Some great free software for keeping your pc in good shape

I have no idea. Why would you want to?
 
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Uhh.. copy settings from the registry of a win98 machine to the registry of a xp machine?

You're joking or I misunderstood :D
 
Well, the point is that I used to develop certain colour settings for my desktop display ... You know, you can change the colour of the buttons, frames, edit fields etc. manually - at least to a very large extend from within Win98SE (on desktop: right-click, and there go to "display" or "design" or how it's called in English versions, and there to "more" or wwhat the English-language versions have there).

These colour layouts or settings are stored within the registry, alas no longer in the win.ini, as it was custom in Win 3.1 (there I developed such settings, too ! :D ), so I've got to import them into the registry of my new winxp computer.

However, the old data still lies - including the whole OS ! - on my old harddisks (my new PC has a new harddisk), and therefore I don't really know where these settings are stored - physically. I know there's the USER.DAT and the SYSTEM.DAT, but what else ?

I'm not sure, but I think I'll need to look around.
 
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Thanks, I'll check this out.
 
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I'd like to make a ditto on VLC - just to remind people its a great open source media player that seems to keep ahead of the commercial stuff like WMP and WinAMP.

I didn't see any torrent programs recommended so I wanted to mention Azureus.

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/

Azureus 3 is bundled with Vuze unfortunately but there is a way to turn that off and make it look identical to Az2. Its other drawback is that its made with Java so its known to be a resource hog. On the other hand, Java allows it to run everywhere so it should work on any OS. There's a lot of flexibility with the settings too.

If you are looking for any peer to peer web broadcasting Sopcast seems to be the standard:

http://www.sopcast.org/
 
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Great recommendations!

Having recently made the switch to Vista, I also (re-)installed a bunch of useful and mostly free tools.

Already mentioned were Foxit PDF Reader, a fast and clean replacement for the heavyweight Adobe Reader, 7-Zip for your compression needs, Daemon Tools to mount ISO images and Spybot Search & Destroy to find and remove unwanted ad programs.

µTorrent
I had Azureus once but found it too slow during startup and use and thus switched to the light utorrent.

Comodo Firewall Pro 3.0
On WinXP I used ZoneAlarm Free, but due to issues with that and utorrent, I switched to Comodo. Looks fantastic, works like a charm, and it's also free.

(NOD32 Antivirus 2.7)
I was also using AntiVir PersonalEdition, but switched to NOD32, since there was a 1 year license in one of my c't magazines. They don't offer a free version, unfortunately, only a 30-day trial.

Notepad++
My notepad of choice. Reminds me of FoxitReader, kind of the same style. Syntax highlighting for lots of common file types.

XnView
It's very fast and does what I want my image viewer to do: view images in full screen, zoom with + and -, quit with Esc, go to next/previous image with mouse wheel or PgUp/PgDn. All without noticable loading times.
I loved ACD See back in the day when there was only version 3.0, which was fast, before they made a bloated suite out of it. I tried FastStone Image Viewer mentioned by Dark Savant and Moriendor too, some time ago, but couldn't get used to it, maybe due to the interface.

Free Download Manager
Great tool for downloading large files or many at once from a single website. You can click on a button to reduce download speed in case you need it for something else. In Firefox I can right click and select "download all files", set wildcards to "zip" and it would put all zip files in a queue and download them..
Looks and feels like FoxitReader too.

WinSplit Revolution
Got a large monitor? Don't know what to do with all your windows? Use this program. It lets your sort windows on your desktop on two sides, four or six corners, by a simple keystroke. No need to painfully resize every window manually. E.g. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 4 for one window, Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 6 for the other and they are both perfectly aligned next to each other and take up all available screen space. (Screenshots)

Oh, and last but definitely not least, already recommended by Gorath:

Total Commander
A file manager you use instead of Windows Explorer. Can't do file operations any faster than with this tool. It does take some getting used to if you only know Explorer, though. It's a bit like learning 10 finger typing when you are still a bit faster with two fingers. But eventually, it'll be worth it.
You can use it for ftp transfers, to synchronize directories so they have the same content, it offers a multi rename tool to easily rename lots of files at once, the list is endless. ;)
 
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Wow! Found a new incredibly usefull mp3 player.
Easily the best music player I've ever seen - I switched immeadiately.

http://mpesch3.de1.cc/1by1.html

"1by1 is a small, fast and handy audio player which is not only small: it provides a smart and versatile environment to handle your file collection and listen to your tracks - with no need for playlists or databases. "

The install file is 100kb :D Unbelievable!

Features: (copy n paste)

* Directory Player: directly plays your folder contents
* Full Resume play: remembers last track and position
* Supported decoders: ACM (mp3), mpglib (mp2, mp3)
* Winamp input plugin support (ogg, wav, cd..)
* Gapless play · simple crossfading · Audio enhancer
* Folder tree file navigation · Directory finder: plays a whole drive
* File utils: copy, move, rename while play, delete, date change
* Cue sheet support · Playlist support · Favorites · Big title display
 
Again, some great free software:

http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php

"PC WIZARD 2008 is a powerful utility designed especially for detection of hardware, but also some more analysis. It's able to identify a large scale of system components and supports the latest technologies and standards. This tool is periodically updated (usually once per month) in order to provide most accurate results.

PC WIZARD 2008 is also an utility designed to analyze and benchmark your computer system. It can analyze and benchmark many kinds of hardware, such as CPU performance, Cache performance, RAM performance, Hard Disk performance, CD/DVD-ROM performance, Removable/FLASH Media performance, Video performance, MP3 compression performance."
 
I have been using the auslogic defrag and it is great. I had to reformat the HD and found a pay for program that did a fast job getting me the latest drivers and software updates. Here is the link to Version Tracker Pro. It was a bit slow in the downloads at times but the time it saved me finding the right drivers was much greater. Thanks for this list guys.
 
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