Plex, the ideal home media center.

There are many, many media players out there, but Plex differentiates itself in several ways.

• It connects to online information such as IMDB automatically to provide thumbnails, categories and general information.
• It seemlessly integrates with your iTunes library.
• The GUI is a fantastic.
• It supports several online services including the following:

• Apple Movie Trailers
• BBC iPlayer
• Game Trailers
• Hulu
• Joost
• Major League Baseball
• March Madness Basketball
• National Public Radio
• Netflix Watch instantly
• Pandora Player
• PBS online streaming content
• Pitchfork Media
• South Park
• Spotify
• SVT Play (Swedish TV)
• The Colbert Report
• The Daily Kos
• The Daily Show
• The Onion News Network
• The White House Updates
• TV4 Play (Swedish TV4)
• YouTube

PC Wizard

System information tools provide a convenient way to give you information about, hmm, your system. Hardware information from your keyboard to your RAM. Software information about running processes and installed programs. All details of your computer are laid out neatly for information or troubleshooting.

Hugin

We've all seen them. Panorama photographs that cannot possibly have been taken with one shot. They can span a city, a beach, a desert. They are created using some kind of photo-stitching software.

Hugin is the most feature-rich panorama creator available, free or otherwise. You can take a series of photos with different cameras, different lenses, even different perspectives, and Hugin will help you transform you series of snapshots into a beautiful panorama.

UPDATE! Check out my latest article series on the new Cloud Storage Solutions

Dropbox

Microsoft Security Essentials

You know that anti-virus software that came pre-installed on your computer? The one that keeps telling you to register? Or upgrade? THE ONE THAT'S SLOWING DOWN YOUR MACHINE?

Get rid of it. Now. I mean it. Uninstall it completely.

Once you've done that, head over to Microsoft Security Essentials and install their free anti-virus software. This is something that Microsoft has done right. It's easy to install and get started, and regular updates are pushed out to you without any hassle.

Duplicate Commander

It's pretty much inevitable that you will wind up with several copies of the exact same file saved on your local drives. Whether it is the same video clip, the same cute kitty photo that people keep emailing you or perhaps your term paper that you keep saving in different places.

Not only does this eat up drive space, it also makes it very, very hard to keep track of the correct, most-recent version of the file you are looking for.

Calibre
There is no other. I use it daily.

Calibre manages all common ebook file formats including LIT, MOBI, EPUB, FB2, HTML, PRC, RTF, PDB, TXT, PDF and more and converts between them. You can edit metadata such as author and the date the work was published and automatically sync the correct format to your device. It also has a built-in reader to read on your computer.

File Renamer Basic

Now that everyone carries a camera with them at all times - and has an mp3 player - and pretty much stores their lives and records of their lives in digital files, it's become difficult for us to make sense of all this data. A bulk file renamer simplifies the process of keeping up with the vast reams of data we produce by providing a simple method of calling our files what they are.

Everything

Hard drives are massive. You have thousands of pictures, videos and documents. How do you find anything?

Everything runs in the background, using a very tiny amount of system resources, but it indexes and finds anything on your computer instantly. Really. Instantly. I mean, like faster than Speed Racer. Faster than the Flash. You know, fast.

Ninite

Just pick your apps and click Get Installer. Ninite does the rest — fully automatic.

Notepad++

PSPad

Here's some of the features:

Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding
Auto-completion
You can edit several documents at the same time.
You have two views at same time.
Regular Expression Search/Replace supported
Drag 'N' Drop
File Status Auto-detection
Zoom in and zoom out
Bookmark
Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting
Macro recording and playback

7-Zip File Manager

Once upon a time, almost everyone had shareware WinZip on their machines, and almost nobody registered it. (Before that it was PKZip, but I'm dating myself.) When Windows XP was unveiled with limited zip file compatibility, the demand for decompression utilities slowed down. But now, people are pushing files all over the internet in buckets of formats. RAR, JAR, BIN, CAB, ISO, IMG and more.

VLC

Either of these players are excellent general-purpose media players. VLC has the advantage of coming bundled with every video codec under the sun, and it plays streaming media as well. It plays DVD's, CD's, VCD's, and all major video and audio formats.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

http://sf.net/projects/guliverkli/

ArtRage

This is about as close to real painting as it gets. If you have a tablet PC or even a graphic tablet, you should definitely give this a try. It does work with a mouse, but you don't get the same "painterly" feel without a tablet's pressure sensitivity. This is a beautiful piece of free software. Take a look at the gallery for some impressive examples.

http://www.artrage.com/index.html

Inkscape

LibreOffice Draw

These are pretty close contenders. Neither of them are Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, but again, if you're a professional, you probably won't be allowed to use anything but what your shop requires. OpenOffice Draw has a couple more features than Inkscape, but its interface isn't quite as polished. If have the OpenOffice suite installed, you probably won't need Inkscape, but if not, you might want to give Inkscape a whirl.

http://www.inkscape.org

Picasa 2

The difference between an image viewer and image browser is like the difference between a DVD player and Tivo. A DVD player / image viewer lets you look at the thing you want to see. An image browser / Tivo let you browse quickly and precisely through a lot of stuff. Okay, the analogy isn't great, but hopefully you get my point.

Irfanview

There are a lot of image viewers out there, and picking the best is largely a matter of taste. Irfanview stands out because of the large number of formats it can view and convert. It also has a command-line option, if you need that kind of thing. Extremely small and fast, two features that push it ahead of other similar products.

http://www.irfanview.com/

Blender

Blender is about twenty years old now and is amazingly robust. Professional 3D software runs from several hundred to several thousand dollars. If you go through the feature list, it's quite amazing that it is freeware (Open Source GNU Public License). It has all the standard features of the professional programs with sophisticated modeling, animation and rendering. It even includes realtime 3D game creation. And yet, there's more! Import and export standard 3D file formats. Create standalone executable files to distribute your creations.

The Gimp

Paint.NET

SpamBayes

Oh, you actually like spam? It makes you feel less lonely? Get away from me, you pathetic fool!

SpamBayes uses a Bayesian filter (don't they all?) to get rid of spam. That means that it learns, according to your habits and preferences, what is and what is not spam. As those nasty spammers get more clever to get past your filter, SpamBayes adjusts and responds.

It comes in a couple different flavors, according to your needs. There's an Outlook plugin and both a Pop3 and IMAP proxy.

Google Toolbar

Available for both Internet Explorer (yuk) and Firefox (yay!). The Google toolbar isn't particularly whiz-bang or feature-rich, but it's the best because it searches... Google.

http://toolbar.google.com

Skype

I've reviewed all of the major free VOIP (Voice Over IP) packages, and in this case, the best is also the biggest: Skype . As they put it, "Talk to anyone free. Forever." Well, almost. "Anyone" has to have a Skype account as well. That said, the software is simple to set up, easy to use, and provides excellent audio quality.

http://skype.com/

Free Download Manager

So what does a download accelerator / manager do? It lets you schedule, prioritize and generally control your http and ftp downloads.

HTTrack

For downloading entire websites to view offline, HTTrack is the easiest solution. You can specify advanced filters, how deep in structure you wish to go, what directories to stay on, etc.

http://www.httrack.com/

PuTTY

PuTTY is the undisputed champion of Windows SSH terminals. It's also an excellent telnet and sFTP client. It also has several other SSH-related goodies.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Ultr@VNC

Controls a computer over a local network or the internet. There are quite a few free applications that do this, and I've tried most of them. Ultr@VNC is currently the best of the lot. It supports session encryption via a plugin (some do not), so you won't get any eavesdroppers. It's also fast. If there's a faster remote access application, I've yet to find it.

http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/

Pidgin

Pidgin allows you chat on all major networks using any protocol without advertisements. AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, Zephyr and now Google Talk.

If you chat, use Pidgin.

http://www.pidgin.im/

µtorrent

Does everything you would want a BitTorrent client to do. You can pause downloads, prioritize them, and throttle upload speeds. It supports DHT (Distributed Hash Table), which means, basically, there's less chance of the tracker being down.

http://www.utorrent.com/

Filezilla

FTP clients should be simple. There are really only a few things than 99% of users need to do. You upload files, you download files. You save ftp site settings. Maybe you rename them on the server sometimes. Maaaaaybe you change file permissions. Filezilla does these things simply and perfectly. Easy to use, quick to start. It supports all the normal encryption methods as well.

http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/