The Best Free Software – Windows Edition
Through my years on the Internet & using Windows, I have found tons of useful software that is also free. All of the software in here have been used by me personally. I also recommend checking out The Open CD for more ideas. Enjoy!
Office Software
OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice is the best alternative to MS Office and other proprietary solutions. This multi-platform office suite will open and save in virtually any format making it the most compatible suite out there.
Abiword
Abiword is a multi-platform word processing system that is comparable to MS Word yet extremely lightweight.
PDFCreator
PDFCreator easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. Use it like a printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows application.
System Tools
IZArc
IZArc is the ultimate freeware archive utility supporting many archive formats like: 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CAB, CDI, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MDF, MBF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO. With a modern easy-to-use interface, IZArc provides support for most compressed and encoded files, as well as access to many powerful features and tools. It allows you to drag and drop files from and to Windows Explorer, create and extract archives directly in Windows Explorer, create multiple archives spanning disks, creating self-extracting archives, repair damaged zip archives, converting from one archive type to another, view and write comments and many more.
7-Zip
This is a great tool to manage compressed archives in multiple formats.
TightVNC
This allows you to access your computer remotely. I use it all the time to access my computer away from the office.
Filezilla
This is a powerful FTP client that is way more stable than using IE.
Clamwin
A free anti virus for Windows
AVG Free Edition
It’s not open-source, but still a great anti-virus for personal use.
Web / Chat / Email
Pidgin
Formally called Gaim, Pidgin is the best IM client I’ve ever seen, as it’s compatible with virtually all protocols including AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google (Jabber), Jabber, etc.
Firefox
The best web browser in my opinion with many customizations available.
Mozilla Thunderbird
My personal favorite for email. I have it manage all my company email, personal email, and RSS feeds.
Graphic Design
The Gimp
The Gimp is the free & open source solution comparable to Adobe Photoshop that’s perfect to any graphic designer. See gimp.org/windows for Windows installation packages.
Paint.net
Microsoft Paint…but souped up.
Text Editors
PSPad
This is one of the nest editors available on the Windows platform.
Notepad2
Another great text editor for code, etc.
Scintilla
Yet another text editor for Windows and other platforms.
Notepad++
Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.
Multimedia
Media Coder
MediaCoder is a free universal audio/video batch transcoder distributed under GPL license, which nicely integrates lots of excellent audio/video codecs and tools from the open source community into an all-in-one solution, capable of transcoding among different audio/video formats.
Audacity
Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds.
Web Server Related
Web Developer Server Suite
I haven’t used this suite itself, but I have used all the included packages on my Linux servers every day.
Apache
With a market share of over 59%, Apache is the most popular software for serving web pages on the HTTP. Plus, it’s free software!
MySQL
The database system I use every day.
PHP
Web scripting language no server should be without – even if it’s running Windows 
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It’s very possible that I missed something. Please write me or leave a comment if I missed a popular program.
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 26th, 2007 at 4:21 pm and is filed under Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
