Free and open-source software

Free and open-source software is good for you and for the world. This is the best Windows software that we know of.
No adware, no spyware, just good software.

Web Browsing

Mozilla Firefox

The premier free, open-source browser. Tabs, pop-up blocking, themes, and extensions. Considered by many to be the world's best browser.
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Video Player / Video Podcasting

Miro

Beautiful interface. Plays any video type (much more than windows media player). Subscribe to video RSS, download, and watch all in one. Torrent support. Search and download from YouTube and others.
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IM - Instant Messaging

Pidgin

Connect to multiple IM accounts simultaneously in a single app, including: AOL IM, MSN, and Jabber.
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E-mail

Mozilla Thunderbird

Powerful spam filtering, solid interface, and all the features you need.
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RSS

RSSOwl

Solid cross-platform RSS client.
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Peer-to-Peer Filesharing

Cabos

A simple, easy to use filesharing program. Gnutella network.
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Gnucleus

A very good Gnutella search and download filesharing program.
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Azureus

A powerful, but complicated BitTorrent client. So many features you'll lose your mind.
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Video Playback

VLC

Plays more video files than most players: Quicktime, AVI, DIVX, OGG, and more. Pretty good interface.
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MPlayer

Similar to VLC-- plays loads of video formats.
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Media Player Classic

Compact, but powerful media player. Plays anything under the sun. No install necessary.
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DVD Ripping / Video Conversion

Media Coder

Great tool for ripping CDs, DVDs, etc and converting between tons of video formats.
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Word Processing / Office Suites

OpenOffice.org

Big, full featured suite of tools for word processing and spreadsheets. Compatible with and a free replacement for Microsoft Word documents. Also supports OpenDocument Format.
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AbiWord

A word processor. Leaner and quicker than OpenOffice. Compatible with Microsoft Word documents and OpenDocument Format.
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Podcasting

Juice

Solid podcasting client.
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DVD Ripping

Handbrake

DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter.
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Sound Recording

Audacity

Simple sound recording tool.
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Graphics / Photo Editing

GIMP

Photo editing application that rivals Photoshop in features.
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Paint.NET

Graphics editor with a very nice interface.
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Inkscape

Vector graphics application.
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FTP / SFTP

Filezilla

Excellent FTP program.
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IRC

X-Chat 2

IRC client.
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Some more specialized free and open-source Microsoft Windows apps.

Note Taking

Freemind

An innovative application for note taking and outlining. Takes time to get used to, but some people swear by it.
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Jarnal

Open Source note taking application written in Java
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Keynote

Open Source note taking application, very good. I use this myself extensively
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Personal Finance

TurboCASH

Simple, easy to use application for managing personal finances.
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Quasar

Easy to use Accounting package
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Chat Clients

aMSN

MSN Messenger client written in TCL/TK aMSN Messenger

X-Chat

IRC Client X-Chat

More Web Browsing

K-Meleon

Fast, nice web browser.
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Amaya Browser for Windows

W3C developed web browser and editor for multiple platforms
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Screensaver

Electric Sheep

Immersive, trippy screensaver.
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More Filesharing

Frostwire

GNUTella client based on the Limewire codebase.
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Also see: Poisoned - Azureus

3D Graphics and Modeling

Blender

Powerful 3D Modeling software.
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Also see: Kerkythea (illumination engine) - Persistence of Vision Raytracer - Quesa

Stars and Outer Space

Celestia

Open-source 3D planetarium software. Akin to traveling through space (outer space).
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Stellarium

"Renders realistic skys in realtime." See what you would see if your city wasn't so light-polluted. Used in real planetariums.
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Also see: macORSA - Orbit Reconstruction, Simulation, and Analysis

Games

Marathon: Aleph One

Engine for Bungie's free FPS series Marathon. Play online, solo play with rich original story, many total conversions and thousands of maps.
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Zombies

3D zombie strategy game.
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Armagetron Advanced

3D Tron game.
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BZFlag

First-person tank game.
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Battle for Wesnoth

Fantasy / Strategy Game
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Also see: Snes9X (SNES emulator), Frozen Bubble

Free File Hosting

CC Publisher

Host Creative Commons video or audio files for free on archive.org with this easy uploader.
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Security Tools

NMap

Easy to use port scanner for Windows
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Wireshark

Network Protocol Analyzer, formerly called Ethereal
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TrueCrypt

Creates encrypted virtual hard drives for extra security
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ClamWin

Open Source Anti-Virus. Very good at detecting viruses. Can be plugged into hMailServer for e-mail protection LIMITATION: Real Time scanning not implemented yet
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Eraser

Delete files securely off your hard drive utilizing DoD standards
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MP3 and Audio Tools

MP3 Gain

Easy to use MP3 manipulation tool for Windows. adjusts sound levels on MP3's so they are all the same
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MP3 Book Helper

This program provides rapid Mp3 (ID3v1, ID3v2) and Ogg/Speex/Flac Vorbis tags editing and file renaming functions. Mass Tag editing is done using special variables and Regular Expressions.
Download Page

musikCube

Open Source MP3 Player, ripper and organizer written using the .NET Framework
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Utilities

Cobian Backup

Backup software.
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7-Zip

File archiver.
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Developer tools

XEmacs

The classic, super customizable editor, for Windows.
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KompoZer

Easy to use, open source WYSIWYG html editor
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SharpDevelop

Open Source IDE for the .NET Framework. Utilizes the multiple programming languages and Windows forms
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Notepad ++

Open Source programmers notepad for Windows
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SciTE

Source code Editor for Windows and X
Download Page

Web Developer Server Suite

Very good WAMP Stack (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) Very thouroughly tested on Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 Server (preliminary testing on Longhorn Server underway). Highly Recommended.
Download Page

Mapping Tools

Nasa World Wind

Mapping tool similar to Google Earth for Windows. Must have the .NET Framework installed.
Download Page

Become a Browser Music DJ in a Flash!

Most Web
Browsers support Flash these days, so you’re in luck. Just head
over to Tony B and you can be a DJ
as well! As soon as everything loads, you can start changing how
everything sounds. You can change the melody itself, adjust the bass,
and even the drums. Once you have your mix to your liking, simply save
it out on the virtual “floppy” disk… then share it
with your friends!

There’s nothing to register for, and
it’s completely free.

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Collagr.com - Create your own collage

There’s a service called Collagr that does it for you pulling in photos from Flickr. If you’ve got shots on there, just fill in your username and Collagr will do its magic.

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Easy Video Downloader

Easy Video Downloader

With Easy Video Downloader you can easily download videos from YouTube, Google Video and save it as AVI (High Quality for PC) or MPEG4 (for iPod, PSP).

New version 1.4.2 is released

What's new in latest versions:

1. Add: Download from MySpace
   
   
   
2. Fixed: Error with Forbidden Filenames
   
   Thanks to Bob Denny for reporting
   
   
   
   
3. Fixed: Error "HTTP/1.1 400 bad request"
   
   
   

Easy Video Downloader is a completly FREE Software.
It contains absolutely NO ADWARE, NO SPYWARE, NO REGISTRATION, NO POPUPS, NO MALWARE or other unwanted software.

The
user interface of Easy Video Downloader is very simple, so you don't
need any technical knowledge to use it. No need to use scripts for web
browsers. Just run Easy Video Downloader and start downloading!

All you need to do is to paste URL of movie and press Start button.

If
you haven't flash player to play videos from YouTube just select "Save
as AVI" and Easy Video Downloader automatically convert video to avi
format.

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Paint.net

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.

Paint.net was written by the same Microsoft engineers that wrote the original Microsoft Paint. Paint.net does many things better than Paintshop Pro 8. The magic selection wand is very powerful, and quickly allows you to delete unwanted sections. The design makes it easy to manage multiple pictures simultaneously. Lastly making transparent gifs is two times easier than PaintSthop Pro. If Paint.net could read PSD files, I would never use Paintshop Pro ever again.

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Google's new 411

Google's new 411


About GOOG-411

Google's new 411 service is free, fast and easy to use. Give it a try
now and see how simple it is to find and connect with local businesses
for free.

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Easy Thumbnails

Easy Thumbnails

Easy Thumbnails is a popular free utility for creating accurate thumbnail images and scaled-down/up copies from a wide range of popular picture formats. An elegant interface
makes it a snap to find your images and select them for processing
individually, in groups, or in whole folders, using a simple file
selector and built-in image viewer. You can use slider controls to
rotate images and adjust their contrast, brightness, sharpness and
quality, and check out the results with the built-in viewer.

Key Features

• Scale images up or down in batches
• Eleven resampling filters, including Lanczos3
• Sharpen soft images from digital cameras
• Real-time preview of target image
• Supports the new JPEG 2000 image format
• Preserves EXIF data in JPEG images
• Supports lossless JPEG rotation
• Free software producing quality results

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