Some great free software for keeping your pc in good shape

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Great FREE software for your windows PC - A List.

I thought I'd post about some great software that has really been helpful & useful for me. This stuff is all free and I've been using them myself and I can recommend them to anyone. These are programs that help keep a windows pc working nice and fast, so that people can concentrate on the importants things ... like playing CRPGs. :D

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Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition
http://www.free-av.com/
- An excellent free antivirus program. It has a bit more features
than any of the other free AV programs making it the best free AV suite.

Ccleaner
http://www.ccleaner.com/
- Download the slim version. Cleans much of the crap on your harddrive.
Temp files, usage tracks, useless & obsolete files, etc...
Works great. Truly a must have. Includes a reg cleaner and startup manager.

7-ZIP
http://www.7-zip.org/
- Very light and fast compression & archive tool. Easy to use.
Supports dozens of file formats. Excellent.

Spybot - Search and destroy
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/index.html
- The best spyware&adware&malware removal tool i've seen.
Has tons of nice features under the "advanced" button.

Eusing free registry cleaner
http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_cleaner/registry_cleaner.htm
- A nice, simple, fast and efficient easy to use tool to clean up all the garbage
from windows registry. Highly recommended. Very easy to use. Does not cause problems.

Foxit PDF reader
http://filehippo.com/download_foxit/
- Uninstall the adobe reader and get this one immediately.
It's better in every possible way and it's incredibly fast.

TweakUI.
http://www.download.com/3000-2341-2830963.html
http://filehippo.com/download_tweakui/
With it the windows user interface (and many other things) can be adjusted to suit your needs. I like to disable all the unnecessary eyecandy. Makes using a computer much faster and easier. A must have. And it's official from MS.

Daemon Tools
http://filehippo.com/download_daemon_tools/
- "The application mounts ISO images to a virtual drive without having to burn them to a CD. DAEMON Tools is a virtual cd/dvd-rom emulator and is able to emulate nearly all known copy protections on the market today."

Auslogics Disk Defrag
http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag/index.php
- The best defragger I've seen. Great user interface and it's very small
and fast. Does not install additional background services on your computer
like most of the other defraggers out there do.

PageDefrag
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/PageDefrag.mspx
-"Paging and Registry file fragmentation can be one of the leading causes of performance degradation related to file fragmentation in a system.
PageDefrag uses advanced techniques to provide you what commercial defragmenters cannot: the ability for you to see how fragmented your paging files and Registry hives are, and to defragment them. "

Freeram XP Pro
http://www.yourwaresolutions.com/software.html
- Excellent freeware ram tool.

Guru3D - Driver Sweeper
http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?page=driversweeper
- Always use this before installing new drivers to avoid some serious trouble.

PDF Creator
http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator
- Excellent free tool to create PDF files from any Windows application.

Abiword
http://www.abisource.com/
-AbiWord is a free word processing program. Brilliant. openoffice is too bloated.

Alvaro's Messenger
http://www.amsn-project.net/
- I dont like the Microsoft one. I use this one instead.

Irfanview
http://www.irfanview.com/
- Easily the best 100% Free image viewer/editor -tool.
A must have. Very fast. Very stable. Very lightweight.

1by1
http://mpesch3.de1.cc/1by1.html
- Extremely useful and light mp3 player. It does not
need playlists nor does it take over your computer just
to play some mp3's. It is directory based. The best audio
player software I've seen. Free, Small & Fast.
Very easy to use.

VLC PLayer
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
- The best videoplayer. Supports a ton of different video formats
without installing any codecs. I Love it. I hate installing codecs.
VLC just works. It plays anything I throw at it right out of the box
and it's fast and lightweight.

Zonealarm Free
http://filehippo.com/download_zonealarm_free/
- My firewall of choice. I tried many of the alternatives but they were
all way too complex for my tastes. Way Too many buttons. Zonealarm is easy and simple and it just works.

Pixia
http://www.ne.jp/asahi/mighty/knight/download.htm
- Excellent free image manipulation program. Simple, fast, free and
has many nice features.

Adblock Plus
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
- An addon for mozilla. This thing makes all the ads embedded into websites go away. It really works. And it's free :D
- After instaling Adblock Plus, get this also:
http://easylist.adblockplus.org/

Audacity
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
- If you need to edit/record audio this is the way to go.

Notepad++
http://filehippo.com/download_notepad/
- Light, Powerfull & Versatile text editor.

GraphCalc
http://www.graphcalc.com/
- Excellent free calculator.

WinSCP
http://winscp.net/eng/index.php
- For all your FTP, SCP or SFTP needs.

XP-Antispy
http://www.xp-antispy.org/
-Very useful little tool that makes it easier to disable some
unnecessary and questionable features of a modern windows OS.

***

These are the programs I liked the best. I tried most of the more popular free programs and these are the ones that still reside on my system.

Hopefully someone will find this list useful. And please post your suggestions too!
 
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Interesting list. I know Spybot is good, but I'm not au fait with the rest. How about some helpful comments from a few others.
 
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An excellent place to look for free software is
http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/

Just choose a category and sort the results in order of popularity and you'll
have a very nice list of programs in the category you're interested in. this site has
saved me so many times :D

Also, from that site you can check out user reviews for the programs I just mentioned, for example.
 
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CloneSpy is a Free Duplicate File CleanUp Tool for Windows© 98se/NT/ME/2000/XP

fast and easy to use.
 
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Would you say that comodo thingie is better than zonealarm?
Zonealarm is kinda heavy...

talking about the free product here.. I'm not interested
in anything but 100% free software. (Let's also keep
this thread about free software, please? )
 
Comodo is 100 percent free (although I think you might have to register to get a free keycode for updating, but that might have been avast) and it's better than zone alarm, IMO. It has a lighter footprint from what I understand and is more intuitive in regards to bugging you for permissions. I've used both and Comodo is a lot better I think, but that's just my opinion. Both that and Zone Alarm are good freeware offerings, though.

Here's a review in case you're interested:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1969225,00.asp
 
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I've heard that Kerio is an excellent free firewall as well!!
 
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Just found a neat tool for older games last night. I bought the Deus Ex: Game of the Year edition on Steam since I felt like replaying this classic and was having some problems because the game ran too fast. This is due to dual core processors which Deus Ex can't handle very well. ALT+TAB'ing out of Deus Ex to set the processor affinity crashes the game (at least on my rig) and it's obviously also a pain in the ass if you have to set the affinity manually every time you start the game.
Sooo... I started looking for a tool to set the CPU affinity and came upon this extremely neat and helpful Task Assignment Manager from THG. It lets you create profiles for games in the most easy way and you just need to let the tool run in the background while playing. Highly recommended for older games that have issues with multi core CPUs! :)
 
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Thanks Mo, as someone with a DC system who regularly plays old games, this might prove useful!!
 
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Stumbled upon some very interesting software (Free - of course):
http://hfslip.org/
http://www.nliteos.com/
http://www.vlite.net/ (For you vista people out there)

I'm gonna go with HFSLIP and create a win2k install media for myself
with ALL the servicepaks, fixes, patches, updates etc from microsoft
(including directx, mediaplayer, ie) slipstreamed in.

I'm propably gonna do this in a week or two. Let you know how it goes.
 
yeah abiword rocks. openoffice is way too much bloat an unneccessary stuff. way too many buttons.
 
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You can't call THAT an Operating System! Heresy! Blasphemy!
If it is NOT fully compatible with Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate 2 & TES III -
IT IS NOT AN OS !! It is a disgusting abomination! :D
 
You can't call THAT an Operating System! Heresy! Blasphemy!
If it is NOT fully compatible with Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate 2 & TES III -
IT IS NOT AN OS !! It is a disgusting abomination! :D

Devs should make more stuff to make it run on linux. We would live in a better world!
 
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