Must-Have Freeware Tools

[Urwumpe]

Camstudio proved very uncapable for me. It is nice for 2D stuff, but once you try recording a D3D window with 1280x720@30fps, the result is crap to say the least.

I used it for capturing a video of the StarStreak (spaceplane/reusable sounding rocket) once, did work like it should.

 

[Countdown84]

InfraRecorder- a great CD burning application. I prefer this to CDBurnerXP, but both are good.

Inkscape - Very powerful program for creating clip-art style graphics

Metapad - fantastic replacement for the default notepad (you can actually replace your notepad.exe with it). Haven't used Notepad++ for comparison though.

Mediamonkey - best way to organize a music library I have found

SMPlayer - another lightweight, all-purpose media player

Crimson Editor or PSPad Editor - very powerful notepad-style editors for HTML, scripting, programming, etc.

I almost don't want to admit this, but after years of using Picasa I actually think Microsoft's Windows Live Photo Gallery is superior now. It loads images and thumbnails much faster, the indexing is not as much of a drag on resources, and editing photos is more intuitive (saves changes to original files, but backs them up as opposed to creating duplicate images everywhere).

That's my $0.02. Great thread!

 

[ex-orbinaut]

Camstudio proved very uncapable for me. It is nice for 2D stuff, but once you try recording a D3D window with 1280x720@30fps, the result is crap to say the least.

So it is no good for Orbiter? I was looking for something like this, and went ahead and downloaded it.

Some 3D and raytracers, not really 100% suited to Orbiter, but useful if you are doing animations or 3D stills for other pruposes (pros and cons each)...
http://www.povray.org/download/
http://www.daz3d.com/
http://www.k-3d.org/wiki/Main_Page

Scenery Generator type utilities;
http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/productmain.shtml

http://www.biederman.net/leslie/terranim8or/terranim8or.htm
(anim8or extention, most probably already know it)


And if you accidentally clear the Trash (sorry, Recycle...) with a mesh in there that you needed, I use;

http://download.cnet.com/Recover-Files/3000-2094_4-10715455.html?tag=mncol

 

[ar81]

Tricks to play old DOS/Win95/Win98 games in WinXP
Inlcludes a list of freeware tools to play your old games and software.
This will bring your old software back to life.

 

[astrosammy]

A nice thing for HTML file creation is HTML-Kit.
And this is what I use to create PDFs: PDFCreator.

 

[Oceanic]

guys your are just awesome! a lot of new toys to test!

Edit: Very usefull thread, stickied!

didn't see that one coming!

 

[Hielor]

1. well that's is true, but remember you have a shortcut in the start-menu directly to the windows-update website. if you check it regularly you can save yourself a few mb ram and your system will boot faster. i personaly don't disable the service.

Most users wouldn't check this as regularly as they should; having it always on is the safest bet and won't make a noticeable difference in either memory usage or boot time.

2. no options are choose automatically by xp-antispy and all can be restored, there are several options that you should really consider deactivate in your xp system. (windows media player global unique id ; mesaging service -net send; error report service; scripting host; internet explorer intergreated windows authentification; and others depending on you working/browsing behaviour)

net send: Yes, definitely should be disabled.
Error reporting service: Why would you disable this? Believe it or not, Microsoft does actually use this data quite extensively in finding and fixing bugs. It only kicks in after a crash, and the data that's sent is not personally identifiable.
IE Integrated windows authentication: Why disable this? It's only used when you access a Microsoft site that requires authentication, and if you have it disabled you have to download a separate tool in order to accomplish the same thing.

Honestly, although some of the things that this program does are valid performance tweaks, most of them are just paranoia that in the long run just ends up hurting you. Data from the CEIP and Error Reporting are used to determine what features are most used and what bugs are the biggest issues that need to be fixed. If, for example, all "power users" turn these features off, then Microsoft has no idea how power users are interacting with their computers (to improve upon the system) and also has no idea of what bugs they're running into.

Turn them off if you're paranoid about it, sure, but then don't complain when the bugs you run into or the features you like aren't worked on.

YSFLIGHT, for anybody who could be bored enough to play a free flight simulator.

FlightGear, a much, much better free flight simulator.

 

[Tommy]

As I just re-installed Windows myself last night, this list comes at a wonderful time. Here's a couple of my own favorites.

Sodipodi - A vector graphics tool (cross platform) which uses the W3C format:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sodipodi/

Image Magick = An image converter/editor with support for over 100 different image types. Can be used from the command line for batch processing. Also cross platform:
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php

Textpad - A notepad replacement. Less features than Notepad++, features syntax highlighting for a variety of programming languages and formats, including .rib and .sl.
"Dosify" function will convert cut-and-pasted text from Word documents into web compliant ascii standard. Easy to create a new syntax profile - useful for annotating flight recordings:
http://www.textpad.com/

Synthfornt - Uses freely available high quality Soundfonts to "render" MIDI files into wave files, independantly of the sound card. Can be useful on PC's with low quality or built-in sound cards:
http://www.synthfont.com/

Ext2 IFS - Ext2 and Ext3 filesystem support (read and write) for Windows, very handy on dual boot PC's:
http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html

 

[Oceanic]

Error reporting service: Why would you disable this? Believe it or not, Microsoft does actually use this data quite extensively in finding and fixing bugs. It only kicks in after a crash, and the data that's sent is not personally identifiable.

example: using "browser of choice" on a heavy flashplayer loaded day, flashplayer gives up, browser frezzes --> no nagging

IE Integrated windows authentication: Why disable this? It's only used when you access a Microsoft site that requires authentication, and if you have it disabled you have to download a separate tool in order to accomplish the same thing.

Honestly, although some of the things that this program does are valid performance tweaks, most of them are just paranoia that in the long run just ends up hurting you. Data from the CEIP and Error Reporting are used to determine what features are most used and what bugs are the biggest issues that need to be fixed. If, for example, all "power users" turn these features off, then Microsoft has no idea how power users are interacting with their computers (to improve upon the system) and also has no idea of what bugs they're running into.
Turn them off if you're paranoid about it, sure, but then don't complain when the bugs you run into or the features you like aren't worked on.
[/QUOTE]

very vaild arguments never though about them, on my side it's paranoia i don't like it if a program/tool/service does something without me knowing it.

No no, I'm not starting a browser debate, just looking for information.
Does opera make any registry edits? FF, to my knowledge, doesn't.

Sorry, one more, does opera color manage profiles?

it does the same edits/new keys like FF (install path, file association, start menu shortcut) nothing more and of course you don't have to set it as default browser. but there are ways to install it as portable (without any installation, unfortunately you'll need a small tool for that) . it supports profiles but i'm not 100% sure if the portable one does, if you have more profiles the downside is that if you customized it as much as i have, you have to do the work twice

 

[tblaxland]

notepad++ awesome notepad/wordpad alternative, compare you orbiter scenario, config, ini -files, it highlight's you the differences

That looks an interesting tool. I generally use NoteTab Light for general text editing since it has some powerful automation tools (it collectively calls them the "Clipbook" but really they are like macros). For comparing text files I use WinMerge, very easy to use, very powerful, can output reports in html format for non-WinMerge users, etc.

 

[willy88]

InSSIDer:
http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider

NetStumbler (does not work with Vista):
http://www.netstumbler.com/downloads/

LogMeIn:
https://secure.logmein.com/home.asp?lang=en

Sun VirtualBox:
http://www.sun.com/software/products/virtualbox/

SpeedFan:
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

WinDirStat:
http://windirstat.info/

 

[Biscuit]

That looks an interesting tool. I generally use NoteTab Light for general text editing since it has some powerful automation tools (it collectively calls them the "Clipbook" but really they are like macros). For comparing text files I use WinMerge, very easy to use, very powerful, can output reports in html format for non-WinMerge users, etc.

Well, if you're going to recommend free editors, I'd have to recommend VIM ... A really great port of the good ol' VI editor. What I do all of my vbscript coding in. (definitely has a learning curve, but when I'm working on a document or a script, I really, really hate having to continually jump back and forth from the mouse to keyboard to mouse, etc.)

Also, if you're working on code, it has built in syntax highlighting ... really handy.

 

[ar81]

Power to change
An utility that allows you to compare your consumption with average user in terms of carbon emissions.

 

[TSPenguin]

My preferred editor at this time is UltraEdit. I'd be happy to switch to a free (and more lightweight) one, but so far I haven't found one that has something similar to UEs column mode.
Yes, I know I can do it with vi. But c'mon, a little wysiwyg is nice at times

 

[agentgonzo]

Canon Digital Photo Professional
An absolutely awesome piece of software. It won't let you edit photos on the same scale as photoshop/GIMP, but does make editing lots of photos remarkably easy. You can return from a holiday with hundreds of photos, open them in DPP and step between each photo with ease, quickly modifying colour balance, exposure, rotation, cropping etc without needing to open/save each file individually. At the end you can export all photos to jpg/png etc as a batch process in one easy step.

I can't emphasise how easy this makes organising and editing your digital photos. It feels like it was written by a software engineer at Canon who is also a very keen photographer and seemed to say "what all the other applications are missing is x. I'll write an application to do it properly"

 

[Face]

For developers I can recommend some good, free versioning tools (assuming Windows here):

• TortoiseSVN - Subversion client - a centralized versioning tool
• TortoiseHG - Mercurial client - a distributed versioning tool
• Fossil - a distributed versioning tool with built-in bug-tracker and wiki - commandline only, but easy to install

And if you're in for command-line-fu from time to time, a good wrapper for cmd.exe is Console2.

regards,
Face

 

[agentgonzo]

For developers I can recommend some good, free versioning tools (assuming Windows here):

• TortoiseSVN - Subversion client - a centralized versioning tool

If you use visual studio, I also suggest AnkhSVN/AnkhCVS. A Subversion/CVS plugin to use source control from within Visual Studio.

 

[ar81]

InSSIDer:
NetStumbler (does not work with Vista):
LogMeIn:
Sun VirtualBox:
SpeedFan:
WinDirStat:

What do they do?

 

[willy88]

What do they do?

InSSIDer and NetStumbler show a graph and a list of all the wireless networks within range.

LogMeIn allows you to remotely connect to your computer.

VirtualBox is a virtual machine.

SpeedFan allows you to control the fans in your computer and see the temperature readings.

WinDirStat shows a map of your hard drive.

 

[ar81]

Visual Basic CCE
Free version of Visual Basic 5.0