Free programs - the ultimate guide

[Time Bandit]

I see you have the excellent handbrake for video encoding, in conjunction with this I use ProjectX for demultiplexing .ts files from my PVR and Cuttermaran which is great for editing digital video. To bring the images and sound back together ImagoMPEG-Muxer is also a great little app.
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/ProjectX

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Cuttermaran

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/ImagoMPEG-Muxer

I also like SyncBack Freeware V3.2.19.0 for backups - very customisable, can be as simple or complicated as you want.
http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html

Sorry if this one s been added already but CCleaner to get rid of all the junk your pc accumulates and the remnants of cr**py software that doesn't uninstall properly. Very safe and does not corrupt your registry like more aggressive cleaners.
http://www.ccleaner.com/

[Disturbedguy]

I like this thread, even the layout of it, makes it easy to find things, for example the DriveGuide Toolkit, I could have used this a while ago, however the link doesn't seem to be working at the moment.

DriverGuide Toolkit - Backs up all drivers into one file.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

I see you have the excellent handbrake for video encoding, in conjunction with this I use ProjectX for demultiplexing .ts files from my PVR and Cuttermaran which is great for editing digital video. To bring the images and sound back together ImagoMPEG-Muxer is also a great little app.
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/ProjectX

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Cuttermaran

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/ImagoMPEG-Muxer

I also like SyncBack Freeware V3.2.19.0 for backups - very customisable, can be as simple or complicated as you want.
http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html

Sorry if this one s been added already but CCleaner to get rid of all the junk your pc accumulates and the remnants of cr**py software that doesn't uninstall properly. Very safe and does not corrupt your registry like more aggressive cleaners.
http://www.ccleaner.com/

could be handy as im gunna be doing some video editing soon

[moogle]

could be handy as im gunna be doing some video editing soon

Is that your alibi to your parents for getting i7?

[j.o.s.h.1408]

Is that your alibi to your parents for getting i7?

hehe

[SiM]

We all edit our home pr0n once in a while. Don't need an i7 for that.

[magneticman]

rofl

[aidanjt]

Windows apps I use:

Windows Live Essentials - IM and mail.
AVG Free - The some what decent free anti-virus.
Firefox - What can I say?
Daemon Tools - Mounts disc images like ISO, CUE/BIN, MDS, UDF, etc..
7-Zip - Reads practically any archive, and uses lzma as it's native compression algo, which leaves the rest in the dust, has a 64bit native port too.
uTorrent - Tiny, fast, feature packed, but yes, it's written for Windows!
VirtualBox - The free and reasonably decent virtualisation hypervisor, not the fastest, but the pace of development is only increasing.
XChat - It's Gtk, it's shareware, but it's also GPL (strange, no?), so you can get other non-shareware builds from the internet, google is your friend. Any other freeware Windows IRC client just seems turd in comparison.
K-Lite Mega Codec Pack - includes all the codecs and filters you could shake a stick at, also includes Media Player Classic (both the origional and the home cinema version, the latter is better of course), and numerous utilities for pulling media file information, all in one handy installer.
OpenOffice.org - Needs no introduction, it's no MS Office, but it gets the job done, most of the time.
MS Visual Studio Express - VB sucks, but the C++ IDE is decent. Useful for when you don't have access to a decent development environment.

Linux apps I use:

KDE 3.5 - The K Desktop Environment. Ignore 4.x for at least another year, it still isn't ready. Don't let the wizz-bang bling and hyperbole fool you into thinking otherwise.
By extension of KDE provding some 300 apps, I wont go through them all. Kopete, KMail, and arK are my favoured IM client, mailer, and archiver.
Firefox - Again, still my prefered browser, mostly due to site compatibility.
XChat - Again, still my prefered IRC client, Konversation suffers from dialog overload, and isn't as customisable.
gtk-engines-qt and gtk-engines-qtcurve - makes Gtk applications integrate into KDE better. See your package manager.
Amarok - *The* music player application for Linux.
K3b - Makes Nero look like a toy. Not only does it let you compose and burn images transparently, but it handles media better, including transcoding functionality. It's so good, that even hardened Gnomie fanboys use it.
K9copy - Like DVD Shrink, but for KDE.
KDevelop - A fairly good IDE for KDE, but it's lack of Git support puts me off.
Kaffeine - A very well integrated Xine-based frontend for KDE, usually plays just about anything thanks to Xine.
KTorrent - Like uTorrent, only better, and written for KDE.

And on to Linux CLI apps:
Vim - *The* text editor, a highly extensible model text editor. It takes some time to learn how to use it effectively, or more specifically, untrain your brain from all the bad GUI/non-model editing you've been used to. But it is far more efficent when you learn how.
Git - Source Code Management on steriods, both fast and powerful, used by hackers all over the world for maintaining their source trees, including Linux kernel developers. It turns out it's also rather useful for dealing with complex package management trees, as well as versioning non-development work in your /home directory, and for doing backups too.
MPD - The Music Player Daemon, a background process for keeping track of, and playing your audio files, supports *lots* of formats.
ncmpc - A nice ncurses (cli) frontend for the MPD.
Mplayer - For older graphics cards with a real framebuffer interface, mplayer works very well on a tty (non-X11 text terminal display). It also serves as a backup video player for the very odd file that xine can't handle.
Irssi - A reasonably competant ncurses based IRC client.
Bitlbee - Turns any IRC client into a multi-IM protocol client by providing a fairly intuative IRC gateway to your IM accounts. Much like a BNC, only for your IMs.

That's a few from the top of my head.

[Giraffe]

More internet browsers:
Opera An alternative to Firefox with much the same features, tabbed browsing, in built download manager

Oi - Firefox has much the same features as Opera - sometimes only a few months later but mostly a few years!

From Opera, looking for new employees on development:

"Do you do all of the above and still have time to fix bugs and implement exciting new features that are always copied by some other browser?"

[digit]

Oi - Firefox has much the same features as Opera - sometimes only a few months later but mostly a few years!

From Opera, looking for new employees on development:

"Do you do all of the above and still have time to fix bugs and implement exciting new features that are always copied by some other browser?"

Perhaps I miss worded what I said, I was just trying to mention a few familar firefox features.

Opera An alternative to Firefox with much the same features, tabbed browsing, in built download manager

becomes:

Opera An alternative to Firefox with much the same features such as: tabbed browsing, in built download manager

Happy ?

[0iD]

Opera even handles torrent downloads

But yes, Opera and Firefox do many of the same things, but I just prefer Opera.

Downthemall is great on Firefox

[digit]

Opera even handles torrent downloads

But yes, Opera and Firefox do many of the same things, but I just prefer Opera.

Downthemall is great on Firefox

Never had much success with torrents on Opera? They just sit at 0%. Does it just work after installation or does anything have to be configured? Using azereus etc the torrent downloads just fine?

[Disturbedguy]

Has anyone got a working link for this DriverGuide Toolkit - Backs up all drivers into one file?

[0iD]

Never had much success with torrents on Opera? They just sit at 0%. Does it just work after installation or does anything have to be configured? Using azereus etc the torrent downloads just fine?

No, works fine for me with the vast majority of torrents Tho the added functionality in Azerus is a boon.

[magneticman]

most of google chrome's defining features are opera rip-offs

and firefox has lost it's way imo, not quite what it was. Opera is the best.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

cptwhite_uk: you should of made the firsts two posts so you can reserve the 2nd post to expand on what is already a big list of useful apps