Windows Notes

From Catholicpenguin

This page contains tidbits of useful free software, etc, that I use over and over on my windows machines.

Software

A collection of useful free software that I use.

Obvious Stuff

Preques that everone should know about and have, but nevertheless listed here for completeness.

• Firefox
• Java - Not the slow useless program it used to be 10 years ago.
• Gimp - The open source altnative to Photoshop. Nowhere near as good, but...
• Winamp - The simple and just works media player for years. Be sure to get the super lite version and be careful while running through the installer and uncheck all the junk.

Maybe Not So Obvious Stuff

This that maybe aren't as commonly known, but are in my opnion are great, usually the best of the breed for the price.

• IfranView - Small free image viewer with lossless JPEG rotation. Get the plugin pack as well.
• CutePDF - One of several good free PDF printers that wraps a nice front end around Ghostscript. Works great, you'll use it more often then you think. You need both the 'converter' and CutePDF.
• PDFTools - Lets you split and combine PDFs.
• GSview - The more powerful, free version of Acrobat Reader. Lets you do all sorts of powerful things w/ PS and PDF files. See Extracting data and images from PDFs for an application of this program.
• Audacity - Free sound editing program. While it won't cut it for professional sound recording (See Adobe Audition for that), it works wonderfully for general purpose sound recording work.
• XVID codec - Open source version of the DivX codec.
• Virtualdub - Open source video conversion tool, also a great tool for debugging webcams.
• Wireshark - Spinoff of the famous Ethereal network sniffer.
• RASPPPoE - Excellent implementation of the PPPoE protocol for Windows. Useful if have a DSL provider that uses this method of connection. Even supports multi link aggregation, tho probably your DSL provider doesn't.
• NetStumbler - The classic WLAN 'war driving' tool. Super useful when debugging WiFi connections.
• NTLM Authorization Proxy Server - An HTTP proxy that authenticates to an NTLM proxy server, then passes the data through. Super useful when you want to run things like, say, Firefox, which do not support NTLM authentication through your corporate proxy server. Requires Python.
• Netstat Live - A nice tool that provides a realtime bandwidth graph for Windows 2000 (or lower machines) which don't have it built into the Task Manager.
• FileZilla and FileZilla Server - If you're like me, you tend to ignore FTP right up until you need to quickly install a free server to share some file, or find a decent small client to retrieve something Internet Explorer won't get. And then you spend hours looking for something amid all the shareware crap on Google. Here's something. Works great.
• ImageMagick - A set of command line utilities for working with images. I use it for resizing batches of photos before putting them on the web as it's fast, and it's quality is the best I've seen from anything except maybe Gimp or Photoshop. Use it like this: mogrify -resize 1024x768 *.JPG in a folder of images you want resized. Note: It will overwrite the original images, so make a copy first.
• X-Lite VoIP Softphone - A free windows VoIP SIP softphone that doesn't seem to be as slow and boggy as SJPhone as gotten to be. Sometimes can be a bit problematic w/ your sound card however, so try it first. If by chance it doesn't work, try...
• SJPhone - The original popular VoIP phone. Lately IMHO it's gotten bloated and slow. But it usually works, and it's free.
• AVG Antivirus - For personal, non commercial use, a free excellent virus scanner.
• Dia - The open source alternative to Visio. I actually like it better.
• Inkscape - The open source alternative to Illustrator. Really good at authoring SVGs.
• VLC - The VideoLan player, the open source plays anything media player. Theoretically it plays anything. In reality, it's really only useful for me to play DVD's w/ CSS encryption w/o finding another media player.
• mplayer - Command line media player and encoder in the same vain as ImageMagick. It'll take you at least a week to read through all the command line options, but on the other hand, it can decode just about anything to raw WAV or AVI, including, for example, M4A decrypted audio from Apple's iTMS.
• AlwayOnTopMaker - A very small utility that lets any program be 'stick' or always on top
• Batch Picture Resize - A single exe small picture resizer which "just works". It's awesome and free.