Your Fab Five Freeware?

[kleinkinstein]

What are your favs? Your five most coveted freeware and/or open source Windoze apps?

...I'll start, and aside from all the fantastic apps from Piriform...

1st Fav 5.....
CintaNotes 1.8.2
Q-Dir 5.37
SyncBack 3.2.26.0
VLC 2.03
Xmedia Recode 3.1.2.8

2nd Fav 5.....
7-Zip 9.20
Greenshot 1.0.2.2011
NitroPDF 2.5.0.41
Foobar 1.1.15
TeraCopy 2.27

Bonus Fav 5.....
LibreOffice 3.6.3
The Gimp 2.8.2
Geek Uninstaller 1.0.4.7
DVD Shrink 3.2.0.15
KeyPass 2.20

 

[Batmeat]

Malwarebytes Antimalware
Super AntiSpyware
CCleaner
Winrar
Firefox

Whole bunch more but it seems like those are the ones I use most often, mostly on other peoples computers when I fix 'em.

 

[ronbo613]

CCleaner
Firefox
Malwarebytes
Adobe DNG Converter
VLC Media Player

Honorable Mention
Filezilla FTP Client
Clonezilla
Gparted

 

[radhak]

Had not heard of CintaNotes or Greenshots - nice ones, will use them a bit, I think. Thanks.

My list must be familiar to a lot of people :

Total Commander (power file-explorer like none other)
gVim (ultimate text editor for those who dislike using the mouse, though I use the 'graphical' version)
Notepad++ for those that find gVim too geeky
Macrium Reflect disk image and backup software
Belarc Advisor : PC Audit software - you should always run this and keep a printout copy with you to review
Slick Run : a free floating command line for Windows. You could live without it, but you'd probably never know what you are missing. (It's 'geeks only', but may never bother others using the machine)

I'm not listing some that almost everybody must have on their machines : Firefox, Picasa, CutePDF (or NitroPDF), VLC, etc.

 

[Thor86]

Peazip Portable (no install)
Password Safe
Synctoy (Microsoft)

 

[gitano]

Firefox
KeePass
Notepad++
Rainmeter
ImgBurn

 

[phobsi]

I used to like Teracopy but I ended up with some random network file copy issues that were resolved when I uninstalled it.

Chrome
7zip/WinRAR
VLC
Putty

 

[kleinkinstein]

Eeeek, how could I forget The Gimp and GimpShop!

 

[lxskllr]

I think the more interesting question would be "favorite payware?" What's valuable enough to buy because there isn't a free replacement.

 

[smitbret]

Can't believe no one has mentioned

Handbrake - Better than paid versions for what it does

Also:

Avast
The KMPlayer
ImgBurn
Mozilla Firefox

 

[jhansman]

Calibre
MSSE
Malwarebytes
Auslogics Defrag
VLC media player

 

[smitbret]

Calibre
MSSE
Malwarebytes
Auslogics Defrag
VLC media player

Crap, I change mine.

Drop Avast and add Calibre

Handbrake
IMGburn
Calibre
The KMPlayer
Firefox

 

[Gooberlx2]

7zip
Crashplan
LibreOffice
Notepad++
Teamviewer

 

[radhak]

I think the more interesting question would be "favorite payware?" What's valuable enough to buy because there isn't a free replacement.

Nice thought, but if there's no free replacement, would make for a captive customer. Frankly, in today's world I can't think of anything like that (ie, there's always a free alternative, even if crappy).

Probably you meant - what's good enough to buy even though freeware alternatives are available?, but we'd need a different thread for that.

Many of the above freeware manage functionality that I'd not pay for - like a text editor or a file explorer. OTOH, stuff like anti-virus or disk-imaging, I'd put down some money if the free stuff wasn't there. Media players and internet browsers fall somewhere in between - might end up paying, but grudgingly.

 

[abaez]

I tried a bunch of different file manager freeware and ended up buying xplorer2.

 

[lxskllr]

Nice thought, but if there's no free replacement, would make for a captive customer. Frankly, in today's world I can't think of anything like that (ie, there's always a free alternative, even if crappy).

Probably you meant - what's good enough to buy even though freeware alternatives are available?, but we'd need a different thread for that.

Many of the above freeware manage functionality that I'd not pay for - like a text editor or a file explorer. OTOH, stuff like anti-virus or disk-imaging, I'd put down some money if the free stuff wasn't there. Media players and internet browsers fall somewhere in between - might end up paying, but grudgingly.

That's all kind of the point. All the usual suspects are being listed, and are expected from general users. How do you pick a top 5? Some aren't much fun, but are necessary for a properly running system.

I didn't pay for a single thing on Windows aside from games. I suspect many people are the same. That's why "What do you pay for?"(not pirate) is the more interesting question. That would suggest software that's so much better than the competition that people would be willing to put out money for it.

 

[MoInSTL]

That's all kind of the point. All the usual suspects are being listed, and are expected from general users. How do you pick a top 5? Some aren't much fun, but are necessary for a properly running system.

I didn't pay for a single thing on Windows aside from games. I suspect many people are the same. That's why "What do you pay for?"(not pirate) is the more interesting question. That would suggest software that's so much better than the competition that people would be willing to put out money for it.

I paid for Revo Uninstaller Pro. No more digging through registry files after uninstalling.

 

[Berryracer]

1- Firefox
2- MPC-HC + SVP (Smooth Video Project)
3- SUPERAntiSpyware
4- TeamViewer
5- Winamp

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Handbrake
Lilypond
Opera
SOFAstats
Truecrypt

I think the more interesting question would be "favorite payware?" What's valuable enough to buy because there isn't a free replacement.

You should start a thread.

 

[ultimatebob]

WinSCP
TortoiseSVN
UltraVNC
AdBlock (but give the poor guy a donation, will ya?)
Google Chrome

 

[totalnoob]

AVG Free 2013 (low resource + effective)
Google Chrome (fastest browser by far)
VLC Player (low resource + silky smooth playback on slower systems)
Smart Defrag 2 (awesome program with scheduling, background defrag + page file defrag..features usually only available on paid programs)
Microsoft Skydrive (7GB free cloud storage to back up important stuff)

 

[happysmiles]

Pot Player! I find it better than VLC.
Winamp
CCleaner
Foxit Reader
Google Chrome

 

[lehtv]

I can't make a top 5... Here's my list of freeware

Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Thunderbird
ZoneAlarm AV+Firewall
OpenOffice
CCleaner
MSI Afterburner
uTorrent
Defraggler
Foxit Reader
GIMP
ImgBurn
Imgur Uploader
Notepad++
Steam
VLC player
Audacity
Paint.NET
7-Zip
CPUID CPU-Z
CPUID HWMonitor