Sengor's General Tool Set

Looking at how much time I spend looking for useful software utilities, here is an essential list, all of them are freely available on the internet:

(In no particular order or category)

• AVG Free
• Great free antivirus software, thanks Jones
• Sonique
• Formerly my favourite audio player, development of it these days is next to none
• GX::Transcoder
• Convert those audio files to and from multiple formats
• EAC - Exact Audio Copy
• Accurate and quality focused free CD -> MP3 ripper
• PowerToys for Win XP
• Tweak UI & Enhanced Alt+Tab & ClearType Tuner & Image Resizer & Virtual Desktop Manager are the most useful ones
• SciTE
• Syntax aware Code/Text editor with ability to expand/collapse code sections, very useful for large code viewing
• Dev C++
• C/C++ IDE for Windows platform
• WinAMP
• Still with classic skin, still the best media player out there ;)
• PeerGuardian
• Block/Filter out internet traffic from preselected IP address ranges, thanks Jones
• The GIMP
• Free photo editor/creator like Photoshop. Wind32 and Linux
• WinRAR
• best file archiver out there, light and fast, opens many formats
• 3D Mark
• Test out that Gfx Card, yes I know it's now called Futuremark - Hey I'm old fashioned!
• BurnAtOnce
• Burn those ISO images
• OneWorld Time
• What time is it in --insert place-- ?
• PowerOff
• Turn that PC off when you want and how you want, thanks Jones for the tip
• GameArena COGS
• Keep track of all of those local gaming servers for all of your games, GA account required
• WordWeb
• Uhh Ohh what does this and that fancy word mean? Free disctionary, I wish they had more internet jargon in there
• Windows Uptime
• How long did your Windows PC manage to stay up for so far?
• RefreshForce
• Fix all of those games/[resolutions] that run in low refresh rates
• SuperScan & Nmap
• See what TCP/IP ports are open on a remote computer
• Y'z Dock
• Mac OS Like docking bar for Windows, attractive eye candy, no official page since development ceased
• TCPview
• kindof like netstat but in GUI and real time
• Process Explorer
• See ALL processes that Windows is running, Task Manager hides some
• Riva Tuner
• Tweaker for nVidia based video cards
• Resource Hacker
• See what those Win32 binaries contain, Pictures, cursors, resources, classes...
• WinSCP
• The best SCP/SFTP client out there
• TightVNC
• Cross platform remote graphcal computer access, great for slow links, session resuming and situations where you don't have admin access to the remote box
• FreeNX
• I blogged about this a while ago. Similar to VNC but faster
• PuTTY
• SSH/Tenet/RAW client, for all of the remote access needs
• Cygwin
• unix shell for windows along with all of the usefull GNU tools, best way to get X11 working under Windows
• gVim
• advanced text editor, only for the brave!
• Real Alternative
• aka Media Player Classic with Plugins
• VLC Media Player
• ... and also preview/stream those corrupt/incomplete videos
• Net Transport
• download manager, even downloads streams into a file, thanks Jones
• uTorrent
• Light and small BitTorrent client with all the features you might need
• WinRipper
• Extract various multimedia segments from any file. Useful for extracting content from game files
• GkrellM
• System statistics monitoring panel, one of my long time favourites. Comes both in Unix and Win32 ports
• CPU-z
• Detailed info on CPU, M/B and RAM for PCs, can produce great summaries of a PC config.
• BartPE
• Make a bootable Windows XP based CD. There's lots of plugins for it available out there. Great for troubleshooting Windows issues (viruses, disks, spyware...)
• Knoppix
• Best live Linux CD/DVD out there. Useful feature is booting Memtest86 for troubleshooting memory related problems.
• Slackware
• Not a single tool, but a great selection of useful tools atop of a great build of Linux ketrnels (Yes that does constitute an OS).

That's enough for now, I'll probably update this list at a later stage...

Version: 1.4