Cool Programs


Here are some cool free Windows programs that I've found around the place. In general, I like my programs fast with a clean and easy interface and for them to do their job and do it well (as opposed to trying to do a million things badly.)

Music
CDex Record CDs to MP3s
MP3 Tag Studio Tidy up your mp3 collection
Album Cover Art Downloader Automatically download album cover art for your mp3s
Winamp The best media player by far
-- MSN Messenger plug-in Adds the current song to the "Currently playing" feature of MSN Messenger 7.0+
-- iPod plug-in Adds iPod support to Winamp's Media Library window
-- Cover&TAG plug-in Display album cover art in the Video window when playing music
-- SqrSoft CrossFading plug-in Very funky plug-in that automatically mixes songs in the playlist!
Soulseek Soulseek! A lovely P2P network accessible using a goddam ugly client program. Ah well - the grass is always greener I suppose.
eMule Very good P2P client for connecting to the eD2K and Kad Networks. Especially good for videos and software.
Video
Media Player Classic A fantastically clean, easy to use and intuitive movie player
G-Spot Despite the rather, erm, strange name, this handle little program allows you to quickly identify what codecs are used by video files
SmartRipper SmartRipper grabs the files off a DVD and let's you put them on your hard drive. You can either keep them like that, maintaining full DVD quality without having to have the DVD, or you can encode the resulting VOB files using something like AutoGK... Check out Doom9.net's SmartRipper guide for more help.
AutoGK (Gordian Knot) (Re-)Encode DVDs or other video files into something a little more sensible, size-wise. I'd personally recommend the XviD codec with either VBR (Variable Bit Rate) MP3 or AC3 (Dolby Digital) for action films / ones where surround sound is important. Check out Doom9.net's AutoGK guide for more help.
DefilerPak If your having trouble playing a video file, it'll probably be because you don't have the right codec installed. This is a fab little codec pack that has a good reputation for reliability.
Internet
Mozilla Firefox Browse the web in style
-- Download Status Bar A lovely little bar above the status bar for easy monitoring of in-progress downloads
-- HTTP Live headers Good for website development - lets you see everything that's being transmitted
Mozilla Thunderbird Powerful and fast e-mail client
-- MinimisetoTray Mozilla Thunderbird extension that lets you minimise the thing to the system tray
A-Patch for MSN Messenger A rather lovely patch for MSN Messenger that lets you get rid of ads and generally make it a lot more clean and user-friendly
Messenger Plus Add a load of funky features to MSN Messenger
AVG Anti-Virus Free Keep your computer virus-free... cash-free
Sygate Personal Firewall More and more personal firewalls are becoming bloated, overly paranoid (breaking things when they shouldn't) and Microsoft-y (treating the user like an idiot and removing the ability to make any kind of fine-grained customisation.) Sygate personal firewall WAS a breath of fresh air in this area but unfortunately Norton (damn them!) have bought Sygate and removed it. So I'm hosting it here instead
Handy Apps
Editplus Funky text editor - a great replacement for notepad
Color Cop Grab the colour codes of any colour u can see on the screen
Alarm Clock Thingy Handy little alarm clock with chimes (made by yours truly)
Techie
XP Powertoys Funky add-ons for XP that Microsoft reckons are too 'advanced' for the Average Joe
CPU-Z Handy program to tell you everything you could possibly want to know (and more) about your CPU and RAM
Link Magic Creates NTFS junctions (directory hard links)
PuTTY The grooviest SSH Client around
Cygwin Fancy a bash at a Linux shell on your Windows machine?    ;)
Motherboard Monitor How HOT is your PC? And just how fast are the fans running? And are your CPU voltage levels all over the place?
Process Explorer A fantastic free replacement for task manager with features such as the ability to suspend processes, view processes in a tree like structure, see and search for what files are being used by what processes, highlight processes when they are created / destroyed, a graph of past CPU usage with a roll-over showing which process was using most CPU, and loads more! Power to the (geeky) people!


Know of an invaluable program that hasn't made it on to the list? If you send me an email (check the About Me page) I might very well add it!

(c) Ben Kennish 2008 - Source code license