Best Free Software Suite GNUWin II is a free software compilation for Windows. This huge suite features dozens of programs including free alternatives to many expensive commercial products. There is Abi Word as an alternative for MS Word, OpenOffice for MS Office XP, The Gimp for Adobe Ph*tosh*p, Gzip for WinZIP are dozens more. Taken collectively this suite provides more than enough software to completely set up a PC without spending a cent on applications or utilities. The suite is available or CD or you download the CD image and cut your own. http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/en/index.html Best Free Notepad Replacement There are lots of text editors and Notepad replacements. Some of these aspire to be programming editors while others try to be word processors. What I love about EditPad is that, unlike the others, it concentrates on simply being a better plain text editor and it succeeds brilliantly. It has a Notepad like interface combined with tabbed document windows and the ability to open as many documents as you like with no file size limitations. I use it every day for tasks as diverse as writing Support Alert Newsletter to examining my web log files. Some of the latter can be up to 100MB, yet EditPad handles these huge files with ease. (849KB). http://www.editpadlite.com/editpadlite.html Best Free Hotkey Utility Hotkeycontrol XP is a free utility that allows you to define your own hotkeys so that a single key press can launch an application, insert commonly used text, change your volume, or just about anything else. Hotkeycontrol works with all versions of Windows from 98 onwards, though some features will only work with Win2K or XP. (0.91KB) http://www.digital-miner.com/hkcontrol.html Best Free Registry Cleaner To keep the registries on my PCs in top running order I use Fix-It utilities This is a commercial product but I must admit that Toni Helenius' Easy Cleaner performs almost as well and is totally free. As a bonus, it will also detect duplicate files and help you clean up temp files to make more disk space. Remember though, as with every Registry cleaner, to back up your Windows Registry before use. (2.64MB) http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ecleane.htm The Best Bookmark Cleaner AM-DeadLink scans your bookmark file for dead links or duplicate links. When I tried it on my huge favorites file I discovered 17% of my links were dead. I've now got a much leaner set of favorites and the comfort of knowing that the links actually work. (546KB) http://aignes.com/press/deadlink140.htm Best Free Route Tracer 3D Traceroute graphically displays Internet route information. You can use it for technical tasks such as diagnosing slow connections or for general purpose snooping like determining the location and owner of a web site or tracing spammers. (996KB) http://www.hlembke.de/prod/3dtraceroute/ The Best Free Screen Capture Utility I've used over half a dozen screen-capture utilities and none of them has really satisfied. Until now. Gadwin screen capture does exactly what I want in the way I want. Further, it avoids the trap of providing lots of useless and confusing features. It's the little things that count like making the hot key PrtSc so I don't have to remember it, and automatically sequentially naming the output files for multiple screen shots. Gadwin will stay on my PC permanently. (976KB) http://www.gadwin.com/printscreen/?prnscr The Best Free Search Bar Updated Dave’s Quick Search Bar is a free utility that gives you the same easy access to Google searches as Google's own search bar but wait, there’s more. It also provides access to the excellent Teoma, FAST and other search engines. Because it resides in your task bar, it's accessible from any application. Comes with a host of other features such as dictionary/thesaurus access and even a calculator. If that's not enough for you, it's totally customizable. A serious second choice is the new Google DeskBar which shares many of the features of Dave's Search Bar but is geared exclusively to Google searches. http://www.dqsd.net/ (380KB) http://toolbar.google.com/deskbar/ (452KB) Best Free Download Accelerator Updated Star Downloader 1.43 is not only free of charge, it's free of ads, spyware and other undesirable extras packed into most free download accelerators. On top of that, it is blindingly fast and has a raft of features including automatic mirror site detection, automatic resumption of failed downloads, download scheduling, anti-virus integration and more. If you are not yet using a download accelerator, go get this product and start counting the time you save. The faster your internet connection, the more you will gain. Users with slow modem connections will, unfortunately, benefit least. (1.4MB) http://www.stardownloader.com Best Free Trojan Scanner/Trojan Remover New Ewido the best of a new crop of anti-Trojan programs. On my recent tests over at www.anti-trojan-software-reviews.com it emerged as was one of the few products that could reliably detect polymorphic and process injecting Trojans that were totally missed by anti-virus products like Norton and AVG. No, it's not as good as TDS-3 or Trojan Hunter but you get what you pay for. You see, the free version of Ewido doesn’t have a memory monitor but the on-demand scanner is so good you'll have no complaints. The free version download is actually the same as the paid version but after 14 days the memory monitor becomes non-functional. I recommend all readers download the product and scan their PCs weekly. I suspect you may be surprised at what you will find. I've also included a link to my full Ewido review for those who want to know more about the product prior to downloading. http://www.ewido.net/en/ (2.2MB) http://www.anti-trojan-software-reviews.com/review-ewido.htm Best Free Web Site Ripper New HTTrack is one impressive product: it's easy to use, has an excellent user interface, offers every feature you could want, is blindingly fast and free of any adware as well. If you like to download web sites so that you can "browse them offline", this is the product to get. (3.23MB) http://www.httrack.com/ Best Free DLL Cleaner Updated Over time most PCs become cluttered up with the unwanted remainders of long deleted programs. DLL Archive is a free utility that will scan your PC for DLLs that are no longer referenced. You can then archive the unwanted programs away or delete them entirely. Archived items can easily be restored to their original location if any problems arise. (227KB) http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/system/dllarch.htm Best Free File Cleaner I've tried quite a few commercial products designed to clean unneeded temporary files off your hard disk but must say that the free utility "Empty Temp Folders" ranks with the best. It takes a few minutes to set up but after that, just press a button to recover many megabytes of disk space. (667KB) http://www.danish-shareware.dk/soft/emptemp Best Free Resource Meter This is cute. TinyResMeter is an itsy-bitsy system monitor. Unlike many other monitors, it doesn't consume a lot of CPU utilization in order to tell you your CPU utilization. In addition to CPU usage, you can optionally monitor cache, RAM, page file and swap file usage, running processes and threads, disk space utilization and a number of other parameters as well. Also built-in, is a screen grabber that saves the current screen to disk when you press PrintScreen. How they fit all this into 96KB beats me. http://pesoft.fr.st/ Best Free Spam Filter for the Average User Updated Mailwasher is for most folk, the easiest way of dealing with Spam. It's a free email preview utility that allows you to check your email on your mail server before you download it to your PC. The advantage of this approach is that you can kill unwanted messages including spam, viruses and large attachments before they get anywhere near your computer. Mailwasher automatically flags for you any messages containing viruses and possible spam which makes for quick and easy identification. It also will send a message back to the spam mail sender saying that their message could not be delivered. Hopefully this will encourage some spammers to take your name off their mailing list. The free version only handles only one POP email account but that's sufficient for most users. If you need multiple account try XTerminator which provides many of the same features of Mailwasher though with a less elegant interface. http://www.mailwasher.net (1.35MB) http://www.artplus.hr/adapps/eng/xterminator.htm (1.87MB) Best Free Spam Filter for Experienced Users Updated When it comes to effectiveness, POPFile beats the pants off most other spam filters I've tried. But this effectiveness takes a little time to develop. POPFile is a statistical filter so it has to be trained to recognize your spam from your normal mail. It takes a week or so before it starts becoming accurate and best results may take a month or more. POPFile works as a proxy mail server so that means that it can be used with any POP email client. Setup is reasonably straightforward for experienced users but beginners should stick with Mailwasher. Outlook users should check out SpamBayes, another open source statistical filter that offers an Outlook plug-in that makes it more more convenient to use. http://popfile.sourceforge.net/old_index.html (4.3MB) http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ (3.6MB) Best Free PopUp Stopper Updated Updated The Proxomitron is not like your average popup stopper. It operates by filtering and transforming all your Web pages on the fly. As a result you can not only stop pop-ups but pop-unders, ads, flash animations, status bar scrollers and just about anything else. Besides, next time you are asked what pop-up stopper you use, you can answer; "why, I use The Proxomitron" and how cool is that. The first link below is to version 4.5, the last and final version of this superb utility. The following two links offer useful setup and usage tips. Note: For Novice PC users I suggest you try the news Google tool bar rather than The Proxomitron. It's free as well and has an excellent popup filter built in. It's not as flexible as as The Proxomitron, but it requires no setup. As a bonus it also makes Google searches easier. http://computercops.biz/files/ProxN45.exe http://accs-net.com/smallfish/prox.htm http://www.sankey.ws/proxomitron.html http://toolbar.google.com/ Best Free Sticky Notes Utility New Some people hate these programs others swear they can't work effectively without them. I used to be in the first category but with so many things on my plate these days, I'm slowly being converted. The function that I find really useful is the reminder that pops up at a designated time and date. I use it for simple things like "put up the latest issue on the web site." ATnotes is a neat implementation that features configurable alarms, resizable windows, variable fonts and a host of other useful features. The product is remarkably similar to the commercial sticky notes utility called, TurboNotes. Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery? Maybe not. (723KB) http://atnotes.fr.st/