This topic is dedicated to the accumulation of useful websites or useful free programs.


Old Version - A website with old versions of programs. Very useful for finding that 'old version' that worked better than the new one.
Internet Movie Database - Websites with a thorough catalog of movies, games, and tv shows.
Random.org - Internet Random number generator and misc randomizer.
Hulu - Watch tv or movies online with minimal commercials. Great alternative to pirating.
Surf The Channel - Another place to find tv/movies online.
Newegg - Definitive computer parts online store. Find most of the best deals here.
Gametrailers - Website constantly updated with all forms of media concerning upcoming and current games.
Ladislav Zezula - A pioneer of reverse engineering the MPQ file format used in W2, W3, D1, D2, SC, and other Blizzard games. He also has his own set of utilities that are like those at sysinternals.
Filter Forge - A really large database with seamless textures. Useful for beginners
dafont - Get your fonts here.
Tweak Guides - Site with an optimization guide for numerous games and applications.
Requirements lab - Check to see if your computer can run certain games before you buy them. Not 100% accurate.


File utilities
7-zip - File compression utility. Works with many formats.
Irfanview - Great image viewer/browser/converter.
Free Commander - Alternative windows file manager.

Video utilities
VLC - Great media player, if videos lag then try this.
SUPER - If you can follow the several links and somehow manage to download it its a great video file conversion utility.
Media Coder - Rockz claims this is better than SUPER.
Virtual Dub - Another conversion utility a bit more on the technical side.
CCCP - Combined Community Codec Pack. Lightweight codec pack which will play most anything, so long as the encoder wasn't an asshole. Also comes with 2 media players.

Audio utilities
Winamp - Old school mp3 player. Sucks for anything else.
Foobar2000 - The player for people who hate Winamp.
Audacity - Great audio editing utility.

Computer Maintenance (Also please read the other pinned topic, these two tie in nicely)
Ad aware - Spyware removal.
Spybot - Also Spyware removal.
CCleaner - Helps keep your compy running faster by cleaning out shit.
Reg Cleaner - Registry cleaner. Does different things than CCleaner's built in registry cleaner, and allows you to view/delete keys that don't exist anymore. Only use 1 core, or it will freeze.
Easy Cleaner - Much like CCleaner, but with a few extra tidbits. One nice part is the pie chart of folders.
NTREGOPT - Registry optimizer. Makes it "faster" and "smaller". Not by much, but a lot of small things can make something big.
Start -> Run -> msconfig - Why fuck with other programs when Windows has shit like this built into it. This lets you edit many things from your system and windows boot settings, to active services, to startup programs and shortcuts to other useful Windows tools.
Hijack this - Scans system for possible changes by spyware/malware.
System Internals - Contains some very basic tools that can greatly satisfy performance needs, development needs, or just plain curiosity.
Auslogics Disk Defrag - Alternative defragger to Windows built in one.

Bittorrent/File Sharing programs
Vuze - Great bittorrent program with a built in community.
uTorrent - More minimalistic bittorrent program.

Browsers
Firefox - Plugins make this the most feature packed browser.
Opera - Faster than Firefox but lacks the flexibility.
Chrome - Faster than FF and Opera and very minimalistic.
Firefox Plug-ins
Mouse Gestures Redox - Gestures featuring diagonals, and the ability to highlight an address (not a link), open new tab and automatically go to that address.
FireGestures - Another popular gestures addon, apparently better if you don't use diagonal gestures.
NoScript - Easily block javascript/flash through the use of a whitelist. Annoying if you don't know how to use it, or don't have a very good mouse. Blocks most *annoying* ads, shows the simple ones.
Adblock Plus - Blocks ads via a blacklist. Really though, ads are what keep the internet free.
DownloadHelper - Downloads flash movies with ease. It's gotten a whole lot better, but doesn't work on obscure sites.
IE Tab - Allows you to open up an emulated IE tab. Works with windows update. The back button is a little funky though. You may notice that ytmnd sucks on Firefox, but not on IE.
Greasemonkey - Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Great for modifying commonly viewed sites with bad layouts like Youtube.

CD/DVD/Bluray utilities
DoISO - Great for quickly turning anything into an ISO. ANYTHING.
CD burner XP - CD/DVD/Bluray burning utility.
Daemon tools - Mount and emulate cd/dvd drives on your computer.

Document utilities
Open Office - Free alternative to Microsoft Office.
Notepad++ - Great source code editor.
Metapad - Minimalistic editor but has many features.
Textpad - Mix of the above two, choose your flavor I guess.

Cosmetic or useful alternatives to Windows Explorer
Launchy - Launch programs with a couple keystrokes.
Rocket Dock - Windows dock application that mimics ones on a Mac.
Rainmeter - Customizable resource meter that can display various performance data in different formats. A screenshot is worth a thousand words. Its very customizable.
Google Desktop - For people without Vista who want this stuff. Its a highly flexible sidebar on your computer where you can stick tons of mini-gadgets and applets.

FTP programs
Filezilla - Great FTP agent.
winscp - Another FTP agent.

PDF utilities
Foxit Reader - PDF viewer. Opens much faster than Adobe Reader.
Cute PDF - Create PDF files.

Miscellaneous / Not enough for its own category
Gimp - Free alternative to Photoshop.
Taksi - Free alternative to FRAPS.
DOSBox - x86 emulator. Play those old games found on abandonia and Home of the Underdogs.
Gmax - 3d modeling tool.
Swiss knife - Partitioning tool, when Windows fails this thing picks up the slack.
ATI tray tools - If you have an ATi card, ATT is an alternative to Catalyst Control Center: much easier to use, supports game profiles, and doesn't require .NET.

Post some good additions and I'll throw them in the list.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Mar 5 2009, 3:44 am by chuiu.

Useful. I think I'll check out that program Taksi.

I can't really think of much to suggest right now. Maybe Virtual Dub. That program is really huge in the video editing community. I have used it some myself.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 6 2009, 5:52 am by bajadulce. Reason: better link

Foxit Reader - PDF viewer. Opens much faster than Adobe Reader, and is just plainly filled with less aids.
MediaCoder - SUPER sucks. Mediacoder sucks less, and is much easier to download.
RegCleaner - Registry cleaner. Does different things than CCleaner's built in registry cleaner, and allows you to view/delete keys that don't exist anymore. Only use 1 core, or it will freeze.
Easy Cleaner - Much like CCleaner, but with a few extra tidbits. One nice part is the pie chart of folders.
NTREGOPT - Registry optimizer. Makes it "faster" and "smaller". Not by much, but a lot of small things can make something big.
Bootvis - Microsoft Utility to view the boot process. Also features a boot optimization routine. Can seriously reduce the boot time of a system.
HijackThis - Scans system for possible changes by spyware/malware. Chances are if you haven't heard of this, you shouldn't use it.
DOSBox - x86 emulator. Play those old games found on abandonia and Home of the Underdogs.
Notepad++ - Advanced notepad. See also metapad.
CCCP - Combined Community Codec Pack. Lightweight codec pack which will play most anything, so long as the encoder wasn't an asshole. Also comes with 2 media players.
Alcohol - Disk emulating software. Much like Daemon Tools. 52% is free, but 120% supports burning/ripping images. See also PowerISO.
ATi Tray Tools - If you have an ATi card, ATT is an alternative to Catalyst Control Center: much easier to use, supports game profiles, and doesn't require .NET.
WinRAR - For completeness, a very good archiver much like 7-zip.

Firefox addons:
Mouse Gestures Redox - Gestures featuring diagonals, and the ability to highlight an address (not a link), open new tab and automatically go to that address.
FireGestures - Another popular gestures addon, apparently better if you don't use diagonal gestures.
NoScript - Easily block javascript/flash through the use of a whitelist. Annoying if you don't know how to use it, or don't have a very good mouse. Blocks most *annoying* ads, shows the simple ones.
Adblock Plus - Blocks ads via a blacklist. Really though, ads are what keep the internet free.
DownloadHelper - Downloads flash movies with ease. It's gotten a whole lot better, but doesn't work on obscure sites.
IE Tab - Allows you to open up an emulated IE tab. Works with windows update. The back button is a little funky though. You may notice that ytmnd sucks on Firefox, but not on IE.

I highly recommend 7-zip over WinRar and WinZip.
Personally, I prefer spybot over Ad-Aware. I recommend you set it on "Advanced" mode so that you can look at some embedded utilities like manage startup entries.
I really like Irfanview too, its batch conversion has some really useful features, and has support for plugins(though not many plugin writers).
As for media player, I use winamp. There are many plugins that play several different video formats(even wmv and mp4).

You should probably categorize the links.
Sysinternals - Contains some very basic tools that can greatly satisfy performance needs, development needs, or just plain curiosity.
Ladislav Zezula - A pioneer of reverse engineering the MPQ file format used in W2, W3, D1, D2, SC, and other Blizzard games. He also has his own set of utilities that are like those at sysinternals.

utorrent ( http://www.utorrent.com/ ) is so much better than vuze. Azureus used to be good back in the earlier days of it's development. Ever since they added the vuze part, it begun to suck big dick. Part of the "every great program gets more and more bloated until it fails miserably" theory I have ;o
winscp ( http://winscp.net/eng/index.php ) is a pretty decent free ftp / sftp program.


Codecs? You'll need divx and ac3filter for basic movie avi's if you don't use vlc (and I don't like vlc, winamp = better, but i have vlc installed for bin/cue movies as well as for subtitles).
Also, I perfer winrar over 7zip.

Let's do this.

gmax - One of the most powerful, if not the most, free 3D modeling tool.
http://www.filterforge.com/ - A really large database with seamless textures. Useful for begginers
http://www.dafont.com/ - Get your fonts here.
http://www.surfthechannel.com - Because not everybody lives in the U.S. to use Hulu. Search engine for online videos of your favourite series/films/tv shows, whatever.

http://trial.alcohol-soft.com/en/index.php

Free edition of Alcohol 52%, great ripping/mounting for isos.

MajorGeeks.com is a pretty good website.

Also, SwissKnife is the best free partition tool I've come across. I also demand that µTorrent replace Vuze!

I could probably just edit my previous post, but the site wouldn't get noticed then.

TweakGuides - Site with an optimization guide for numerous games and applications.

Of particular interest is the tweaking companion, which details just about everything customizable in the windows OS, and provides easy maintenance techniques. Things like the oblivion guide are useful, since they can help make the game run smoother, and show you some tweaks to make it look better. The firefox guide is also useful as a reference for the about:config page, and other customizations.

Really a nice site.

http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest

Awesome page for seeing if you can run games.

Auglogics Disk Defrag is a extremely better alternative than the standard defragger.

Please stop posting programs that aren't 100% free or are only a short trial. This only encourages piracy in the long run. There are plenty of perfectly good open source programs on the net.

I also edited the OP with all of your good suggestions and added a couple more and organized it a little.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 5 2009, 3:59 am by chuiu.

http://www.dban.org/

Darik's Boot and Nuke. In case the FBI ever comes knocking.

http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

Upload an image, and it will tell you the font. (Or a close approximation)

Malewarebytes Removes malware from your computer. (FREE)

Pandora : Find new music; music genome project
Groove Shark : Listen to whatever songs you want and save favorite playlists
Musicovery : Listen to music based on your current mood
Hack This Site : Teaches how to lower-level hack and sql injection(a little)
Engadget : New tech and info
Instructables : Cool guides how to make stuff(some stuff gets pretty bizarre , but most is awesome XD)
WebMD : Self-diagnosis tool

Maybe I'll add more of my secret sites

Edit:

http://kickyoutube.com/watch/?v=PRBgrR4ZPU8&feature=rec-HM-fresh+div (http://kickyoutube.com/) : Download youtube videos or mp3's

Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Mar 6 2009, 12:37 am by Jello-Jigglers.

Yeah, personally I prefer Alcohol 52% over Daemon Tools at the moment. It comes with a utility to make images from your discs, and you don't need to have a program running in your task bar to mount images (though you can if you want to); just right-click the drive and select mount image. It supports basically everything that Daemon Tools does, as far as image formats, emulations, etc. I think it also has a higher virtual drive limit than the free edition of Daemon Tools.
They don't mention it on the site, but last I checked, the web browser toolbar they mention for the free edition is actually optional during installation, just like the Daemon Tools one was. You just have to un-check it during installation.


There is an option you can set in Vuze to make it so it doesn't load all of the extra stuff they added in Vuze, so that it is basically just like Azureas.

He's right. I disabled all of that Extra stuff. The occasional TV show isn't so bad though.

Tell me more >.>

also, what we need is a link to a free non-trail version of an inline sound recorder, like total recorder http://www.totalrecorder.com/productfr_tr.htm, but not a trial version. Flv-to-MP3 converters suck, so I just want to rip exactly what is playing from my sound card.

Paint.NET an alternative to MSPaint with more features and is very useful when editing map pictures taken by scmdraft.
Photogadget is a windows cascade menu built in image resizer. Fast, light, easy with multiple options.