Across the years you tend to accumulate a series of tools through day to day computer use. This of course starts when you have little or no money so feature rich applications which are free/unrestricted are an important part of your collection. I have summed up my collection of tools below and links to where you can get them. One of my favourite sources is the beloved source forge.
Audio
- Audacity – Edit sound files and save them in a large array of
- Goldwave – Almost identical to Audacity but I find it’s far more stable and user friendly. It is far more older however and its technically shareware although it doesn’t seem to limit things much.
CD/DVD Tools
- IsoBuster – Useful tool for ripping straight cd’s or dvd’s to ISO/BIN/TAO images. Useful for bulk file copy’s or that quick ‘hey let me copy that cd’ process.
- CDex – Copy’s audio tracks off cd’s and saves them in various formats.
- WinBin2Iso – A tool to make bin files into iso file. Useful for bin files ripped from iso buster to convert them to iso.
Computer Diagnostics
- CPU-Z – A tool to diagnose the hardware on the computer, ram slots and types, motherboard model number, etc.
Image Editing
- Paint.net – Free tool which mimics photoshop/paintshop elements.
- Inkscape – Vector based graphics editor. Also opens and edits PDF files.
- Dup Detector – Finds duplicate images based on a percentage of similarity.
Music
- NoteCard – A useful tool for remembering music sheets.
- Bome’s Mouse Keyboard – A tool which turns your keyboard into a keyboard which can have midi out to other programs.
Networking
- Bout HTTP Tunnel – Fantastic tool for forwarding traffic through other ports. Used this in a case where the client network would not allow ICQ/MSN traffic so I set up a tunnel through http port (80) to my home server which then connected to msn. Was a tad hard to set it all up but worth it for the communication 🙂
- Free Download Manager – Download tool with all the features of one you would buy but for free!
- Freecap -Tool to redirect all traffic of a selected program that uses SOCK through a selected port.
- FTP Explorer – Old school FTP program.
- hrPing – Command line ping tool with added functionality.
- Network Stumbler -Net stumbler is a wireless tool which picks up broadcasted wireless networks. Its useful for war driving around the place with a laptop.
- Shareaza – Peer to peer client which accesses gnutella, gnutella2 and edonkey.
- TcpView – One of those very useful tools to see all the open connections much like the command net tool but in a windows GUI.
- FastResolver -Tool to obtain host name and mac addresses from ip addresses.
- FPipe -A utility to redirect traffic through different port.
- Ghostwall – Small firewall program which allows you to quickly block traffic by ip/port/etc. Useful for not letting some programs out, rather than not letting things in, if you know what I mean 🙂
- UltraVNC – VNC client and server which offer a large amount of features for free.
Programming
- .Net Reflector – Tool to look through .net binaries, very valuable.
System
- AutoStreamer –Â Tool to modify Windows XP installs and allows you to create bootable windows install cd’s.
- Sysinternals Suite – Large set of tools which allow you to explore the windows operating system.
System – Filesystem
- Explore2fs – WIN32 explorer for Linux ext2fs partitions
- Free Undelete – Free tool to undelete files.
- True Crypt – Create encrypted volume files, drives or hidden drives which you can mount as a normal drive. I find this program fantastic and use it at work for all my personal files.
Text Processing
- Notepad 2 – Improved features on the notepad program.
Video
- Virtual Dub – Famous free video editing suite, I use this all the time for re-encoding and joining files.
- Media Coder – Tool for converting from just about any video type to another one. Using presets you can re-encode your videos for IPod.
- DVD Decrypter – Tool for quickly ripping DVD’s to disk.
- Media Player Classic – The best media player program. Period.
I’ll probably amend this list as I go on and find new tools.
Enjoy