#1

Below are links to some brilliant Freeware, most of which I can never be without. I thought this list may be of some use to you all, so posting it here.

Media

Image
GIMP: A brilliant image editor.
Greenshot: Small, simple and powerful screenshotter.
Icaros: Windows thumbnail previews for multiple image and video formats. Also allows you to alter the time of the video preview by percentage or static amount.
Inkscape: A vector graphics editor.
ScreenToGif: Create animated gifs by capturing desktop video. Also has a basic editor included.
ShareX: Powerful screenshot software. Similar to Greenshot but with more features.

Video
Dain-App: Frame interpolation software to increase FPS of videos.
Freemake Video Converter: A great free video format converter that handles almost anything you throw at it. 
HandBrake: Another superb video converter.
OBS (Open Broadcaster Software): Used to record game footage and also stream it to sites such as Twitch.
Shotcut - Open source video editing package, like Windows Movie maker.
VirtualDub: Freeware video editing software.
VLC Media Player: A media player capable of playing almost any video file without the need for additional codecs.

Audio
Audacity: Audio editor for recording, slicing, and mixing audio.
Metatogger: Brilliant tool for fixing, renaming and adding all kinds of stuff related to audio files.
MP3 Tag: Similar to the above - another tool for MP3 file tag management.
SoundSwitch: Allows you to switch audio output or input with a hotkey.

Office
Libre office: Similar to Open Office (below). A powerful Office replacement.
Notepad ++: A Notepad replacement with syntax highlighting and a ton of features.
Open Office: A powerful and feature-rich replacement for Microsoft Office.

Other
Blender: Freeware 3D suite.

Utility

Troubleshooting / Fixing / Maintenance
ADA64: Similar to Speccy (below). Computer hardware info / scanner.
BleachBit: Temporary files cleaner, similar to CCleaner.
CCleaner: A temporary files cleaner.
ClamWin: Portable antivirus.
DiskGenius: Partition manager and data recovery.
DownTester: Internet download speed tester.
DNS Jumper: Pings multiple known DNS providers to find the fastest one for you.
Driver Verifier: For finding driver issues.
FileTypesMan: Tool for editing Windows file types and associations.
Glary Utilities: Suite of troubleshooting, cleaning and optimisation tools.
HWInfo: Diagnostic software to check fan speeds, temperatures and all manor of other such functions to poll various sensors in your machine.
Ping Plotter: A ping and trace-route utility.
Sidebar Diagnostics: A hardware information sidebar for Windows.
Speccy: Computer hardware information for all components, including chipset, RAM, HDD's and pretty much everything.
SysInternals: A suite of programs to do all manor of useful things in Windows, including a process manager, startup program manager and so much more.
WhoCrashed: Find the cause of BSOD crashes.

Installers / Patchers / Drivers
EnvyUpdate: Lightweight Nvidia GeForce driver checker and downloader without all the GeForce bloat.
PatchMyPC: Multiple program installer and updater. Similar to Ninite but with more options and more software.
Ninite: Multiple program installer and updater.
NVCleanInstall: Checks, downloads and customises an Nvidia driver installation.

Backup
Gamesave Manager: A great utility for backing up and restoring game saves. Works with pretty much every game.
Macrium Reflect: An excellent full-featured backup program.

Developer
AutoHotkey: Excellent automation program that uses scripts/macros to perform virtually anything you can imagine.
Inno Setup: A setup wizard creation tool. Powerful and very useful for developers.
HxD: A freeware Hex editor.
NSIS: A feature-rich setup wizard and package creation tool - similar to Inno Setup.

Customisation
Rainmeter: A beautiful and highly configurable desktop customisation program. I also recommend getting the Enigma skin, along with Arcs.
Windows Layout Manager: Allows you to save position and size of all open windows and then restore them. Multiple profiles as well. 

Other
7-Zip: A file archiver which works with practically every compressed file type there is.
Advanced Renamer: Utility to batch rename files and folders based on a multitude of attributes such as date, mp3 tag, image tag etc.
Bit Meter: An internet/line speed monitoring utility. 
Bullzip: A brilliant PDF printer.
ClipAngel: Clipboard monitoring, storage and retrieval.
Everything: A file and folder indexing program with ultra-fast search capabilities.
dnGrep: A file search utility that finds text inside a multitude of different file-types, including compressed documents, text files, PDFs and more.
FreeCommander: A dual-pane Windows Explorer replacement with a ton of features such as folder comparison and sync, FTP/SFTP, multi-rename and file preview. Extremely customisable.
ImgBurn: Complete set of tools for burning CD's, DVD's and Blu-Ray's.
NirCmd: Command-line utility that allows you to do some useful tasks without displaying any user interface. Great for automation.
PeaZip: Another fast file archiver, similar to 7-Zip, with support for multiple file types.
qBittorrent: Open source torrent program for Windows.
Rufas: USB drive formatter with ISO and boot options, including UEFI GPT bootable drives.
SpeedCrunch: A fast, feature-rich replacement for the Windows calculator.
TeraCopy: Utility used to copy files from damaged drives, corrupted files or just large amounts of data at once with better error control than the Windows default copy service.
WinDirStat: Visual representation of the files and folders on your hard drive. Great for seeing where all that space is being used.
WinSCP: A FTP client.

Useful Websites

10 minute mail: Get an e-mail address for 10 minutes. Very useful when somewhere asks for your e-mail to sign up for something but you don't want to give out yours for endless spam.
AccountKiller: Got an online account you want to permanently remove/delete? This is the site to check out.
Bullshit Detector: Find out how much bullshit is in some text.
CamelCamelCamel: Amazon price history, tracker and comparer
Colour Wheel: Select a colour and it provides you a list of colours that go well together.
CPU Benchmarks: Rates CPU's so you can gauge and compare performance.
Down For Everyone Or Just Me: Check if a website or service is down for everyone.
GPU Benchmark: Rates GPU's so you can gauge and compare performance.
Hemingway Editor: Helps get rid of waffle and unnecessary crap in documents, text, stories and articles.
The Rasterbator: Create huge posters out of images by splitting them across A$ pages.
ManualsLib: Library of manuals.
Print Friendly: Make any website print friendly.
Time And Date: Calculate the amount of time between dates, along with many other features.
Wayback Machine: Internet webpage archival tool used to view websites from the past that do not exist anymore or just to view current websites at previous dates.

Last edited 29 Mar 2023 at 20:11.

#2

ninite - Application Installer / silent updater - Installs a package of programs you choose and silently updated them saying no to all the additional bollocks often prompted to install. In it's infancy but expanding

driver-booster - Complete driver installer / updater - Absolutely, completely and utterly invaluable. Sorts out your entire set of drivers for the whole of windows - Greg, this is your magic bullet for keeping you machine alive (can't help random cats from getting dragged into the fans though.) EDIT - Also gives option to download and install Microsoft/AMD patch for the Meltdown / Spectre CPU issue

backblaze - Unlimited BACKUP cloud storage - Upload a complete PC backup ISO image for example for free

Last edited 7 Apr 2018 at 16:07.

#3

bmpwrap - Ever needed to email a file but it keeps on bouncing because it's an illegal attachment? Renaming the file or storing it in a ZIP archive sometimes works, but many ISP can detect that low-tech obfuscation. You need BMP Wrap. BMP Wrap temporarily hides a file inside a valid .BMP image. Once hidden, you can send the BMP file to anybody you wish and they can then extract that file from the BMP image using BMP Wrap. Now you can send EXEs, DLLs, or whatever file format you want, and the destination mail server will never be the wiser.

You just drag and drop a file onto the .exe icon in windows explorer - no installing, no other files, just literally that one .exe. great program and its 20kb!

Last edited 1 Nov 2019 at 08:42.