Software Recommendation

Believe it or not, there are many free software of amazing quality scattered around the web. Here I maintain a list of free stuff (open source or freeware) that I have found useful, each accompanied by a brief description.

• xplorer²: A very powerful alternative to Windows' native Explorer. With this tab enabled, dual-pane file manager, you will handle your files much more efficiently!
• Process Explorer: A powerful replacement to Windows Task Manager. Manage, inspect and search the processes in Windows XP with a professional GUI.
• AnVir Task Manager Free: Even more powerful process manager. Among other features, you can easily monitor the activity of CPU and disks, or enable/disable start-up applications and services.
• Taskbar Shuffle: Wanna drag-n-drop taskbar buttons to arrange them? Try this free utility then…
• RapidEE: Do you ever feel changing environment variables with XP's built-in editor awkward? Try this lovely little utility!
• ClipX: Tiny clipboard history manager, now you have a clipboard with infinite depth…
• Console: A nice-looking and powerful replacement for XP's Command Prompt. Isn't it cool to have a console with tabbed interface, half transparent background (optional) and many other features?
• VirtualWin: Are you used to working with multiple virtual desktops? You can do the same on Windows.

• Mozilla FireFox: My favorite browser, I just have to recommend it anyway although I believe everyone knows about it.
• FireTune: Firefox is already fast and stable, but you can make it run even faster by running this handy optimizer.
• PuTTY: A tiny yet powerful SSH and Telnet client, a 400k sized program that can do almost everything you expect from a terminal simulator. Among its many features, I like the full screen mode so much.
• WinSCP: A freeware SFTP/SCP client, with PuTTY based security and very nice user interface (you may choose between the Explorer and the Norton Commander styled interface). Since ver 4.0 beta, WinSCP starts supporting FTP protocol as well!
• Apache HTTP Server: Believe it or not, the number one HTTP server in the world is completely free! It turns any PC into a full featured web server. I use it to develop web applications, preview my web pages, and even manage my documents and knowledge bases (via blog and wiki softwares) locally, right on my laptop. Downside for newbies is you need to learn how to config it through editing httpd.conf (not hard though). If easy configuration matters to you, Abyss Web Server X1 might be an alternative.
• Apache Mobile: Apache is so good that you may want to carry it with you in a USB drive and run it on any PC (running Windows). Yes, you can make it with this handy mod.

• HotkeyP: A tiny open source utility that lets you freely assign keyboard/mouse/joystick shortcuts to any program/document/website… It has very small footprint and needs no installation (just unzip and run).
• Launchy: The fastest way to launch numerous applications in your computer, and web search too!
• Easy-go!: Launching programs by entering their name with the aid of intelligent completion - right for you if you are a keyboard fanatic. It only takes 800KB of RAM and can hide itself from the system tray.

• PSPad: One of the best freeware text editors. After trying it for a few days, you might wonder: Why pay $49.95 for UltraEdit?
• Notepad++: Another great free (GPL) text editor, fast and powerful.
• Notepad2: Simple text editor, arguably best Notepad replacement.
• AMP Font Viewer: If you like all kinds of fancy fonts like I do, try this to browse and manage them. You can even preview a font without installing it.

• FastStone Image Viewer: Want a free alternative to ACDSee? After trying other viewers such as IrfanView and XnView, I finally stay with this one. I like its well designed user interface, great support for a wide range of file formats, and many built-in features like batch image processing.
• Blender: You shouldn't miss this one! I couldn't even believe at first but it is truly an open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback.
• JAlbum: Show off your album online with this great freeware! It can be as easy to use as you can imagine. At the same time, it is highly customizable, thanks to its powerful scripting engine.
• IcoFX: If you are seeking for a powerful and free icon editor, this should be your choice.

• foobar2000: An amazing audio player which is minimalist but extremely powerful and extensible. It has a very small footprint in every sense: disk, memory and CPU.

• 7-Zip: Open source archiver. Very simple but sufficiently good interface.
• TUGZip: A free archiver supporting virtually any popular archive format (ZIP, RAR, TGZ, BZ2, 7Z…). Another thing making it superb is its userbility - IMHO *much* better than both WinZip ($29.95) and WinRAR ($29)!

• Agent Ransack: Have you ever been disappointed by XP's default file search tool? This free utility is light-weight but very handy. With it, you can search files by name or contained text in a much more efficient way. Regular expression is supported too!
• Everything: Fastest way to search files based on their names. Trust me, you won't even believe how fast it is.
• Copernic Desktop Search Home: My favorite desktop search utility, it searches files, emails and much more. Fast and easy to use.

• KeePass: Too many passwords to remember? Use KeePass to manage them! It is free (open-source), light-weight, easy-to-use and portable.

• CCleaner: Cleaning a variety of system trashes with a few mouse clicks.
• Auslogics Disk Defrag: Ever think XP's disk defragmenter too slow? Try this. BTW, Auslogics has a Registry Defrag as well, not free though.

• FastStone Screen Capture: The best free screen capture software. It supports various (but not too many, just sufficient) capture modes, editing features and special effects. According to configuration, images can be captured into its internal editor, into file or clipboard, and even directly sent to printer or as email. I used to work with DonationCoder's Screenshot Captor, but turned to this one once I tried it.
• PicPick: Another great screen capturer, if you needs the ”Repeat Last Capture” feature, this one is what you would like.
• Wink: Nice and free screen stream capture software, capable of capturing both audio and video, for video, you may speficy frame rate and capture region. The result can be saved as a Flash file (.SWF) or executable (.EXE)
• CamStudio: If you just want a simple tool to record your screen into AVI, this is all you want.

• Resource Hacker: Totally free resource extractor/editor for Windows EXE's and DLL's. A must-have for geeks who want to customize existing programs.
• HxD: Best freeware hex editor, fast and powerful. It is even able to edit the content of RAM!

• Code::Blocks: Incredible free IDE for C/C++ : compact, powerful, extensible, and …, cross-platform!
• WinMerge: Powerful visual text file differencing and merging tool, handy for file differencing and directory synchronizing.
• Inno Setup: Build a professional installation package for your very own software.