Well, I got a new computer today, and as I set up the XP partition, I thought I would post a list of the excellent free tools that I put on all the machines I use. So here we go:
Productivity:

  • AllerCalc (Freeware): Excellent replacement for the windows calculator, allowing the user to do substantially more complicated equations.
  • Open Office (Open Source): Very mature office suite that is highly compatible with MS Office.
  • Paint.net (Open Source): A fantastic .NET paint program that is meant as a replacement for the paint program that comes with windows.
  • Picasa (Freeware): Google’s photo organizer, helps me bring some order to the thousands of photos I take.
  • Winamp (Freeware): The classic mp3 player for windows. IMHO, still the best.
  • Winzip (Shareware): Why do I still use winzip? Because I personally think XP’s handling of zip files kind of sucks, and winzip is still better.

Networking:

  • Mozilla Firefox (Open Source): Bar none a far better browser then IE. Live it, love it, use it.
  • Mozilla Thunderbird (Open Source): Not only do I use this with my deals hack, but I use it for my mail. Excellent mail client.
  • Bittorrent (Open Source): Great way to download large files. Spreads the bandwidth usage across multiple users.
  • FileZilla (Open Source): Good, usable and open source FTP client
  • GAIM (Open Source): IM client for AIM, MSN, YM, ICQ, Jabber, Irc, etc. Seems much more stable to me then other multi-im clients. Has a spell checker – Yum!
  • Google Desktop Search (Freeware): Makes finding files on your own system actually bearable
  • NMap (Open Source): For all your port scanning needs.
  • Putty (Open Source): Great SSH suite of tools. Does SSH, SSH2, Telnet and Rlogin.
  • Winscp (Open Source): What I prefer to use instead of FTP – this lets me move files around the net, but with solid security.
  • Shareazza (Open Source): As far as I can tell the best p2p app out there. Does nutella, G2 & eDonkey.
  • TightVNC (Open Source): VNC (desktop sharing) server and client.
  • Waste (Open Source): Secure IM and file sharing for me and my group of friends.

Programming:

  • Java SDK 1.5 (Freeware): Well, I’m a java programmer, gotta have a JDK.
  • Eclipse (Open Source): The emacs of the java world, except that it’s actually usable without hand injury.
  • ActiveState Perl/Python/TCL (Open Source, sort of): Compilers on windows for a number of unix scripting languages. Activestate makes em a bunch more usable on windows.
  • TortoiseCVS (Open Source): Explorer interface to CVS source control.
  • TortoiseSVN (Open Source): Explorer interface to Subversion source control. I’ll post a hack about this later.
  • YourKit Java Profiler (Free for Open Source projects): Best Java Profiler Ever.
  • Textpad (Shareware): Fantastic, lightweight text editor. If I don’t open it in eclipse, I open it in textpad (on windows).
  • Squirrel SQL (Open Source): Usable, but slightly clunky Database front end for any JDBC database.

Utilities:

  • Cygwin (Open Source): This is the program that makes windows a usable environment for me. Gives windows a unix shell, and ports all the major unix utilities to windows. No more Dos!
  • Sysinternals utilities (Freeware): Sysinternals has a number of fantastic windows utilities that let you see how programs interact with the filesystem, registery and network.