This is a discussion on Post Your Lesser Known Freeware within the Software forums, part of the Computers and Technology category; OK, try not to mention programs like winamp, AVG or spybot that everyone knows about. Post links to those little ...
OK, try not to mention programs like winamp, AVG or spybot that everyone knows about.
Post links to those little freeware apps that you find useful, but other people might not be aware of.
Heres a few that i kinda like:
MPEG audio collection. A small app which scans your hard drive for music, and displays the info in an explorer like tree which can be exported to text and html. Really useful for retrieving and storing info about all the music on your hard drive, for publishing your music to the web or for printing out info about your music. Supports .ogg flac and ape as well as mp3.
Guild FTP daemon The only freeware FTP server i know of. Its a little basic but is very easy to set up, comes with a generous help file to get newbies started and supports plug-ins to allow users to customise it to their needs. Cool for sharing files with friends.
Coolmon CoolMon is a program for monitoring vital system stats and almost anything else you wish to display on the desktop. It can also display stats from remote pc's and publish real-time stats on a webpage. The application can display CPU, RAM and page file usage, hard drive usage, MotherBoard Monitor temperatures and fan speeds, various network stats and much, much more. CoolMon can display information, from almost any website in the world. If you want to have a weather report on your desktop, or a "What's on TV", and so on.
System Safety Monitor This is an application-firewalling tool. SSM controls which programs are running on your computer and what they are doing. SSM will notify you whenever a program you want to start was modified. In addition, SSM can constantly check your registry and alert you, when an important modification was made. Allows you to control which programs run at system startup. Maintains a list of running applications and allows you to terminate any application immediately. Allows you to block specific windows (including websites) from opening.
http://www.xymantix.com/sysmetrix/
like coolmon, but its the one I usecandy glass skin is nice, only trouble is you cant use it as a dock unless its the same as your resolution, so you should make your own skin (you could just resize candy glass then move the other stuff yourself)
skin creation and editing is sooo simple
A few which spring to mind right now are
http://www.miranda-im.org - Multi-network IM'er.
http://www.headbands.com/gspot/ - GSpot Codec Information App, for checking vid codecs.
http://www.virtualdub.org - F**kin awesome app for cutting / joining video and extracting wav from many sources.
EDIT: Ah yeah, I don't use it too often, but jaba pointed out a wonderful little tool for encoding wav sources to ogg the other day:
http://www.vorbis.com/download_win.psp - oggdrop.
this is pretty well known, but EVERYONE should be using it.
http://www.videolan.org/
XMPlay is an audio player, supporting the OGG / MP3 / MP2 / MP1 / WMA / WAV / MO3 / IT / XM / S3M / MTM / MOD / UMX audio formats, and PLS / M3U / ASX playlists. A load more formats are also supported via Winamp plugins. When XMPlay was first released in 1998, only the XM format was supported, hence the name "XMPlay".
Pegasus Mail is a free, standards-based electronic mail client suitable for use by single or multiple users on single computers or on local area networks. A proven product, it has served millions of users since it was released in 1990. It is extremely feature-rich and powerful, yet remains small and fast.
MWSnap is a small yet powerful Windows program for snapping (capturing) images from selected parts of the screen. Current version is capable of capturing the whole desktop, a highlighted window, an active menu, or a fixed or free rectangular part of the screen. MWSnap handles 5 most popular graphics formats and contains important graphical tools: a zooming box, a ruler, a color picker and a windows spy. MWSnap does not require installation and does not need any special dlls, drivers or system files which can mess up your system.
PINs is a free feature-rich Windows program for safe and comfortable storing of any secure information like passwords, accounts, PINs etc. PINs uses a secure 448 bit Blowfish algorithm to ensure the data are not crackable. The password used for securing access to stored data is not saved anywhere. PINs does not require installation and does not need any special dlls, drivers or system files which can mess up your system. This means that PINs can run directly from floppy - including data files - without installing anything. This is extremely useful if you wish to easily access your data on other computers as well.
HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility.
It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.
WinHTTrack is the Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP release of HTTrack, and WebHTTrack the Linux/Unix/BSD release
Eazy VCD uses programs that anyone familiar with making VCD's and SVCD will be familiar with.
vStrip, DVD2AVI, BeSweet, TMPGEnc and VCDImager are the programs that Eazy VCD automates the tasks between, so you can relax while Eazy VCD does all the work for you.
Psycle is a free OpenSource Music Production Studio that offers unlimited (opinions may vary) possibilites for creating your own music in a professional way.
Psycle has an Old-School Tracker interface, but it
supports VST Plugins and VST Instruments in addition
to samples, to let your wildest music ideas come true.
PrintFolders PrintFolders can create directory listings and output them to txt or html files. The html can contain direct links to the files. PF can also read id3 tags from mp3 files and include that info in the listing. Great proggy. (they have a simple little tetris clone on thier site too)
Media Player Classic The best video player bar none. Has the interface of WMP 6.4, but tons more features, excellent playback quality, and low resource usage. Has its own built in mpeg2 decoder along with tons of other things. I only have 2 video players on my pc, this, and vlc for incomplete files. (Link at betanews goes to the 2000/xp version, click Here for the 98/me version.
As tom mentioned earlier, oggdrop is a great little proggy for encoding to vorbis, however, i'd recommend the version at This location as its a little more advanced and tweaked.
EncSpot i guess a lot of people know about this app, but some dont. Basically EncSpot will tell you what encoder was used to compress your mp3 files. Can be very useful if you're a quality freak, or just curious to know what encoder did it.
IconSushi A great program for making icons from ICO/BMP/PNG/PSD/EXE/DLL/ICL files. Can add the alpha layer for windows xp, make multiple icon files, export to ICO/BMP/PNG/ICL formats. Very handy if you do any work with icons.
Thank you so much. I have been looking for a program like this.Originally Posted by jaba
Mozilla Backup is a utility for creating backups of Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird and Netscape profiles. It allows you to backup mail, favorites, contacts, etc.
HashTab is a Windows shell extension which adds a tab called "File Hashes" to the Windows Explorer file properties. The tab contains the MD5, SHA1 and CRC-32 file hashes. These are common hashes that are used to verify the integrity and authenticity of files. Many download sites list the MD5 hash along with the download link. The HashTab makes it very simple for Windows users to check these hashes on any file on the system without using external tools.
KeePass is a free, open-source, light-weight and easy-to-use password safe for Windows. The program stores your passwords in a highly encrypted database. This database consists of only one file so it can be transferred from one computer to another easily. KeePass supports password groups, so you can sort your passwords (for example into Windows, Internet, My Homepage, etc.). You can drag-n-drop passwords into other windows. The program can export the database to TXT, HTML, XML or CSV files. For sure, you can also print the password list or current list view (see groups). Using the context menu of the password list you can quickly copy password or user name to the Windows clipboard. Searching in password database is possible.
Now that is a cool extention, thanks
Argali White & Yellow searches multiple telephone and email directories in a single mouse click. The found matches are combined, formatted in uniform way and displayed as if they came from one integrated metadirectory. Though freeware it is advertisement supported but I found no indications of spyware from Spybot or Ad-aware. Great to find out if that phone number is from one of your many bill collectors or someone you know.
ePrompter automatically and simultaneously checks and retrieves your email messages from up to sixteen password protected email accounts such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink, Email.com, iName, Juno, Lycos, Mail.com, Mindspring, MSN, Netscape, POP3, OneBox, Rediffmail, SBC Yahoo, Switchboard, USA.net and hundreds of other email domains. Now has Gmail support. Once new messages have been retrieved, ePrompter notifies you which accounts have new messages and how many new messages you have in each account.
YahELite is an unofficial, free, highly efficient and comfortable anti-SPAM chat client that filters out spam bots, clone bots, abusive PMs, flood text, repeated postings and other forms of spam. Used on Yahoo Messenger chat servers. It also protects you from 'boot codes', 'sound bombs' and other mischief. Includes voice chat and webcam capabilities. YahELite runs on Windows and Linux WINE.
NetStat Live is a small, easy to use TCP/IP protocol monitor which can be used to see your exact throughput on both incoming and outgoing data - whether you're using a modem, cable modem, DSL, or even local network! NSL doesn't just stop there, it lets you see how quickly your data goes from your computer to another computer on the internet; it even will tell you how many other computers your data must go through to get there! But wait - there's more! NSL also graphs your CPU usage of your system! This can be especially useful in identifying if your computer is what's slowing things down, or if it's your internet connection.
EviLyrics is a lyrics search tool.
- lyrics software - searches over 4,000,000 lyrics on multiple sites
- works with all major media players
- offers karaoke function - you can create and share karaoke files on EvilLabs website
- stores lyrics for offline viewing
- allows you to translate lyrics
- Only 200 kB installation file
- Contains no spyware and is completely free
Currently supports Winamp â„¢ installed. EvilLyrics will work with both 2.x and 3 versions of Winampâ„¢. Latest version works with Windows Media Player*, Foobar2000, Sonique and MusicMatch too.
This program rocks!!!
He who laughs last didn't get the joke.
Wow this thread is totally hella useful. I have found some great stuff guys!
“Love is the only rational act.”
definitely going to put these together into a website this weekend. keep them rollin!
Im Gonna have to check out alot of this stuff
Sticky'ing this thread. Nice one grab
“Love is the only rational act.”
Posting Permissions 
LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks