My Top 10 Freeware Programs

They’re free and they’re damn handy. Yes, here, in alphabetical order is my list of the 10 most handy freebie programs for Windows…

Audacity
A free audio editor. What else can I say? It works. Record with it, manipulate with it. It’s a god send for the audio recording on the BMTG site.

FileZilla
An FTP utility which, erm, does just that.

Firefox
Ahh, what top 10 freeware list would be complete without this? For me the plugin ability is what sells it.

IrfanView
This is an image viewer with some editing capabilities. I use it for quick re-sizing and cropping.

KeyPass
A very secure password manager. I run it from a USB key. It will also create very secure passwords for you – I just have to remember one to access KeyPass and then it does the job of remembering stupidly difficult 20 digit passwords for my bank access, etc.

PDFCreator
Sets up a printer which is actually a PDF generator – then whatver output you’d put to a printer you can send to this to create your very own PDF. It makes fantastically well and, again, has been extremely useful for the BMTG website.

Picasa
Google’s own photo organiser and editor. The editing facilities are relatively basic but the red-eye reduction works very well. The organising is also excellent, with great links to other Google facilities. I just wish they’d allow us to easily link to other non-Google sites. Having said that, you can upload photos straight to one of many different localised photo printing firms such as PhotoBox, Snapfish, etc.

PowerMenu
Chances are, you’re not heard of this one. It sits in your system tray and doesn’t do much. Click on a windows title bar, though, and you’ll find some extra options – changing priority, transparency, etc. The two that I find the most useful are the “Minimize to (system) tray” and “Always on top”. There are similiar applications available, all of which I’ve tried, but I’ve always returned to PowerMenu.

SEO Note
This is a tabbed notepad utility. So, a bit like Notepad, in that you can create simple notes (having said that you can apply a lot more styles than you can in Notepad) but you can group them in altogether in pages and sub-pages, organising them via a tree-structure.

SyncToy
There are other, better backup tools available, but this is mine of choice. It will synchronise files between two locations – you can specify how, which folders and even run it from command mode (so I have automated backups going).

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