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Anti-Virus
Nod32 - A very good anti-virus program that is known for scanning efficiency and high detection rates. A free 30 day trial is available aswell as a full payware version.
AVG Anti-virus - Another good anti-virus that is available in free and payware editions.
Norton anti-virus - A highly tried and trusted piece of software that is used by millions of users worldwide.
Mcafee anti-virus - Again like Norton a highly tried and tested anti-virus.
Sophos Anti-Virus - A powerful anti-virus used by many companies and businesses, available in Trial and payware versions.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal - A good anti-virus available in Trial and payware versions.
AntiVir - The AntiVir Personal Edition offers the effective protection against computer viruses for the individual and private use on a single PC-workstation.
avast! - avast! 4 Home Edition is a full-featured antivirus package designed exclusively for home users, non-commercial users.
ClamWin - ClamWin is a Free Antivirus for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003.
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Spyware/Adware removal tools
Ad-Aware - Ad-Aware is designed to provide advanced protection from known Data-mining, aggressive advertising, Parasites, Scumware, selected traditional Trojans, Dialers, Malware, Browser hijackers, and tracking components. With the release of Ad-Aware SE Personal edition, Lavasoft takes the fight against Spyware to the next level.
SpywareBlaster - A must have utility!. One way of stopping all those nasty spyware/adware getting on your pc is to stop them getting on you computer in the first place, something SpywareBlaster is very good at.
SpywareGuard - SpywareGuard provides a real-time protection solution against spyware that is a great addition to SpywareBlaster's protection method.
Spybot - Search & Destroy - Spybot - Search & Destroy can detect and remove spyware of different kinds from your computer very effectively.
HijackThis - A general homepage hijackers detector and remover. (When using you must be very careful of what you are removing!)
Spy Sweeper - A very good Spyware remover with a high detection rate. Available in Trial (30days) and Payware versions.
PestPatrol - PestPatrol Anti-Spyware detects and removes a wide variety of spyware to protect your PC from unauthorized access, information theft and diminished system performance. Spyware, adware and other non-virus threats are rapidly spreading, and represent a major security and privacy risk.
CWShredder - A small utility for removing CoolWebSearch (aka CoolWwwSearch, YouFindAll, White-Pages.ws and a dozen other names).
Bazooka - Bazooka™ Adware and Spyware Scanner detects a multitude of spyware, adware, trojan, keylogger, foistware and trackware components; sources of irritation that antivirus software does not deal with.
WinPatrol - WinPatrol uses a heuristic approach to detecting attacks and violations of your computing environment. Traditional security programs scan your hard drive searching for previously identified threats. WinPatrol takes snapshot of your critical system resources and alerts you to any changes that may occur without your knowledge.
Microsoft AntiSpyware - Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware (Beta) is a security technology that helps protect Windows users from spyware and other potentially unwanted software. Known spyware on your PC can be detected and removed.
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Themes and Skins
Style XP - Style XP uses Microsoft's built-in visual style engine, but enhances it by providing many useful tools. Style XP can import, select, rotate, and manage themes, visual styles, wallpapers, logons, bootscreens, icons, and explorer bar.
WindowBlinds - WindowBlinds is a program that enables users to safely add thousands of new visual styles to Windows to change the look and feel of your computer.
UXTheme Multi-Patcher - This is a very good little tool that enables you to use any Windows theme or visual style without having to install any program that uses resources and best of all it's free.
Samurize - Samurize is the popular advanced system monitoring and desktop enhancement engine for Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/2003. IT professionals, overclockers, gamers and desktop modders alike use Samurize for system information, weather reports, news headlines and much much more. And best of all, Samurize is 100% free!
ObjectDock - ObjectDock is a free program that allows you to have a nice animated launchbar/taskbar on your screen that reacts to your mouse when you mouse over it.
RK Launcher - RK Launcher is an application that will allow the user to have a visually pleasing bar at the side of the screen that is used to quickly launch shortcuts.
Y'z Dock - Similar to Object Dock but uses less ram.
Konfabulator - Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather.
Links to the best themes and visual styles resources
ThemeXP - Big resource
Wincustomise - Big resource
Neowin customization forum - You'll find newly released themes and styles in here
Winmatrix customization forum - You'll find newly released themes and styles in here
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Image tools
Irfanview - IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003.
Dxtbmp - A useful program for people wanting to repaint flightsim aircraft.
Screen Grab - Screen Grab is a freeware screen capture tool. It features One click grab of any screen for ease of use, Timer operation, Current window selection list and more. Screen Grab Pro copies a bitmap to clipboard ready for pasting in your favorite Picture Editor.
Adobe Photoshop - The best and most powerful photo/image editing program available today, it's used in industry by professionals. Available in trial and payware versions.
Paint Shop Pro - Another powerful image editing program that is widely used. Again available in trial and payware versions.
Imagetool - A handy little application for aircraft repainters that can convert PSD to BMP and read a wide variety of image types.
Ahaview - AhaView is a handy picture viewer and converter. It allows you to browse, view, organize and convert your digital images.
Picasa - Everything you need to enjoy your digital photos in a single software product, and it's free.
Brennigs - Brennig's is a powerful graphics viewer for professional artists as well as photo experts. It features a fast viewing engine for all common graphics file formats (single/multipage/animated) and includes unique support for alpha channels, transparency and exposure control (f-stops).
XnView - XnView is an efficient multimedia viewer, browser and converter.
Gimp - The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.
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General Utilities And Other Applications
Winzip - WinZip is the original and most popular of all Windows Zip file utilities. Combining power and flexibility with ease of use, WinZip appeals to the entire spectrum of data-compression users.
WinRAR - WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format.
7-Zip - 7-Zip is a file archiver with high compression ratio.
PCI Latency tool - A great find by our fellow member Mango that when tweaked enables higher fps in flightsim, more info here: Link
Regseeker - RegSeeker includes a powerful registry cleaner and can display various informations like your startup entries, several histories (even index.dat files), installed applications and much more ! With RegSeeker you can search for any item inside your registry, export/delete the results, open them in the registry. RegSeeker also includes a tweaks panel to optimize your OS ! Now RegSeeker includes a file tool to search for duplicate files, bad shortcuts and more!
CCleaner - CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) is a freeware system optimisation tool. That removes unused and temporary files from your system - allowing it to run faster, more efficiently and giving you more hard disk space. The best part is that it's fast! (normally taking less that a second to run) and Free.
MaxMem - A little program that frees up ram. A useful program for users who have mid to low amounts of ram.
Memtest86 - A handy tool that will enable the user to test to see if his/her ram is outputing errors (best to leave it running for a few hours so lots of cycles are done)
CPU-Z - Cpu-z is a freeware tool that enables you to quickly view information about your system.
Motherboard Monitor - A useful program that tells you the temperature of your cpu/motherboard.
Jv16 PowerTools - v16 PowerTools provides the best solution to maximize the performance of your PC. You can diagnose, monitor and tune up your computer, and it's easier you would ever believe.
Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP - They're back! PowerToys are additional programs that developers work on after a product has been released to manufacturing. They add fun and functionality to the Windows experience.
Startup Control Panel - A great little tool that enables you to easily configure which programs run when your computer starts.
OpenOffice - A free alternative to Microsoft Office.
Zip Central - ZipCentral is a free and easy to use zip file manager with all the utilities you need to manage your zip files.
Everest - EVEREST Home Edition is a freeware system information, system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for home PC users.
Aida32 - AIDA32 is a professional system information, diagnostics and benchmarking program running on Win32 platforms. It extracts details of all components of the PC.
Rivatuner - RivaTuner is the most powerful tweaking utility for NVIDIA and ATI display adapters running under Windows 98 / Windows 98 SE / Windows ME / Windows 2000 and Windows XP. The purpose of this utility is to give you access to all the undocumented features of Detonator and Catalyst drivers.
Speedfan - SpeedFan is a freeware program that monitors voltages, fan speeds and temperatures in computers with hardware monitor chips. SpeedFan can even access S.M.A.R.T. info for those hard disks that support this feature and show hard disk temperatures too, if supported.
StuffIt Expander - StuffIt Expander easily expands and decodes all those files you download from the Web or receive in your email. It quickly accesses StuffIt files, unzips zip files created by WinZip® and other zip utilities, plus decompresses tar, gzip and bzip files for Unix users. Just drag, drop, and you're done!
Turbo Pad - Turbo Pad is a fast, lightweight programmer's text editor. It includes a tabbed interface, session support, syntax highlighting, unlimited undo/redo, code templates, word completion and much more.
AppRocket - AppRocket is a very natural way of accessing all types of files and information on your computer. Just type a few letters of what you are looking for and AppRocket finds it. It's fast, beautiful, and easy-to-use.
MWSnap - MWSnap is a small yet powerful Windows program for snapping (capturing) images from selected parts of the screen.
Stickies for Windows - Stickies for Windows lets you put yellow sticky notes on your Windows desktop, much like the popular MacOS application. It is very simple, very customizable, and completely free!
Driver Cleaner - A very useful utility for cleaning old video card drivers out that uninstallers can't remove.
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CD/DVD Burning Tools
Alcohol 120% - Alcohol brings a new meaning to the word multimedia! It is without a doubt a leader in it's class, bringing the ability to emulate and record CDs and DVDs together into one amazingly easy to use software program. More info here
Burn4Free - Free cd/dvd burning software.
Burnatonce - Burnatonce can master data and audio discs, read/write image files and copy on the fly. It's drag and drop interface has multi-language support and is fully compatible with XP themes.
Burrrn - Free cd/dvd burning software.
CDBurnerXP Pro - With this software you can burn CD-R, CD-RW DVD+R/RW DVD-R/RW discs.
CDRDAO - Disk-At-Once Recording of Audio and Data CD-Rs/CD-RWs.
CDR Tools Frontend - Free burning software.
Deepburner - DeepBurner is an advanced and extremely powerful CD and DVD burning package. It removes the hassle of making CDs, DVDs, and autoruns.
DVD Decrypter - DVD Decrypter is a highly versatile VOB-ripping utility. The software takes advantage of both the DeCSS Plus and VobDec algorithms for looking up and decrypting the CSS encryption.
DVD Shrink - DVD Shrink enables you to copy a DVD very easily.
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3D Graphics
3Delight - 3Delight is a fast RenderMan®-compliant renderer designed to produce photorealistic images for serious production environments. Some of its features include ray tracing, global illumination, motion blur, depth of field, subdivision surfaces, programmable shaders, quality antialiasing and antialiased multi-depth shadow maps.
Anim8or - Anim8or is a 3D modeling and character animation program.
Aqsis - Aqsis is a high quality, photorealistic, 3D rendering solution. It complies with the Renderman® interface standard defined by Pixar.
Blender - Blender is the first and only fully integrated 3D graphics creation suite allowing modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, realtime interactive 3D and game creation and playback with cross-platform compatibility - all in one tidy, easily and free downloadable package!
Houdini - To introduce 3D artists from around the world to Houdini, Side Effects Software Inc. is proud to bring you the Houdini Apprentice program, which gives you access to the same creative power used by the best animation professionals in the industry such as Electronic Arts, Sony Pictures Imageworks and Disney Feature Animation.
Now3D
OpenFX - OpenFX is an Open-Source 3D modeling, animation and rendering suite.
SOFTIMAGE|XSI EXP - Designed for you to experience the world's best animation software — SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.3.0 — the EXP is your passport to the industry's first truly nonlinear animation system.
Toxic - Toxic is a physically correct global illumination renderer aiming to produce photorealistic images and animations.
Wings3D - Wings 3D is a subdivision modeler inspired by Nendo and Mirai from Izware.
Terragen - Terragen is a work-in-progress scenery generator for Windows and the Mac OS. At this stage of its development, Terragen is free for personal non-commercial use.
POV-Ray - The Persistence of Vision Raytracer is a high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics. It is available in official versions for Windows, Mac OS/Mac OS X and i86 Linux. The source code is available for those wanting to do their own ports.
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IRC Clients
BersIRC
BitchX
HydraIRC
TinyIRC
XChat
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Instant Messengers
Gaim
Im2
Miranda IM
Pandion
Psi
SIM
Trillian
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Flightsim design tools
FS Design Studio V2 - A program for making models for games and in particular flightsim aircraft.
Gmax - gmax is a free 3D modeling and animation tool based on Discreet's award-winning 3ds max software. Built for gamers to create their own in-game content for gmax ready games, a gamer can produce everything from characters and vehicles to landscapes and props.
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Benchmarking tools
3DMark2001 SE - A widely used benchmark that is a good indicator of overall system performance.
3DMark2003 - Another benchmark from Futuremark that is a mainly graphics card dependent test.
3DMark2005 - The latest version of 3DMark from futuremark, a highly graphics card dependent benchmark that not many systems can even run smoothly.
PCMark04 - PCMark04 is the latest version of the popular PCMark series. PCMark04 is an application-based benchmark and a premium tool for measuring overall PC performance.
AquaMark3 - AquaMark3 is a powerful tool to determine reliable information about the gaming performance of a computer system.
SiSoftware Sandra 2004 - SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.
Hd Tach 3 - HD Tach will test the sequential read, random access and interface burst speeds of your attached storage device (hard drive, flash drive, removable drive, etc).
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Overclocking tools
Radlinker - RadLinker is a unique tweaker/linker for ATI Radeon based graphics cards. It allows you easy access to per game settings. It also enables you to overclock your Ati card using a nice and easy interface.
Coolbits - An overclocking application for Nvidia cards that is hidden normally but unlocked by using this registry entry.
ATITool - ATITool is an overclocking utility designed for ATI video cards.
Design target is to write a light-weight application for the enthusiast .
Prime95 - Prime95 is a very useful program for testing to see if a computer is stable, it's used by overclockers (myself included) to stress test after overclocking to prove stability.
Rivatuner - RivaTuner is the most powerful tweaking utility for NVIDIA and ATI display adapters running under Windows 98 / Windows 98 SE / Windows ME / Windows 2000 and Windows XP. The purpose of this utility is to give you access to all the undocumented features of Detonator and Catalyst drivers.
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Audio players
1by1 - Tired of creating and updating playlists? 1by1 is a small, fast and handy player which is not only small: It provides powerful tools to handle your file collection and listen to your tracks.
Billy - Billy is a lightweighted no nonsense audio player that allows you to quickly play an entire directory of MP3 files.
CoolPlayer - Blazing Fast Audio Player for Win32 Environments
DeliPlayer - DeliPlayer is a multi format, free audio player for Windows® 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP. It plays all sorts of music, modules and samples with high quality, while providing a powerful but easy to use user interface.
XMPlay - XMPlay is an audio player, supporting the OGG / MP3 / MP2 / MP1 / WMA / WAV / CDA / MO3 / IT / XM / S3M / MTM / MOD / UMX audio formats, and PLS / M3U / ASX / WAX playlists.
Foobar2000 - Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include ReplayGain support, low memory footprint and native support for several popular audio formats.
iTunes - A very popular audio player used by lots of people.
jetAudio - New jetAudio 6 once again redefines what a digital player should be. Tons of new features are added in this version, and jetAudio give you the best digital audio/video experience ever as well as the easy-to-use skinnable interface.
Musik - an open-source, cross-platform multimedia player and library.
Musik - A good freeware audio player.
SONIQUE - Sonique is one of the Web's hottest media and MP3 players. It features support for all the latest audio formats
Winamp - One of the most popular media players on the web, available in free and payware versions.
musikCube - musikCube is much more than an "mp3 player," it is a music "library." musikCube currently supports mp3, ogg, flac, and cd audio file formats. It also features an integrated cd ripper helping you take control of your music from the start.
Zinf Audio Player - The Zinf audio player is a simple, but powerful audio player for Linux and Win32. It supports MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, WAV and Audio CD playback, SHOUTcast/Icecast HTTP streaming, RTP streaming, a powerful music browser, theme support and a download manager.
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Video players
BSplayer - BSplayer is a Windows player that plays back all kinds of media files ( avi / mpg / asf / wmv / wav / mp3...) and specialises in video and divx playback.
CrystalPlayer - rystalPlayer features original video kernel allowing high-quality playback from any kind of video source, e.g. video files (.AVI, .MPEG, etc.) or URLs. It does not use built-in WindowsMedia environment, so there are no any limitations implied, as with most other players.
Cygwin MPlayer - A free media player.
VideoLAN - The VideoLAN project targets multimedia streaming of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and DivX files, DVDs, digital satellite channels, digital terrestial television channels and live videos on a high-bandwidth IPv4 or IPv6 network in unicast or multicast under many OSes.
Real Alternative - A good media player that has a plugin for Firefox users aswell.
Quicktime Alternative - A good media player that has a plugin for Firefox users aswell.
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Video codecs
Having trouble getting a video to run? well here are a selection of essential codecs.
DivX - DivX is a high-performance video plug-in that lets you create and watch high-quality movies and video.
ffdshow - ffdshow is DirectShow and VFW codec for decoding/encoding many video and audio formats, including DivX and XviD movies using libavcodec, xvid and other opensourced libraries with a rich set of postprocessing filters.
K-Lite Codec Pack - The K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs and related tools.
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Audio Creation
Gungirl Sequencer - Gungirl Sequencer is an easy to use Audiosequencer for Linux and MS Windows. It includes a simple Filemanager and uses Drag & Drop to arrange Audiosamples.
Jesusonic - Jesusonic Software turns your PC or Mac into a fully programmable realtime effects processor.
KRISTAL Audio Engine - KRISTAL Audio Engine is a powerful multi-track recorder, audio sequencer and mixer - ideal for anyone wanting to get started with recording, mixing and mastering digital audio.
orDrumbox - orDrumbox is described as a software drum machine on a desktop application. A fully-featured drum machine and audio sequencer designed to a creative pattern-based way of drum programming. You can compose music and beats with this new generation of sound tracker.
Tu2 - Tu2 is a phrase sampler which means it will make music and sound out of samples you feed it.
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Gaming Utilities
Xfire - Xfire is a free gaming tool that automatically keeps track of when and where gamers are playing PC games online and lets their friends join them easily.
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Hard Drive Utilities
We all know how much of a pain in the behind a borked hard drive is so here are some very helpful utilities for various manufacturers.
Fujitsu
IBM/Hitatchi
Maxtor
Samsung
Seagate
Western Digital
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Major Speed boost for Mozilla Firefox
I found this handy little extension that makes a few changes and pages load much quicker for me
http://www.bitstorm.org/extensions/
And click on the 'Install Tweak Network Settings'
When installed exit Firefox and run Firefox again.
Then go to:
Tools>Tweak Network Settings
and select 'Power' and click apply.
Exit Firefox and run again and see the difference.
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Must have extensions for Firefox
Adblock - A very very good extension that with two clicks of the mouse enables blocking of ads very quickly.
Flashblock - Another great extension that blocks those annoying flash ads while enabling quick access to unblock items via one mouse click.
Mouse Gestures - Allows you to execute common commands (like page forward/backward, close tab, new tab) by mouse gestures drawn over the current webpage, without reaching for the toolbar or the keyboard.
AutoCopy - Select text on any web page and it will be automatically copied to the clipboard. It works in much the same way as does Trillian or mIrc.
The full list of extensions for Firefox
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Useful links
Omega Drivers - The latest drivers for Ati and Nvidia cards offering a slightly higher image quality over the official drivers from both brands.
Imageshack - A very good, free image hosting service.
Registry Guide for Windows - Now this is a site to behold! The Registry Guide for Windows, provides an extensive range of registry tweaks, tricks & hacks for optimizing, enhancing and securing the Windows XP, 2000, NT, 98, 95 and Windows Me operating systems.
Bootdisks - The name of the site gives it away really, lot's of useful bootdisks!
TweakXP - A very useful site full of tweaks for Windows.
Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows - Self explanatory really.
Windows XP Services tweaks - A very very good guide to tweaking the bloated services that run on Windows XP.
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I hope this has helped and feel free to PM me if you see any dead links or have anything to add.
Neil.
Edited by Neil., 24 August 2005 - 11:06 PM.
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