Here are some more free programs for everyone!

Winamp Media Player - MP3, Multimedia, and Music Player. www.winamp.com

Ad-aware. A program to scan for adware. http://www.lavasoft.com/

Zone-alarm. A firewall. http://www.zonealarm.com

Gimp. A photoshop-type program. http://www.gimp.org/

I know im missing some but this should be good for now.

Opera 9.5 is ****ing up. Crashed 5 times in 3 days.

Why do you people prefer Opera?

It's not open source, it has less plugins, it's slower...

I like both; but Opera is faster and uses less resources.

ORLY? How mamy resources does it use while crashing?? Also, RAM/Resources are cheap.


Flock FTW.

Firefox based, with lots of sick features. Almost all Firefox Extensions work as well.

I can see how people like Flock, I just don't need anything it offers. Firefox 3 does everything I need and it does it well.

Yep. The only thing I really NEED Flock for now, is the Photo-Uploader and MediaBar. The Photobucket site is decent now, for uploading/browsing, but Flock still saves me a lot of time.

Ohh - This is a real cool Extension for Firefox/Flock for browsing various image/video sites in a completely new (3D) way.

http://www.piclens.com/

Excellent selections!

I'd consider adding: VLC Media Player and Real Alternative (for video media).

Also, maybe notepad++ when you just don't like the default one packaged...but that's kinda on the nerdy side.

Perhaps a mention that Safari is the default browser for Apple OSes.

fwiw I love opera because in my experience it is noticibaly faster for startup and page loadings, has gestures and a password keeper built in. I've been using 9.5 on an xp and vista machine and haven't had any crashes. meh, it's kinda dumb to debate anyways much like vi/emacs, python vs ruby blah blah blah.

Video

• Media Player Classic - Video Player.
• VLC Player - Video Player, more robust that MPC (can play files that MPC thinks are corrupted), contains numerous codecs and is portable.
• VirtualDub - Video capture/processing utility.
• Super - Video format conversion utility.

Codecs

• Quicktime Alternative - Use this instead of installing the full bloated Quicktime (comes with Media Player Classic).
• Real Alternative - Use this instead of installing the full bloated Real Player (comes with Media Player Classic).
• Klite Mega Codec Pack - Contains almost every codec you could ever need, comes with QTAlt, RealAlt and Media Player Classic.

Instant Messaging / Voice

• Trillian - IM program that supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and IRC.
• Teamspeak2 - VOIP group chat.
• Ventrilo - VOIP group chat, has better quality sound than Teamspeak.
• Apatch - Patch for MSN messenger that removes removes the advertisments and other visual clutter.

IconTweaker - For those of you on XP (prolly works on 2000 also) this tool is cool for editing your icons. You can download pre made themes from a place like deviantart, or make your own with .ico files.

Leopard Theme for IconTweaker

Vista theme for IconTweaker

It's very easy to use and you can revert to the default XP icons with the press of a button.

For IM, I'll add http://www.meebo.com/

It's not even a program, it's a website that allows you to use AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk, and others. Very handy for those of you on computers where you can't (or don't want to) install software.

Zune theme (screenshot)

best thread i read aLL week, thanks OP

CD/DVD burner

Infrarecorder- open-source and actively developed burning suite. Very easy to use and lightweight.

Disk Encryption

TrueCrypt- open-source whole or partial disk encryption. The latest version allows system drive encryption.