Note: This page is out of date, mostly because it was written way back when I used Windows.
Main:
- Firefox - Browser
- Thunderbird - Mail Client
- Spybot Search and Destroy - checks mostly for spyware, also does some work with firefox and internet explorer to help prevent cracks. Then it has a more user friendly version of ms-config that allows programs to be disabled and re-enabled...
- Lavasoft Ad-aware - Checks mostly for ad-aware
- AVG - you already know...
- Zone Alarm - A freeware firewall.
- Hijackthis - Basically just helps to make a list of programs that are running. I think you don't want it for anything else...The detailed list is very useful, and can often be posted in a forum to allow plenty of people to tell you all the bad programs you have running in the background...
- VLC - probably does a lot of that too, but I'm not entirely sure how to use it's full capabilities. In anycase you'll need XP_Codec_pack to fully encode stuff the way you would want. Use the codec ffdshow for all your encodings. It works the best.
- Audacity - Allows Audio editing, importing, etc.
- Image Resizer - Perfect for quickly resizing pictures. Has an option on a drop down menu.
- PaintDotNet - A good program for editing pictures that is very similar to MS-Paint (in comparison to the other free version: gimp). However it requires .Net (which if you keep your computer up to date isn't a problem)
- Crimson Editor - Code writing. It has syntax highlighting, ftp access, almost everything you'd want (as a programmer) in a text editor.
- Ascgen - A pro that turns images into text. Kinda fun to play around with... It makes very good images out of text. You'd be surprised. An example.
- 7-Zip - Best extractor, compressor. It works seamlessly with windows, much better then win-zip. It does very good compressions...only thing is it won't compress into rar files. It extracts though, which is good enough. The Program becomes accessible through the right click menu. Note on Downloading: Just choose the first one if you don't know which one...(I think?)
- Beyond Compare - Double checks the actual file to find differences.
- zip2exe - Creates an extractor program out of a zip archive.
Diagnostics:
System:
- CPUZ - gives detailed info about the specs (CPU, Memory, etc.) of the computer the tool is being run on.wireshark - Gives you too many options as far as what's coming in and out of your computer. I don't know how to use it, though it was a tool I used when I took Computer Security.