Homepage

A very powerful web brower. Below are a few features that Firebird has that Microsoft Internet Explorer does not.

Built-in Pop-up blocking
Tabbed browsing
Built-in google search
Extensions - Basically extra features written by non-mozilla developers
Themes to change browser interface
No installation needed - run from a unzipped folder, so theres no extra hidden files installed.

Google Toolbar

Homepage

There are still some web sites that require Internet Explorer, so you defiently need this to at least stop pop-ups. If you don't use anything else on the toolbar, the pop-up blocker is worth the install. Plus its not spy-ware or ad-ware.

Foobar

Homepage
Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include ReplayGain support, low memory footprint and native support for several popular audio formats.

Features

Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player
Audio formats supported "out-of-the-box": WAV, AIFF, VOC, AU, SND, Ogg Vorbis, MPC, MP2, MP3, MPEG-4 AAC
Audio formats supported through official addons: FLAC, OggFLAC, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, Speex, CDDA, TFMX, SPC, various MOD types; extraction on-the-fly from RAR, 7-ZIP & ZIP archives
Full Unicode support on Windows NT
ReplayGain support
Low memory footprint, efficient handling of really large playlists
Advanced file info processing capabilities (generic file info box and masstagger)
Highly customizable playlist display
Customizable keyboard shortcuts
Most of standard components are opensourced under BSD license (source included with the SDK)

I switched from Winamp to this recently.

Ad-aware

Homepage

If you are already infected with spy-ware or ad-ware, download the free anti-ad-ware software. I restate the title of this page, everyone needs this program. You must keep it up to date with the newest spy-ware definentions (much like an anti-virus program). If you have an anti-virus program, you also needs this program too.

Spybot-Search and Destroy

Homepage
Application to scan for spyware, adware, hijackers and other malicious software.

AVG Anti-Virus Scanner

Homepage
They have a version available for FREE to home users. Download, install and use AVG Free Edition and get:

AVG Resident Protection
AVG e-mail Scanner
AVG On-Demand Scanner
Basic Scheduled Tests
Free Virus Database Updates
Automatic Update feature
Easy-To-Use Interface
Automatic Healing of infected files
AVG Virus Vault for safe handling of infected files

ZoneAlarm (Firewall)

Homepage
ZoneAlarm is free for individual and not-for-profit charitable entity use (excluding governmental entities and educational institutions).

Easy-to-use firewall blocks hackers and other unknown threats.

Intrusion Blocking systematically identifies hackers and blocks access attempts.
Stealth Mode automatically makes your computer invisible to anyone on the Internet.

IZArc

Homepage

Supports many of the compressed file formats (ace, arj, rar, zip, arc, tgz to name a few). Has a very slick Windows Explorer context menu interface too. Bypass winrar and winzip for this program.

PuTTY

Homepage
A free win32 telnet/SSH client.

CDex

Homepage

A slick CD->compressed audio (Ogg/mp3/etc) ripper. A list of features from the web site are as follows:

Easy to use interface
Media File Player
Create PLS and M3U playlist files
Advanced jitter correction
Support for many file formats/audio encoders (WAV, MP3, OGG, VQF, APE, etc)
Support for ID3 V1 and V2 tags
Support for normalization of audio files
Support for transcoding of compressed audio files
Support for CDDB
Support for recording from the analog input line

OpenOffice

Homepage

A valuable free alternative to Microsoft Office.

Really Slick Screensavers

Homepage

For years, the *inx OS's have had some killer screensavers, possiably because *inx developers (especially Linux developers) want to code things that they think are cool. These are defiently cool.

Media Player Classic

Homepage

A free media player VERY customizable. No fancy install, it's just one exec. See below for Real & Quicktime codec's. Interface is customizable. Can play real video and quicktime at full screen. Plus has extra zoom & pan features just to name a few.

Real & Quicktime Alternatives

Homepage
Don't want to install Real SPY or quicktime? Grab these and it will install the codac's without the bloat.

Trillian

Homepage

Running more than one instant messanger program (Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AOL?). This program combines all those different chat programs into 1. Over time I've collected a few different IM screen names on the different networks, and somehow I've now got 11 different screen names. Trillian handles all these different names beautifully with no querks. There's even a free version.

Last Updated: 03 June 2004 01:20:16