I search
Gizmos Freeware whenever I need a free program.
In no particular order, here are some of the programs I have installed on my PC and use all the time.
KMPlayer is by far the most customizable player I have ever used. There are almost too many options. I used to use VLC and MediaPlayerClassic. Video quality in KMPlayer is superior to VLC or MPC and it plays every format imaginable.
MediaCoder will convert just about any video to just about any format.
IMG Burn is a great ISO burner.
Reaper, while not a free program, has an unlimited fully functional trial and is a ProTools replacement as far as I'm concerned. I have paid for a license.
FastPictureViewer is a really fast way to flip through a lot of photos.
Picturenaut is a great HDR photo tool.
Dropbox is great for sharing files with friends or just having your files accessible from anywhere.
TreeSize Free is a great tool that lets you see what is taking up space and where on your hard drive.
Foxit Reader is a replacement for Adobe reader. It is very small, very fast, and superior in just about every way, IMO.
MyDefrag is the best and most effective defrag tool available. It is simple, lightweight, and fast.
Microsoft ICE is in beta but it works wonderfully to stitch together panorama photos.
Irfanview is another image viewer but I use it mainly as a resizer and to convert file formats.
Bullzip PDF Printer creates a PDF in place of printing on paper. I use it to save receipts from online transactions. It isn't super acurrate in that the PDF does not replicate the web page exactly (formatting errors) but it works great for my purposes.
KeePass is an open source and super secure password manager. It is easy to use and and an excellent password generator.
TrueCrypt is for the super security consious. I use it on my laptop to encrypt any sensetive information I don't want a thief to have access too. It does whole drive encryption but I haven't tried it.
Winmerge is great if you have a bunch of duplicate files in different folders. It helps you merge things together and remove duplicates. It can find duplicate files by scanning the binary data which is much more acurrate than file names and it can even find duplicate photos.
SyncToy is my backup utility. It is very simple. Set up folder pairs and the program keeps them synced. For backup, I set it to "Contribute" so new files in folder A are added to folder B but deleted files from folder A are not deleted from B. This cuts down on the number of "Uh Oh" deletions.
That's all I have off the top of my head right now.
