A list of free Windows utilities that do exactly what they promise
There are a lot of dodgy freeware products out there. These do exactly what the name says:
- AusLogics Disk Defrag - Fast, Efficient Defragger
- Mouse Imp - Scroll vertically and horizontally by holding down your right-mouse button
- TrueCrypt - The big daddy in reliable open-source encryption
- Secure Delete OnClick - Removes any file without a trace.
- Process Explorer - This is a task manager replacement tool. Looks ugly. Is INVALUABLE if you get a virus that is scanning your hard drive and it has disabled Task Manager.
- DoPDF PDFCreator - Creates PDFs for you as a printer with very little fuss
- Notepad 2 or TextPad - Great replacements for the venerable (doddering?) Notepad.exe
- Volumouse - Hold your mouse over the task bar and scroll up or down to control volume. Works perfectly!
- 7-Zip - Easy file compression, handles many formats
- Desk Pins - Will pin any window to “Stay on top always”
- Drop Box - AMAZING folder sync tools. Syncs shared folders across the internet and keeps versioned master backups as well
- Launchy - Windows XP - A quick launcher so you never need to open your Start menu again
- Taskix - Lets you reorganise the order of your task bar placeholders (Doesn’t play nicely with UltraMon)
- Beyond Compare - Awesome for comparing files to each other, or synchronising folders with each other
- WinGrep - Because Windows search is rubbish and it ignores code files in searches… and because Regular Expression is so cool. TextPad can also do this with its “Find in Files” functionality.
- TeraCopy - Vista Only - file copying is slow and unresponsive. Copying over a network is unbearable with clicking “Cancel” taking minutes to register and it spending seemingly forever to calculate how long it’s going to take instead of just doing it. Teracopy fixes all this and more. The best part: You can set it as the default copying engine. It’s lovely.
- PureText - Use Windows-V to paste from clipboard with all HTML formatting removed
- Expresso (version 1) - Regular Expression sandbox. The first version was the best, but version 3 is mostly OK.
- Task Switch Xp - A light and crash-free Alt+Tab replacement GUI
- Paint.Net - A light-weight image editor. Loads faster than GIMP which i also like.
For anything else, someone with more patience than me has created a pretty comprehensive list of freeware.
