[KellieCM]

We surfed, clicked, and installed to find sparkling free gems capable of keeping you in touch, planning your time, and tuning and securing your PC, not to mention keeping you productive, glitzing up your desktop, and entertaining you with music, videos, photos, and games. We paid special attention to programs and services you may not have heard of before. The results will be published in the June magazine feature "100 Fantastic Freebies." But we want to hear your picks for the best freebies, too, whether they appear in our article or not.

[snorg]

Media Player Classic uses few resources, has cool features no other media player has, plays all kinds of media, comes with built DVD decoder for playing DVD movies.

EVEREST Home Edition tells you everything you ever wanted to know about your PC.




JkDefrag is a fast & super efficient defragger, uses almost ZERO resources, you can defrag while in safe mode, or in Windoze.
Even after defraging often with the regular Windoze defragger my PC was a bit sluggish, JkDefrag in safe mode made a big difference, my PC perked rite up after that.

[RastaMon]

Quote

But we want to hear your picks for the best freebies, too

Mac Freebies

Perian - Play AVI, DviX, XviD and more in Quicktime.

Demeter - Simply the best, fastest browser available on any platform. And it's only available for Macs. :D

VLC - If it is DRM free media, VLC will likely play it, from DVDs to FLAC. (multi-platform)

You Control Tunes - iTunes controls in the menubar.

Xshelf - It's like an ultra-versatile graphical clipboard that's always handy and never in the way. As soon as I tried it I wondered how I ever got by without it.

Audacity - Powerful, free audio editor. (multi-platform)

Handbrake - Video file conversion with presets for iPhone and iPod. (multi-platform)

iTunes - In addition to being an excellent audio and video file database and player, iTunes is an outstanding PDF database. (multi-platform)

The Unarchiver - Open obscure archived files.

[mphenterprises]

RastaMon said:

VLC - If it is DRM free media, VLC will likely play it, from DVDs to FLAC. (multi-platform)

>
>

Hi RastaMon. Good call on VLC. This application appears to be a catch all for what other applications cannot handle. I have never had a problem with it nor have I had a file that VLC could not handle.

[snorg]

mphenterprises said:

I have never had a problem with it nor have I had a file that VLC could not handle.

I havta disagree VLC wont play an unindexed WMV but Media Player Classic will.



(Snorg ducks & covers)

[mphenterprises]

Hi Snorg. LOL No need to duck and cover. I have never used an unindexed .wmv file so I have never had a chance to test it with VLC. ;-)

[snorg]

VLC wont play some other unindexed (broken) video file types either but Media Player Classic will.
Broken, even with 1/2 the sound missing from incomplete download, unreparable MPC will often play them.
But so will the old mplayer2 for that matter.

[piyushsingh]

vlc plays broken files , streams fine.

MPH- Try opening .rmvb with with vlc.

[Evildave]

Free, Sweet Office Suite. Reads/writes M$ Office, exports PDF, too. Not that you'd WANT to read/write M$ office files, but if someone gave you one, you could open it. OpenDocument is THE STANDARD.
http://www.openoffice.org/

Mozilla Firefox - Unless you LIKE Microsoft's Malware Installation Suite Deluxe (AKA 'Internet Explorer')
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Subversion/TortoisesSVN - Very competent version control; the second is Windows integration for it.
http://subversion.tigris.org/
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

Perforce is also free and fully functional for individuals and open source projects. It has a 'M$ Office' plugin that works OK for versioning and diffing Microsoft Office documents if you're stuck with that in your organization. It plays nice with Visual Studio, too. I use SVN nowadays.
http://www.perforce.com/index.html

Free Adobe Flex/AIR SDK - In case you want to learn to make Flash content. You don't strictly need Flash. You can for instance import/embed bitmaps and MP3 files and use those in your game. Very adequate for knowledgeable programmers.
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/

Visual Studio Express - In case you want to build Visual C/C projects and whatever their dumb 'flash killer' thing was called. Severely crippled, but useful in some ways.
http://www.microsoft.com/express/

Google Earth - Nifty worldwide mapping doohicky. Can't live without that! No way!
http://earth.google.com/

Foxit PDF Reader (For Windows) - An alternate PDF reader that doesn't suck as much as Adobe's Acrobat Reader, and doesn't have as many exploited security holes.
http://www.foxitsoft...df/rd_intro.php

Spybot Search & Destroy - An anti-spyware doohicky
http://www.safer-net...g/en/index.html

Clonezilla Live - Bootable CD Fully replaces 'Drive Image' or 'Norton Ghost' type software. Even does multiple concurrent drive images over a network.
http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/

GParted Live - Bootable CD Fully replaces 'Partition Magic', which Symantec bought and destroyed.
http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/

GMail - Google's Email Service Probably the best spam filtering available, capable of collecting mail from multiple OTHER services and filtering the spam from them for you and presenting you with one 'Inbox' for them all, and though you CAN use your own mail client with it, their web interface works very well. Once you start using it, you'll have no need for a local email client and address book (both very vulnerable to attack if your local machine gets compromised). I can't recommend this highly enough. Everyone I've switched to this has fallen in love with it. One friend got thousands of spam messages a day in her business email, and it went to effectively zero spam messages with no false-positives (that she knows of). Excellent and nearly instant filtering and searching, too.
http://mail.google.com/

[AuroraDizon]

#1 for me has to go to Ubuntu, free operating system
Mostly you guys are aware of anything id put down from avg to gimp spybot and everything in between. Other stuff people have mentioned are great Google Earth Open Office etc, If it hasn't been mentioned yet I really like Pidgin (consolidated messanger program). Craigs list is pretty cool too.

[prairierambler]

Yes, I'll admit it. One of my computers is still on the Millenium Edition and while it isn't any speed-demon, lately, it has slowed to a crawl. Thanks to PCW, I discovered, among other things, EUsing Free Registry. Just before I down-loaded and installed it, my computer continually got "unble to display page" on nearly anything I tried to go to. After I ran the program and cleaned out over 3,000 invalid registries and other things, I was able to immediately go where I wanted and my computer speed increased at least 60%. There is more to do to speed up this antique, but EUsing Free Registry has certainly gotten me off to a good start.

[BryanPidcock]

Wow!!!just downloade slacker and what a fantastic experience. I just wanted to say thanx............

[swathingscientist]

One of the very best,if not THE best,freeware programs I've found over the years was created by a young lad,an Italian and yet I haven't seen it on PCWorld to date or even CNet.

Most unfortunate indeed.

Program/Application,is called "iSysCleaner",does such a superb job,I'd never be without it.Just placing the name in your search engine will take you to Matteo's website.

Good day to all and sunder

[Flashorn]

Hey Everyone!!
Well, I might share a few with you but, if you like to have your tools on your right click,
try this site for all kinds of nifty little tools



The site's name is "2BrightSparks'



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I have a few more but, maybe latter.









FLASHORN.



Ok, my link will not show. Just Google the name and then mouse over products and choose onclick utilities.

[RaisedGrain]

www.coollector.com/index.html

For movie fanatics.

A large database of movies, over 39,000 strong, with many features.

[MiyamotoUsagi]

neat little tool from a Japanese company..... http://www.hyper-anchor.org/en/

This
tool lets you bookmark a specific graphic or selected text in a webpage
and save as a favourite (as you would do with traditional bookmarks) -
handy when you want to bookmark something in a webpage with heaps of text
and you don't want to have to wade through it all again when you go back to it. Can be used on IE or Firefox

[eawheeler]

A usefull tool that I use is the free Address Correction Tool by DYMO. It can be found at global.dymo.com/enUS/PressRelease/DYMO[uoffers[/u]easyaddresscorrection.html]

[jkolean]

BoomVote.com is free to join and gives away frequent cash prizes.

[mikeyesfan]

Microsoft Visual Express Editions 2008 it has Visual C Express Edition.NET that you have to add Windows Server SDK to make windows apps and DirectX SDK for it too. They have instructions how to do it on the Internet or their web page. Then there is Visual Basic Express Edition.NET. The next one on here is Visual C# Express Edition. The next two are Visual Web Developer and the last one SQL Server 2005.

http://www.microsoft...press/download/



Windows Server SDK


http://www.microsoft...&displaylang=en



DirectX SDK


www.microsoft.com/downloads/Browse.aspx?displaylang=en&categoryid=2





How to get it working with DirectX and Windows Server SDK below it says for 2005 Edition though I have that not tried doing it with 2008 Edition. But they can be the same in a lot of ways in setting them up to make Windows and work with DirectX SDK.


[http://www.burninghands.net/2006/04/01/vcexpress-with-directx-sdk/]








This is a free C compiler Dev-C.


[http://www.bloodshed.net/dev/devcpp.html]





This is DirectX9.0c for Dev-C to get it working with DirectX correctly.


[http://www.g-productions.net/page.php?id=23]





Another C compiler Borland C 5.5 I don't like it like the other two though because you have to use command line at parts to work with it and a text editor.


[http://dn.codegear.com/article/20633]





A program that runs in both versions of C makes it easier for those not used to DirectX.


[http://www.allegro.cc/]





Here is a Basic compiler not made by Microsoft and it can use some of the commands of the old Microsoft QBasic program.


[http://www.freebasic.net/]





Here is Netbeans a Java compiler.


[http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.0/final/]





This is Eclipse another Java compiler


[http://www.eclipse.org/]





the next one is Blender it happens to be a 3D Graphic Art Program for Video Game Development or making 3D Graphics similar to Maya, but hard to get used to using it has tutorials on the site though.


[http://www.blender.org/]





This is anim8or another 3D Graphic Program it has tutorials on the site too.


[http://www.anim8or.com/]





This is one more 3D Graphic Program called Truespace 3.2 it is old now, but free the new version costs money to buy.


[http://forms.caligari.com/forms/ts3all_free.html]





What I have here is a 3D Graphic Program called Wings3D


[http://www.wings3d.com/]





This is the most powerful program for 3D Graphics out there Maya Personal Learning Edition is Free has a watermark the page though.


[http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7639525]





This is a 2D Graphic Art Program similar to Photoshop called Gimpshop


[http://plasticbugs.com/?p=241]





This is an animation program called Creatoon it tells you how to use it on the site.


[http://www.creatoon.com/]





Here is another animation program called Pencil.


[http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil/index.php]



Mappy a Tile Editor for 3D and 2D Graphics for making Video Game Graphics.

http://tilemap.co.uk/mappy.php

[busguy]

In this time of high gas prices we found this free transit information site with lots of information on bus routes-videos and links to more transit info.

http://www.transitguru.com/