| Freeware: |
|
| Winamp |
The best playing software.
Recognizes almost every music format around and it's light, fast, and has good
quality. Has got a lot of skins and plugins and has lately become freeware.
Mainly known as an .Mp3 player. |
| Van Basco Midi Player |
For
musicians: This
Outstanding midi player is really a must for musicians. While it plays the midi
file it shows you on virtual keyboards all the notes played on every
track and all the instruments.
You can slow down as much as you want to
understand the deeper secrets of the composers. You can learn composing music
alone, and even how to play drums!
Instruments can also be silenced out or
soloed.
It has got
also the best Karaoke (.kar files) play I have ever seen with excellent
highlightings of the text. You can also transpose songs at
need. |
| PS/2 rate
for windows 9x |
Increase the refresh of your ps/2
mouse up to 200 Hz! See windows moving stuck to your hands like never
before!
Greatly reduces
eye stress while working at the computer. A MUST for windows 9x
users. |
| Cpu Idle |
This utility (only works for Win
9x/Me: Win NT/2000 does it by itself) cools down your CPU from HOT to COLD
instantly! A Must for Overclockers. CpuIdle 2.53 was still freeware, the nexts
are shareware. You should try to get an old version, or you can try Rain or
Waterfall instead. They all do substantially the same. |
| Oasis SE |
For
programmers: If you
are a developer with limited financial resources you will be glad in learning
that a stand-alone software for creating helpfiles really exists! It's buggy, I
admit, but you can learn how to work bugs around in about one
day. |
| Inno Setup |
For
programmers: This is
the best installation package compiler of the world and is freeware! Allows you
making professional software installers in 10 minutes!
Incredible. |
| Sun
JDK |
For
programmers: The
famous Java Development Kit by SUN. You can program in Java for free! Just
don't expect an IDE (=> use JCreator). |
| JCreator |
For
programmers: Excellent free Java IDE which works together with Sun JDK. There is
also a shareware version which adds code completion. |
| Nasm |
For
programmers: This
seems the best assembler around. |
| Active Perl |
For
programmers: Very
good Perl interpreter. |
| Netscape Communicator
4.51 |
You surely know what I'm talking
about. Even if I believe IE5 is better (mainly for the working cache), there is
something which can be taken from this anyway good freeware software: the
Netscape Composer is vastly superior to Frontpage Express in creating internet
sites. This site was created using Netscape Composer. |
| Cygwin |
I have searched it for years. Unix
bash shell ported under Windows!
The bash shell is something like a MSDOS command
prompt but it's immensely more powerful. It's a real filesystem programming
language with variables, functions, backquoting, piping,
redirections....
Cygwin
also provides a DLL which implements all the Unix system calls under Windows,
which means that you can easily port unix source code to Windows with almost no
changes. Gcc compiler provided. |
| The Partition Resizer |
Whith new huge HardDisks you might
want to install different OSs. A freeware very safe partition resizing program
is very appreciated. It can resize Fat 12, 16, 32 partitions. And can at least
MOVE the other unknown partitions. |
| Ranish's Partition
Manager |
This is the most powerful
partition manager all over the world, and free! Excellent substitute for Fdisk.
Gives you the deepest control on what you do, ever. For expert users only, or
for people who want to become. (Use together with Presizer)
Very widely documented, it will deeply
introduce you in the marvellous world of partitions. Version 2.38 can be used
with HDs greater than 8Gb and has got a very complete
interface.
The
correspondent Boot Manager for HDs > 8Gb isn't still fully working but the
one of version 2.37 is, and also supports more than 4 primary partitions in an
HD to have as many independent OSs in your HD as you want.
Killer. |
| Wordweb Dictionary and
Thesaurus: |
It's a
freeware very good english dictionary and thesaurus. |
| Babylon Translator |
This is a
Mouse-Point-And-Translate dictionary which allows you to translate English
words and particular expressions to your native language:
[Last time I
checked it supported: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Netherlands, Japanese
and Hebrew]. |
| Mirabilis ICQ |
Read "I Seek You": this excellent
internet utility allows you to know which of your friends is online at the
moment, and you can send them messages, chat requests (chat is much better than
IRC one), files, internet links and so on. You will not browse the web alone
anymore!
Despite
the added privacy features it's still a bit dangerous because your IP can be
seen: if you have valuable data in your computer you should maybe pay attention
to hackers. |
| Star Office |
Have you ever dreamed to have a
freeware Office suite? It exists! I'm not joking! It's called StarOffice and
it's fully Microsoft Office compatible. It has also got an excellent Equation
Editor which works like LATEK language.
Notice: refresh for equation editor is slow
while typing. Send a stream of F5 keys to the application to force refreshes
(Star Office 5.2 or later version required). You can use a timer rule of Flash
Desktops to do this. I will soon add an example in FD
manual. |
| Exact Audio Copy |
Incredible! The perfectest
audiograbber of the world is freeware! (Well... postcardware) This is an
excellent piece of software: it has got a secure algorithm which extracts the
same data at least twice and guarantees that the audio extractions are always
100% exact. You never need to listen the extraction: a great time gain! It even
works with almost destroyed CDs. |
| E-Icons |
This small program allows you to
change every icon of the system associated to files, folders or special
folders, as you want. Comfortable to use. |
| CDSpeed |
This program made by ASUS can be
found in the ASUS FTP site or search cdspeed.zip with an FTP search engine. It
allows you to set the speed of a CDROM drive on the fly. If you need to make a
big copy and you see that it has slowed down a lot because of errors, you can
spin it up again instantly with this. Very handy. |
| Putty |
Freeware Telnet and SSH (=RSA
secure telnet) client with asymmetric key pair generator. |
| SmartFTP |
Best FTP client ever. And
freeware!
Still a bit
buggy but features widely compensate this. |
| CyberKit |
Internet analyzing tools with GUI:
Ping - Traceroute - Finger - NSLookup - QoD - Time synchronizer - Netscanner -
DBScanner. |
| Ad-Aware |
Many programs apparently freeware
found over the Internet are in fact spywares: cloaked under apparencies of
advertising loaders they will send over the internet your personal data,
usernames and passwords. Find and remove them all with this
antispyware. |
| Filemon Regmon HandleEx DebugView
PsTools |
File Monitor and
Registry Monitor let you monitor all accesses to the filesystem and the
registry by all the programs in your system.
Handle Ex will use
undocumented Windows APIs to let you see all the handles, mutexes, semaphores,
dlls, modules, etc. accessed/loaded/owned by every process in your
system.
Debug View monitors all the debug output from
programs.
Process Tools are commandline tools for Windows
NT4/2000. |
Shareware: |
|
| AcdSee |
Really the best Image Viewing
program. Reads almost every image format and is instantly loaded. Allows you to
scroll to next and previous image of that directory with PageUp - PageDown and
reads next pages in advance for maximum speed. Its window automatically resizes
to fit images. You can easily zoom, enlarge, and watch fullscreen. And has got
the best jpeg compressor ever seen! |
| WinRAR |
This is a very powerful
compression tool which can compress/extract both RAR and ZIP formats and can
make self extracting archives. The RAR compression algorithm is much more
efficient than the ZIP one and has got a special nonlossy but very efficient
sub-algorithm for multimedia data. |
| Where Is It |
This is not cheap but it's very
well made and handy. It can record the filesystem structure of all your
recorded CDs in order to tell you immediately where you have put a particular
file.
It will
watch inside ZIP and RAR archives too! |
| Fat32 driver for
WindowsNT4 |
Again not cheap but very useful in
case you want to do multi-booting with Windows NT4 and Windows 9x: one of the
biggest lacks of NT4 is support for Fat32.
This is the solution. |
| Fine Print |
This half-driver allows you print
front/rear with your printer even if the provided driver didn't allow you to do
that. You can also shrink many pages in one. |
Mail
servers |
If you want your email delivery to
be fast and reliable, you need a local mail server installed in your computer.
Emails will be delivered instantly and directly to the destination server, and
you will see possible error messages from the remote email server so you are
always informed of what is happening.
I suggest you to check out the following
products:
ArGo Soft: They distribute a freeware and a
shareware mailserver. They both have the same big fault: if you send an email
while you are not connected to the internet the email will be DESTROYED! Only
good for a static connection.
Advanced Direct Remailer: This costs
$40 but it worths them. Almost perfect: eficient, reliable, clean interface,
multithread delivery. |
Online
services: |
|
| Google |
This is the BEST internet search
engine. Advantages:
- No
graphics, very light result pages with almost no advertisement.
- It provides the BEST results due to
it's revolutionary page ranking algorithm: the most linked-to pages are
considered more important.
Killer. You are 100% right, Google. |
| Housecall |
Freeware online antivirus.
Excellent product, it was also able to recognize the W97M_EIGHT941.D virus
which was not catched by my Network Associates Virusscan. |
| NtFaq |
This is a wide "Help" site for
NT4/2000 covering most subject, under the form of FAQs. Contains years of FAQs:
very worthy. |