My top 10, er, *11*, freeware Windows utilities

[trixtah]

I've been meaning to do a post for ages about the great freeware software that's around, and here it is, finally. It's for Windows software only, for which I make no apology. Apple is not exactly across the free software paradigm (unless you dig into the BSD underpinnings), and naturally they provide a lot of functionality out of the box (especially for handling media). For Linux, well, duh.

1. This is a no-brainer: Firefox. Now, the browser is good, and 3.5 is shaping up well with its new Javascript engine, and CSS support. However, pretty much any modern browser does a decent job these days; even IE has tabbed browsing. No, the killer app with Firefox is its extensibility. IE is a joke, and Opera's addins are total crap. So in that respect, there are three things that really make it for me for Firefox:
   
   1. Gmail Manager (although that's not working in FF 3.5 yet, unless you cheat). Being able to automatically check and directly login to multiple Gmail accounts is total win.
   2. Adblock Plus. Need I say more? I was recently party to a discussion about the ad overload on Facebook - erm, I hadn't ever seen any, except from those spammy "applications" that go around (ok, a few of those are fun. Not the ones that are advertising and nothing else).
   3. Zotero. cheshire put me onto this citation management tool, and it is total WIN. The ability to nab citations from the uni library Webpac, Google Scholar, online databases of any description, and even Amazon is fantastic. Add the ability to fully index text-based PDFs, archive and index web pages, tagging, notes, page snapshots... OMG, it's love. Really, best software I've used for ages. And that's not mentioning the nifty part where you can insert your references correctly formatted in pretty much any style into your documents. Nor the fact you can register on their site, synch your citations (although not any attachments) to the site entirely for free, and be able to access them from anywhere with an Internet connection and Firefox. Holy shit.
2. Paint.NET. If you're still using MS Paint for anything or playing stupid amounts of money for things like cut-down versions of Photoshop, when all you want to do is tweak some photos, adjust colour levels, and clean them up a bit, or do some drawing, put what you're using down and get Paint.NET. As it says on the tin, you need the .NET framework on your machine, but if you're running XP and up, you should have that anyway. It has a number of drawing and image tweaking controls in an OMG EASY interface. It does layers. And you can download plugins to extend functionality, like more image adjustment features, or importing RAW files, or any number of things. It's powerful, and much more intuitive to use than Photoshop and especially GIMP.
3. Foobar2000 is an excellent music player. It plays just about any music file format you can think of, but the most powerful feature is an excellent tagging function. It's a bit barebones when you first install it, but you can download plugins to add more display feaures, and support things like iPods, as well as skins to make it look prettier. It interfaces with Last.fm, so it will scrobble the tracks you play, and stream radio stations. It will rip CDs beautifully, filling in the track info from FreeDB. The only slight "difficulty" is that you need to download the encoder for each file type you want to rip to. That's it. It's also completely portable. You can stick it on a USB key and take it anywhere.
4. Notepad++. A really excellent Notepad replacement. It has tabs, will reopen files that were open when you closed the product, and it has syntax highlighting for just about any programming language you care to use. But the best thing for me is its really powerful search-and-replace functionality. It will even do regular expression search and replacing.
5. VLC and/or Miro. VLC is a free media player, which will play pretty much any video or audio format with no need to download codecs. While the basic interface is basic, there are some nice skins you can install to pretty things up. For Firefox users, there's a VLC plugin that will allow all manner of media to be played inside Firefox - you select to install the plugin when you install the product. Miro is a product that builds on VLC, by using RSS and Bittorrent to create a media subscription service that runs really well. You can subscribe to podcasts, video blogs, and other media feeds, and they just show up in the player when a new one is ready. You can also use it just as a media player instead of VLC.
6. Audacity is a fantastic audio editing application which will output into any number of file formats (again, you have to get any encoders that you want to use, although WAV is a default). Want to nab a rare track from YouTube? Play it on your PC while you've got Audacity set to "record". Trim the rubbish from the beginning and the end (drag-select > DEL), select your export format, done. And, hey, Mac and Linux users are catered for as well (although the Linux interface was horrible; don't know if it's improved recently).
7. 7-zip is an excellent zipping tool, which is completely free, will fit on a floppy disk, if you actually have any, and unzips just about any format you can think of, including ZIP, GZIP, BZIP, TAR (and will zip those too, and its own special .7z format), as well as RAR (yay! I hate hate hate WINRAR), CHM, CAB, ... (it won't encode those latter ones though). It integrates with Windows Explorer, so if you want unzip a file, you right-click on it and select "extract" (there are a few options to choose from). Zipping files is the same, in reverse. There's a command-line interface that you don't have to pay for (boo Winzip).
8. µTorrent. The best Windows bittorrent client, if you're not using it already. The most similar product on Linux is KTorrent.
9. Avast Home Edition. A very good virus scanner, completely free, and not prone to support/licencing weirdness like AVG has been of late. You register on the site, and you get updates and automatic signature file updates.
10. Foxit PDF reader. I hate Acrobat. Bloat bloat bloat. Foxit has a good search function, does notes, highlighting, comments, bookmarks, the works, and doesn't try to jam crap onto your system.
11. Super © is a good video encoder and transcoder (for example, converting MPEGs to AVI, or shrinking a file size, etc). While the documentation on using it is horrible, it's as simple as select your options, drag and drop the file into the file box, and hit Go.

Now, the only thing I am really feeling the lack of in Windows freeware is a good video ripping/editing tool. There are some, but they are pigs to use.