Must have Free & OSS Stuff
Web Browsing:
Firefox - My personal choice for web browsing. It includes tabs, pop-up blocking, themes, and extensions.
Video:
VLC - A great video player that has all the codecs built right in.
SUPER - SUPER is the fastest and simplest tool to encode full-length movies to any other format without any time or function limitation. It does NOT require any additional external codecs. Just don't try to download from their site directly.
Media Server:
Universal Media Server - Universal Media Server is a DLNA-compliant UPnP Media Server. The program streams or transcodes many different media formats with little or no configuration. Basically, it streams music/photos/video from your computer to your PS3/TV/XBox/Wii/any other DLNA compatable product.
CD/DVD Burning:
ImgBurn - This free little program will burn everything from a music CD to a data Blu-ray disc.
Office/Document Suite:
LibreOffice.org - The OSS version of Microsoft Office.
Notepad++ - A great source code editor and Notepad replacement. It supports several programming languages and comes with a ton of features including context highlighting, spell check, plugin support, etc.
PDF-XChange Viewer - A small, fast alternative to Adobe's pdf Reader.
AntiVirus:
Avast Free Antivirus - The best free antivirus software available.
Spyware/Adware/Malware Removal:
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware - Technology to detect and remove all traces of malware including worms, trojans, rootkits, rogues, dialers, spyware and more.
SuperAntiSpyware - Lightweight and fast spyware remover.
SpyBot - Search & Destroy - Another great tool for removing spyware/adware.
Ad-Aware SE Free - Another useful for removing all that spyware junk. Its kind of a large download though.
Computer Cleaning:
CCleaner - The best I've found for removing all the junk from your system.
Imaging:
GIMP - A program similar to Photoshop, except it is free.
XnView - A great photo viewer and editor, complete with red eye removal, a slideshow feature, context menu thumbnail integration, etc.
FTP/SFTP:
FileZilla - An excellent FTP client.
Telnet/SSH:
PuTTY - PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator.
KiTTY - A fork of PuTTY with some additional features.
VNC:
UltraVNC - The best VNC software I have found. It is especially nice because it supports file transfer.
Other Network Stuff:
Wireshark - Wireshark is the world's foremost network protocol analyzer (formerly Ethereal). Also availiable is AirPCap, an 802.11 analyzer.
qBittorrent - An open source version of μTorrent; A very tiny bittorrent client which has been built for speed.
Encryption:
VeraCrypt - Open source, on-the-fly complete or partial hard drive encryption. Great for USB drives. It is a fork of the old TrueCrypt.
KeePass Password Safe - An excellent way to store all your passwords and other important information.
Anominimity:
Tor Browser Bundle - The Tor Browser Bundle, which includes Firefox Portable, lets you use Tor on Windows without needing to install any software. It can run off a USB flash drive, comes with a pre-configured web browser and is self contained.
Mailinator - An always on, ready for use anonymous email receiver. Just pick any name @mailinator.com then go check your inbox at mailinator.com.
System Info & Tools:
7-Zip - A very nice file archiver with a high compression ratio. It supports most all compression formats like zip, rar, gzip, tar, etc.
VirtualBox - VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product. Great for running multiple operating systems from your computer without needed to multi-boot.
Cygwin - Linux-like environment for Windows making it possible to port software running on POSIX systems (such as Linux, BSD, and Unix systems) to Windows.
Cpu-Z - A great little program for view all the cpu, motherboard, and other hardware specifics of your computer.
Gpu-Z - Similar to Cpu-Z, except made for graphic processors and cards.
SyncToy - A great tool from Microsoft that helps keep your data synchronized.
Unlocker - Sick of those 'cannot delete file' errors? Unlocker will tell you exactly what program is using the file and help you delete/rename/move/etc it.
BitPim - BitPim is a program that allows you to view and manipulate data on many CDMA phones from LG, Samsung, Sanyo and other manufacturers. This includes the PhoneBook, Calendar, WallPapers, RingTones and the Filesystem.
Astronomy:
Stellarium - See what is happening in the heavens at any point in time. Very useful for the amateur astronomer.
Widgets:
Rainlendar - A feature rich calendar/todo list/event list/widget application that is easy to use and doesn't take much space on your desktop. It runs on all major operating systems. Download the Widget addon to get RSS feeds, pictures, weather, etc.
Typesetting:
TeX - A typesetting system created by Donald Knuth widely used to produce well-formatted mathematical and scientific writing.
Web Development:
Open Source Web Design - A great site to find some easy to use and visually pleasing web templates. The template I am currently using is by NodeThirtyThree.
Updates:
Filehippo - A great site with updates for all the above programs. The UpdateChecker app will even scan your computer and tell you what needs updating.
