Useful Software
A number of free (or nearly-so) programs and utilites keep my (Windows) computer tuned and make day-to-day life online that little bit easier. I present a selection here in the hope you may also find some of them useful.
All the products on this page can be used indefinitely for free, although some will try and upsell. There will eventually be another page for products I have found worth purchasing after a limited free trial period.
Documents and images
Foxit pdf viewer is an incredibly fast substitute for the Adobe Acrobat reader, with some additional functonality.
IrfanView is a very fast and compact graphic viewer and editor. I particularly like it's batch-processing features.
Picasa is the photo-management application from Google, and comes with a generous allotment of free web space for online albums.
You may also be interested in the other applications in the Google Pack
Alternative Web Browsers
Avant adds functionality to the Internet Explorer engine
Google Chrome is the new kid on the block.
Mozilla Firefox is the most well known of the non-IE web browsers.
Opera is the one I use as my primary browser.
Communication
Digsby is a single resource-light application that lets you:
- chat with your contacts on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber.
- manage your Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other mail service inboxes.
- follow what's happening on your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn accounts.
- enable people to chat with you from your website.
Skype is best-known for voice and video messaging and also enables cheap calling to landlines and mobile phones around the world.
Microsoft Windows management tools
WinDirStat provides a visual representation of your hard drive which quickly lets you identify the largest files and directories on your computer.
Startup delayer lets you take control of the accumulated utility programs that try to launch when you boot your computer and assign a time delay to each, meaning you can get the essentials loaded and start working without waiting for Windows to finish with the rest.
CCleaner has a number of functions to free up hard drive space and allow Windows to run faster.
- find and remove unused and obsolete temporary files from your system.
- clean traces of your online activities such as your Internet history.
- contains a fully featured registry cleaner.
The freeware file defragmenter Diskeeper Lite is no longer available from Diskeeper Corp., but can still be found for download. It features speed and efficiency improvements over the default Windows utility and will periodically inform you about the state of your hard disk.
GoodSync is an easy-to-use file syncronisation program great for keeping files in sync between a PC and a laptop or backed up across a network / to an external hard drive. The free trial allows you to keep using the product for up to three projects even after it expires.