Windows XP/Vista
Listed software is either free software (as in free speech) or gratis (as in no need to pay to use, freeware)
General Usage Applications
Ant Movie Catalog "Ant Movie Catalog is a free (really free, i.e. the source code is available) program made to manage your collection of movies DVD, CD (VideoCD, DivX, ...) and tapes."
avast! Antivirus
"avast! antivirus software is based on the ALWIL Software Virus, Worm and Trojan horse scanning technology since 1988. The avast! antivirus portfolio includes a number of products, providing effective protection at all levels - from PDAs to large networks."
DAEMON Tools
"DAEMON Tools Lite is a virtual DVD-ROM emulator based on a SCSI miniport driver. It emulates max. 4 DVD-ROM drives and works with CD/DVD images created by many burning programs. It is great on notebooks without a physical CD-/DVD-ROM drive or to save akku power and speed up CD/DVD access. In opposite to other CD-/DVD-ROM emulators DAEMON Tools Lite doesn't use a proprietary container format. The advantage is that you can can burn the images you're using with DAEMON Tools Lite right away or just test an image before burning it to see if it was created correctly. DAEMON Tools Lite works with most image formats. Moreover it has a special feature to make physical (burned) backups of your CD / DVD images when it is possible. It supports Alcohol120%-Images (MDS-Files) and RMPS-Media! It's also great if you want save Power on your Notebook"
Explore2fs
"Explore2fs is a GUI explorer tool for accessing ext2 and ext3 filesystems. It runs under all versions of Windows and can read almost any ext2 and ext3 filesystem."
Google Talk
"A Google approach to instant communications"
InfraRecorder
"InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration.
InfraRecorder is released under GPL version 2."
Notepad++
"Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment."
WinHTTrack
"HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility.
It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.
WinHTTrack is the Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP release of HTTrack, and WebHTTrack the Linux/Unix/BSD release."
WinMerge
WinMerge is an Open Source visual text file differencing and merging tool for Win32 platforms. It is highly useful for determining what has changed between project versions, and then merging changes between versions.
Features
- Visual differencing and merging of text files
- Flexible editor with syntax highlighting, line numbers and word-wrap
- Handles DOS, UNIX and MAC text file formats
- Unicode support
- Difference pane shows current difference in two vertical panes
- Location pane shows map of files compared
- Highlights differences inside lines in file compare
- Regular Expression based file filters in directory compare allow excluding and including items
- Moved lines detection in file compare
- Creates patch files
- Shell Integration (supports 64-bit Windows versions)
- Rudimentary Visual SourceSafe and Rational ClearCase integration
- Archive file support using 7-Zip
- Plugin support
- Localizable interface via resource DLL
- Online manual and installed HTML Help manual"
WinSCP
"WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client and FTP client for Windows. Legacy SCP protocol is also supported. Its main function is safe copying of files between a local and a remote computer."
X-Chat 2
"Official X-Chat for Windows version has been made shareware (30 days trial), but X-Chat is still open-source and licensed under GPL. So there are a few free non-official builds, and mine is among them. You can find more in Wikipedia.
X-Chat has two good features of usability: colored nicknames and alignment by text as opposed to alignment by nicks. When you read text, it's enough for eyes to notice the colors of nicknames, which they can do when they are focused to somewhere else near, and you may know at once who is writing. Colors are unobtrusive and there just 6 of them—not to burden your short-term memory. And eyes don't have to search for ends of nicknames, they can start reading text at once when text is aligned by the beginning."
Office/Productivity Applications
PDFCreator
"PDFCreator easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. Use it like a printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows application."
SumatraPDF
"Sumatra PDF is a slim, free, open-source PDF viewer for Windows."
Image/Graphics Manipulation and 3D Rendering
IrfanView
"IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista."
Paint.NET
"Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins."
Video Editing
VirtualDub
"VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images."
Development Software
IDEs
Bloodshed Dev-C++
"Bloodshed Dev-C++ is a full-featured Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the C/C++ programming language. It uses Mingw port of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) as it's compiler. Dev-C++ can also be used in combination with Cygwin or any other GCC based compiler.
Features are :
- Support GCC-based compilers
- Integrated debugging (using GDB)
- Project Manager
- Customizable syntax highlighting editor
- Class Browser
- Code Completion
- Function listing
- Profiling support
- Quickly create Windows, console, static libraries and DLLs
- Support of templates for creating your own project types
- Makefile creation
- Edit and compile Resource files
- Tool Manager
- Print support
- Find and replace facilities
- CVS support"
Entice Designer
"Entice Designer is a Form Designer for DFL, and DWT, is a rich code editor, and is on the path to becoming an IDE."
SharpDevelop
"#develop (short for SharpDevelop) is a free IDE for C#, VB.NET and Boo projects on Microsoft's .NET platform."
Software Deployment Tools
HM NIS Edit "HM NIS Edit is the best Editor/IDE for Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS). Its useful for experts and beginners in the creation of Setup programs with the NSIS. Its Script Wizard will help you to create standard Setup programs with only few clicks, also its InstallOptions designer will help you to create your own custom pages with a friendly drag and drop interface."
Inno Setup
"Inno Setup is a free installer for Windows programs. First introduced in 1997, Inno Setup today rivals and even surpasses many commercial installers in feature set and stability."
ISTool
"ISTool helps you create scripts for Jordan Russell's Inno Setup compiler. Inno Setup is a great compiler for very professional looking setups, and the only disadvantage is that you have to create fairly complex scripts by hand.
This is where ISTool comes in. With this application you can edit these scripts in a visual environment, and creating these setup scripts becomes much easier."
NSIS
"NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) is a professional open source system to create Windows installers. It is designed to be as small and flexible as possible and is therefore very suitable for internet distribution.
Being a user's first experience with your product, a stable and reliable installer is an important component of succesful software. With NSIS you can create such installers that are capable of doing everything that is needed to setup your software.
NSIS is script-based and allows you to create the logic to handle even the most complex installation tasks. Many plug-ins and scripts are already available: you can create web installers, communicate with Windows and other software components, install or update shared components and more. "
Misc Development
Mingw
"A collection of freely available and freely distributable Windows specific header files and import libraries combined with GNU toolsets that allow one to produce native Windows programs that do not rely on any 3rd-party C runtime DLLs
A port of the GNU developement tools."
XN Resource Editor "XN Resource Editor is a free, powerful, fully featured resource editor and PE module explorer for Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP."
Platforms
Active Perl
"ActivePerl is the industry-standard Perl distribution, available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX. Developers worldwide rely on ActivePerl's completeness and ease-of-use, while corporate users protect their infrastructure and stay competitive with quality-assured ActivePerl business solutions."
TortoiseCVS
"TortoiseCVS lets you work with files under CVS version control directly from Windows Explorer. It's freely available under the GPL.
With TortoiseCVS you can directly check out modules, update, commit and see differences by right clicking on files and folders within Explorer. You can see the state of a file with overlays on top of the normal icons within Explorer. It even works from within the file open dialog. "
TortoiseSVN
"TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control/version control/source control software for Windows.
Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like.
TortoiseSVN is free to use. You don't need to get a loan or pay a full years salary to use it."