Good Software
Here is an assorted list of high quality software for Windows. Most of it is open source with an excellent speed/features compromise.
| PSPad | The very programme used to write this page. This is a freeware text editor with more features that I could ever dream of (not that dream of text editor features.) It will highlight html tags for you. I like to write my webpages in XHTML when possible for reasons that I am not able to express cogently. It isn't currently set up too well for this but good anyway. | |
| TeXnicCenter | Open source (GPL) IDE for writing LaTeX which is a typescripting language that will produce professional looking mathematical papers. Eg. paper proving there are some unprovable statements. Here is the LaTeX that produced that document. | |
| Padgen | If you write shareware/freeware or commercial software this is a must. The association of shareware professionals is promoting one standard xml format for describing software. This allows easy and automated distribution through many websites. However it looks like it isn't written with open source authors in mind. | |
| Xenu Link Sleuth | This is a handy tool for anyone with a website. It finds any broken links in your website. Very easy to use and quick. Also give tells you orphaned files if you give it access to your ftp. Freeware but no source code released. Come on Xenu, release it - what if you die tomorrow? | |
| Microsoft Movie Maker | Very nice and free software for letting you make edit movies. Easy to learn fast and I've found it gives great results. | |
| 7-Zip | Open source, fast and secure encryption and compression. | |
| Exam Diff | Commercial but functional freeware version available. Nice format for examinging differences between two files. Useful with tortoise cvs above. | |
| MP3Tag | Freeware for cleaning up the tags on MP3s and other music formats. Superb. | |
| AniEdit and ImageEdit | Very simple cursor and icon editors free from Microsoft. Can't seem to find the official site right not but if you google the names you can download | |
| Iconextract | Extracts icons from dlls and exes. Please do nothing illegal. | |
| Iconoplasm | Quite good Icon editor | |
| Filezilla | Awesome free FTP manager for maintaining websites. | |
| Belarc Advisor | This makes sure that your PC is up to date and tickety-boo. | |
| Gimp | Open source image editing software, with more features than you could need and a good tutorial | |
| ClamWin | Open source anti-virus software for windows | |
| Python | "Fun", but powerful intepreted language with a cult following. | |
| Audacity | Open source sound editing software. | |
| Inkscape | Open source version of Adobe Illustrator, hardly used this one | |
| Autoruns | Have complete control over what starts up automatically on your computer, or you can click the wrong button and bugger up your PC. | |
| Carbonite | Complete PC backup solution. This runs unobtrusivly in the background and Blowfish-encrypts everything on your hard disc and sends it to a guarded, 3x redundent server in the states. And you can redownload it when your computer goes tits up. Unlimited storage and very reasonable price. | |
| GnuCash | Open source finance software for making it easier to fill in tax return and working out why the beer money has run out. | |
| Bullzip | Free PDF creator. | |
| Analog | Fast, free, simple, powerful, no frills one-pass web log page analyzer. Slightly updated version here. | |
| Keepass | Secure password manager |