Some great free software for keeping your pc in good shape

I use VLC Media Player on my Windows XP based HTPC. It plays everything I can throw at it and, to my eyes, the quality is better than WMP.

Thx -> This made my movies look very good on the 24". The media player made it blury every few seconds. Btw, I can confirm this works under vista ultimate 64 too. Perhaps it would be good to split some stuff cause not everything will work under vista 64. (I had a mcafee unlimited version 8, but it fails to install)
 
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Here are a few of my favorites that haven't been mentioned:
  • Programmer's Notepad 2 - "The free, open source, text editor with special features for coders."
  • Zip Genius - A great archiving utility that can handle multiple archive types.
  • Ultimate Boot CD - Assembles over 100 PC hardware diagnosis tools into one bootable CD to analyze and repair hard drives and boot problems.
  • G-Spot - Identify audio and video codec information for video files.
  • NoScript (Firefox extension) -
    The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and others mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java, Flash and other plugins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser.

    NoScript's unique whitelist based pre-emptive script blocking approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities (known and even not known yet!) with no loss of functionality...
  • (requisite UNIX pimp) FreeBSD - For when you'd like to use your PC for things other than gaming ;)

Edit: Forgot G-Spot and NoScript
 
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Thx -> This made my movies look very good on the 24". The media player made it blury every few seconds. ...
Glad to hear it! One thing I really appreciate is the fact that with VLC I can play back standard DVDs in full screen resolution i.e., no 'pillar box'. If you find a better player out there, please let me know.
 
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I use media player classic and windows media player for dvds. MPC is very compact, while WMP can do auto-bookmarking to movie i'm watching when closing it, how about VLC?
 
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KMPlayer seems like very promising audio-video player. I use Winamp for long time, also tried VLC, Media Player Classic, Windows Media Player. KMPlayer could run video such downloaded game trailers smoother if compared to Winamp, and has much more features with variety of playback options.

BTW, recently found Wordweb - a both online and offline thesaurus and dictionary.
http://wordweb.info/free/
 
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Something for more security on your PC; this was recommended in the latest c't magazine:

Secunia PSI (Personal Software Inspector) compares the versions of your installed software with the latest versions and alerts you of possible updates and patches.

It did find some important ones on my system I neglected to update before, most notably flashplayer and quicktime, which should always be updated ASAP.
 
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AVG is going to stop support on version 7.5 by the end of the month so they are pushing users upgrade to 8 ASAP.

I went and did the upgrade but was disappointed by the inclusion of anti-spyware software and other extras I couldn't remove.

I've gone back to Avira and I have to put up with some adware after db updates.

I can't remember why I switched from it to AVG the last time. It may have been because of that, or I got a virus it failed to block, or I had upgraded to Vista and Avira wasn't ready yet. It obviously is now.
 
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Can we sticky this? I had to work to find this again.

I don't know if I've mentioned XAMPP

both my Database class and my Client/Network class use this as an all in one web server and database.

http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

among a few others it has MySQL and Apache in a simple, easy to use package and simple controls to turn them off and on.

Versions of XAMPP are in Windows, MAC OSX, Linux, and Solaris.
 
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This thread has become extremely useful, and will only get more so.
I would agree with the sticky-thing.
 
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are there any recommendations for good backup software for XP?

I thought it had one built in but I couldn't find it. Vista's seems decent though I've yet to try it.
 
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Does anybody know a tool to save the active browser page as .pdf or .djvu? I want to archive a couple of articles.
 
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xp-AntiSpy 3.97 has been released last week. This is a must-have. It's the first thing I use when OS and firewall are installed.

Total Commander has been updated in August. A critical bug was fixed.
 
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Does anybody have a link to a site specialized on correctly adjusting a CRT? I don't want to really calibrate it, but so far the colors don't seem 100% correct and everything is too dark. I would like to at least get a little bit closer to the real thing.
 
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