The Ultimate Freeware
http://zekr.org
Al-Quran for Windows
The List
1. AMP Font Viewer - Font manager, view, install, uninstall, organize your fonts. an interesting feature is that you can "test" fonts before deciding to install them.
2. Ant Movie Catalog - A very important program for me, as I have more than 2500 movies in my collection. Although it has no official support anymore it still is the best movie collection manager, even if it doesn't look as good as most competitors. It's an open source program, maybe someone will take the source code and make it better.
3. Any Audio Converter - The name says everything, it converts audio files, WMV, MP4, WAV, WMA, OGG, AAC, MP3, M4A, MP2, etc. The interesting feature is that it can extract the audio track from video files such as AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV, ASF.
4. Audacity - Open source audio editing and recording program, the best free on you can get. It is very easy to use and works on Mac OSX and Linux too.
5. Avast! - The home edition is a free antivirus solution, provides resident real time protection, basic antispyware protection and doesn't take to much memory while running in the background (a lot less than BitDefender, that's for sure).
6. CamStudio - Free screen session recorder, can record audio too, records to avi or swf files.
7. Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP) - Essential codec pack, no spyware, Media Player Classic included.
8. CCleaner - Great freeware program, a registry cleaner, disk cleaner and software uninstaller. Can also manage your startup programs.
9. CodecInstaller - Analyzes your video or audio files, tell you which codecs are needed, finds codecs, installs or unistalls codecs from your system.
10. Crystal DiskInfo - Real time hard disk monitoring utility, provides awesome in depth information about your hard disk drives.
11. Digsby - Although it is still in beta it's a very interesting instant messenger client. Supports AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat Accounts. But the great feature is that it supports multiple e-mail accounts, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP. It is also a great tool for social networking, it supports Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace accounts so far, with more of them coming up.
12. DriveImage XML - Great freeware program, you can backup your hard disk data and then restore the image if needed.
13. DVD Shrink - This one is a classic, everybody knows it, some people even sell copies of it. A great tool for backing up your video DVDs.
14. DVD Styler - Free DVD authoring tool, supports PAL and NTSC. Very easy to use, just drag and drop an mpeg file and make your video DVD. You can also make decent menus with it, even with audio. It also has a Linux version.
15. Exact Audio Copy - Great audio CD ripper, extracts your audio tracks from all kinds of CD and DVD drives are supported (including USB, Firewire, SATA and SCSI drives). Supports many output file formats, including flac through external encoders.
16. FeedDemon - It wasn't free, now it is! Looks nice, works well and has a bunch of nice features that will make your RSS feeds reading better.
17. FontNetInstaller - This one can help you search for fonts over the internet as it has the best websites indexed and lets you search through them within the program. Doesn't require installation, just unpack and run.
18. Format Factory - Universal transcoder, converts almost any video, audio and graphic file formats. Can also extract DVD Video to avi.
19. GIMP - The best freeware alternative to Adobe Photoshop. It's an open source image editor, very powerful and quite stable.
20. GOM Player - The best video player in my opinion, supports almost any video file format and subtitles, solid and nice looking.
21. Gparted (Gnome Partition Editor) - Open source partition editor, very powerful, can be used on a bootable CD, USB stick, PXE server and Hard Disk.
22. IrfanView - The best free image viewer, already a classic piece of software. Can open various file formats and also has some basic editing capabilities.
23. JKDefrag GUI - Awesome disk defragmenter, fast and reliable. Can run scheduled defragmentation sessions or run as a screensaver, only defragmenting when your system is idle.
24. MeGUI - Powerful video encoder, supports the best formats and encoders, great tutorials available.
25. MemTest - Tiny freeware program that allows you to test your memory from Windows.
26. Memtest86+ - Open source advanced memory diagnostic tool, runs at boot-time from a bootable CD or other media.
27. MozBackup - Great freeware tool, backs up your Firefox ot Thunderbird settings, bookmarks, etc. If something goes wrong you can restore your precious settings in only a few seconds.
28. Mozilla Firefox - The latest release, Firefox 3, comes with nice improvements, although it seems to use more memory while running. Hopefully that problem will be fixed soon.
29. Notepad++ - Powerful open source text editor written in C++, supports a wide range of programming languages, great multi-document and multi-view features.
30. OpenOffice.org - This open source package replaces my Microsoft Office installation. Is it as good? I think it's better! You won't have any problems with adjusting to it, the basic features are similar to those in Microsoft Office.
31. Orbit Downloader - Great download manager with the unique feature that allows you to grab video and audio files from websites such as YouTube.
32. PCInspector File Recovery - Very good data recovery tool, supports all file systems (FAT and NTFS), finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged.
33. PDF XChange Viewer - Very good PDF reader, a lot faster than Adobe Reader. And there's even more: you can convert your PDF files to various file formats, including BMP, JPG, PNG or TIFF. It can be integrated with Firefox or Internet Explorer.
34. PDFCreator - Very good freeware PDF writer, can create PDF files out of any printable document. It can be installed as standalone or as a server application - install on a single computer and have it available on all the machines in your network.
35. Quintessential Player (QCD) - Great audio player, my favorite, highly customizable with the various plugins that are available.
36. RadarSync - Finds driver updates for your hardware, downloads and installs them. Although it's not flawless it's still a very useful tool.
37. ReNamer - Very easy to use drag and drop file renamer, it offers all the standard renaming procedures: prefixes, suffixes, replacements, case changes, as well as removing contents of brackets, adding number sequences, changing file extensions.
38. Resize My Pictures - Tiny standalone application that allows you to resize pictures very quickly.
39. Screenshot Captor - Great screenshot capture program, lots of capture modes - Multimon (multiple monitors), Desktop, Active Window, Region, Windows Object. Supports multi-monitor and includes editing features for the screenshots.
40. SIW (System Information for Windows) - Great free system information tool, provides info about the components and software environment in your computer. Also has some interesting extra features like network bandwidth monitoring and password manager.
41. StarBurn - I've been using Nero before. I don't need it anymore, StarBurn is free and pretty good. I've burned several DVDs with it (including DVD video) and it never failed. Supports CD, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu Ray discs.
42. SUMo (Software Update Monitoring) - Identifies the software that you have installed in your system and checks the internet for updates. The latest version seems to have corrected most errors, works pretty fine.
43. SUPERAntiSpyware - The best antispyware solution that you can get for free. It doesn't provide resident protection, but if you just scan your computer with it once a week or so you should be fine.
44. SweepRAM - Outstanding tiny freeware memory optimizer with an unique approach. What you should do is, after you’ve turned your computer on, and started all applications that will be running all day long (antivirus, etc) run SweepRAM. That way, all running applications will reduce their memory use to the required amount, giving you as much RAM available for your work as possible.
45. SysTrayMeter - Tiny resource meter that sows you the CPU and memory usage. You can easily close it by double clicking on the icon in the system tray.
46. TUGZip - Very good free compression utility, works fine with almost any archive file format, fast and reliable.
47. TweakUI - Free from Microsoft? Well, it's for real :) A must have for any Windows XP user, allows you to tweak the setting you wouldn't have access to normally.
48. uTorrent - Best BitTorrent client, lightweight and reliable. The new version brings better functionality and some new features.
49. VirtualDub - Legendary open source editing tool, great for cutting and transcoding your video files for best quality avi output.
50. WordWeb - Great free dictionary and thesaurus, I'm already in love with it. It can be used to look up words from almost any program, showing definitions, synonyms and related words. It includes pronunciations and usage examples, has spelling and sounds-like links.
51. GigaTribe - I use this one for sharing files with my fiends and colleagues. It is easy to configure and perfect for connecting a small group of people. It includes a chat feature, so you can talk to your friends while they download your shared files.
The Conclusion
For the normal PC user, the user that doesn't do highly specialized work on his computer, the freeware alternatives that you can find in this list are more than enough.