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.

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.

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

(Snorg ducks & covers)

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I am Snorg, The King of chaos, The Master of disaster, The Duke of delirium, The Prince of perturbation. Everyone can chat at Snorg's Chat Room!!

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.

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I am Snorg, The King of chaos, The Master of disaster, The Duke of delirium, The Prince of perturbation. Everyone can chat at Snorg's Chat Room!!

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.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

Spybot Search & Destroy - An anti-spyware doohicky
http://www.safer-networking.org/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/

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.

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

http://www.coollector.com/index.html

For movie fanatics.

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