72 Programs For A Freeware Only PC

BEST FREE FONT VIEWER

AMP Font Viewer – Font manager, view, install, uninstall, organize your fonts. an interesting feature is that you can “test” fonts before deciding to install them.

Alternatives: – FontPicker, Fast Font Preview

BEST FREE MOVIE CATALOGING SOFTWARE

Personal Video Database – Simply the best movie collection manager. It can retrieve information about your movies from several internet databases, includes loan manager and full unicode support. And it has a nice layout too.

Alternatives: Ant Movie Catalog

BEST FREE AUDIO CONVERTER

Any Audio Converter – The name says everything, it converts audio files, WMV, MP4, WAV, WMA, OGG, AAC, MP3, M4A, MP2, etc. The interesting feature is that it can extract the audio track from video files such as AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV, ASF.

Alternatives: – MediaCoder

BEST FREE AUDIO EDITING PROGRAM

Audacity – Open source audio editing and recording program, the best free on you can get. It is very easy to use and works on Mac OSX and Linux too.

Alternatives: – Wavosaur

BEST FREE ANTIVIRUS

Avast! – The home edition is a free antivirus solution, provides resident real time protection, basic antispyware protection and doesn’t take to much memory while running in the background (a lot less than BitDefender, that’s for sure).

Alternatives: AVG, Antivir

BEST FREE SCREEN SESSION RECORDING UTILITY

CamStudio – Free screen session recorder, can record audio too, records to avi or swf files.

Alternatives: Jing

BEST FREE CODEC PACK

Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP) – Essential codec pack, no spyware, Media Player Classic included.

Alternatives: K-Lite

BEST FREE REGISTRY CLEANER

Advanced Windows Care 2 Personal – great system repair and cleaning program, which also includes antispyware protection.

Alternatives: CCleaner, EasyCleaner ,Glary Utilities

BEST FREE CODEC UTILITY

CodecInstaller – Analyzes your video or audio files, tell you which codecs are needed, finds codecs, installs or unistalls codecs from your system.

Alternatives: -

BEST FREE HARD DISK HEALTH MONITORING UTILITY

Crystal DiskInfo – Real time hard disk monitoring utility, provides awesome in depth information about your hard disk drives.

Alternatives: – HD Tune, HDD Health

BEST FREE INSTANT MESSENGER

Digsby – Although it is still in beta it’s a very interesting instant messenger client. Supports AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat Accounts. But the great feature is that it supports multiple e-mail accounts, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP. It is also a great tool for social networking, it supports Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace accounts so far, with more of them coming up.

Alternatives: Pidgin

BEST FREE DISK BACKUP UTILITY

12. DriveImage XML – Great freeware program, you can backup your hard disk data and then restore the image if needed.

Alternatives: – Acronis True Image

BEST FREE DVD RIPPING PROGRAM

DVD Shrink – This one is a classic, everybody knows it, some people even sell copies of it. A great tool for backing up your video DVDs.

Alternatives: DVD Decrypter

BEST FREE DVD AUTHORING PROGRAM

DVD Styler – Free DVD authoring tool, supports PAL and NTSC. Very easy to use, just drag and drop an mpeg file and make your video DVD. You can also make decent menus with it, even with audio. It also has a Linux version.

Alternatives: DVD Flick

BEST FREE AUDIO CD RIPPING PROGRAM

Exact Audio Copy – Great audio CD ripper, extracts your audio tracks from all kinds of CD and DVD drives are supported (including USB, Firewire, SATA and SCSI drives). Supports many output file formats, including flac through external encoders.

Alternatives: CDex

BEST FREE RSS READER

FeedDemon – It wasn’t free, now it is! Looks nice, works well and has a bunch of nice features that will make your RSS feeds reading better.

Alternatives: RSS Bandit, RSS Owl

BEST FREE FONT FINDER

FontNetInstaller – This one can help you search for fonts over the internet as it has the best websites indexed and lets you search through them within the program. Doesn’t require installation, just unpack and run.

Alternatives: -

BEST FREE UNIVERSAL TRANSCODER

Format Factory – Universal transcoder, converts almost any video, audio and graphic file formats. Can also extract DVD Video to avi.

Alternatives: MediaCoder, SUPER

BEST FREE IMAGE EDITING PROGRAM

GIMP – The best freeware alternative to Adobe Photoshop. It’s an open source image editor, very powerful and quite stable.

Alternatives: – Inkscape

BEST FREE VIDEO PLAYER

GOM Player – The best video player in my opinion, supports almost any video file format and subtitles, solid and nice looking.

Alternatives: VLC Media Player, Zoom Player

BEST FREE PARTITION EDITOR

Gparted (Gnome Partition Editor) – Open source partition editor, very powerful, can be used on a bootable CD, USB stick, PXE server and Hard Disk.

Alternatives: – Cute Partition Manager, EASEUS Partition Manager

BEST FREE IMAGE VIEWER

Picasa 3 – Fast and reliable image viewer, can open various file formats and also has some basic editing capabilities.

Alternatives: IrfanView

BEST FREE DISK DEFRAGMENTER

JKDefrag GUI – Awesome disk defragmenter, fast and reliable. Can run scheduled defragmentation sessions or run as a screensaver, only defragmenting when your system is idle.

Alternatives: Auslogics Disk Defrag, Defraggler

BEST FREE VIDEO CONVERTER

MeGUI – Powerful video encoder, supports the best formats and encoders, great tutorials available.

Alternatives: AutoGK, StaxRip

BEST FREE MEMORY TESTING UTILITY

MemTest – Tiny freeware program that allows you to test your memory from Windows.

Memtest86+ – Open source advanced memory diagnostic tool, runs at boot-time from a bootable CD or other media.

Alternatives: – MemScope

BEST FREE BROWSER SETTINGS BACKUP UTILITY

MozBackup – Great freeware tool, backs up your Firefox ot Thunderbird settings, bookmarks, etc. If something goes wrong you can restore your precious settings in only a few seconds.

Alternatives: – Google Chrome Backup

BEST FREE WEB BROWSER

Google Chrome – I like it better that Firefox because it’s a lot faster, more reliable although less customizable.

Alternatives: Mozilla Firefox, Opera

BEST FREE TEXT EDITOR

Notepad++ – Powerful open source text editor written in C++, supports a wide range of programming languages, great multi-document and multi-view features.

Alternatives: – Emerald Editor

BEST FREE OFFICE SUITE

OpenOffice.org – This open source package replaces my Microsoft Office installation. Is it as good? I think it’s better! You won’t have any problems with adjusting to it, the basic features are similar to those in Microsoft Office.

Alternatives: IBM Lotus Symphony, Oxygen Office, Jarte (word processor only)

BEST FREE DOWNLOAD MANAGER

Orbit Downloader – Great download manager with the unique feature that allows you to grab video and audio files from websites such as YouTube.

Alternatives: FlashGet

BEST FREE FILE RECOVERY UTILITY

PCInspector File Recovery – Very good data recovery tool, supports all file systems (FAT and NTFS), finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged.

Alternatives: Recuva

BEST FREE PDF READER

PDF XChange Viewer – Very good PDF reader, a lot faster than Adobe Reader. And there’s even more: you can convert your PDF files to various file formats, including BMP, JPG, PNG or TIFF. It can be integrated with Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Alternatives: – Foxit Reader, Sumatra Reader

BEST FREE PDF WRITER

PDFCreator – Very good freeware PDF writer, can create PDF files out of any printable document. It can be installed as standalone or as a server application – install on a single computer and have it available on all the machines in your network.

Alternatives: BullZip, CutePDF

BEST FREE AUDIO PLAYER

Quintessential Player (QCD) – Great audio player, my favorite, highly customizable with the various plugins that are available.

Alternatives: – Foobar

BEST FREE DRIVER UPDATE UTILITY

DriverMax – Finds driver updates for your hardware, downloads and installs them. Although it’s not flawless it’s still a very useful tool.

Alternatives: RadarSync

BEST FREE FILE RENAMER

ReNamer – Very easy to use drag and drop file renamer, it offers all the standard renaming procedures: prefixes, suffixes, replacements, case changes, as well as removing contents of brackets, adding number sequences, changing file extensions.

Alternatives: Lupas Rename 2000, Flexible Renamer

BEST FREE SCREEN CAPTURE UTILITY

Screenshot Captor – Great screenshot capture program, lots of capture modes – Multimon (multiple monitors), Desktop, Active Window, Region, Windows Object. Supports multi-monitor and includes editing features for the screenshots.

Alternatives: Screen Hunter Free

BEST FREE SYSTEM INFORMATION PROGRAM

SIW (System Information for Windows) – Great free system information tool, provides info about the components and software environment in your computer. Also has some interesting extra features like network bandwidth monitoring and password manager.

Alternatives: Everest Home Edition, PC Wizard 2008

BEST FREE DVD BURNER

StarBurn – I’ve been using Nero before. I don’t need it anymore, StarBurn is free and pretty good. I’ve burned several DVDs with it (including DVD video) and it never failed. Supports CD, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu Ray discs.

Alternatives: CD Burner XP, ImageBurn

BEST FREE SOFTWARE UPDATE PROGRAM

SUMo (Software Update Monitoring) – Identifies the software that you have installed in your system and checks the internet for updates. The latest version seems to have corrected most errors, works pretty fine.

Alternatives: FileHippo.com Update Checker, UpdateStar

BEST FREE ANTISPYWARE

SUPERAntiSpyware – The best antispyware solution that you can get for free. It doesn’t provide resident protection, but if you just scan your computer with it once a week or so you should be fine.

Alternatives: Spybot Search and Destroy

BEST FREE MEMORY OPTIMIZER

SweepRAM – Outstanding tiny freeware memory optimizer with an unique approach. What you should do is, after you’ve turned your computer on, and started all applications that will be running all day long (antivirus, etc) run SweepRAM. That way, all running applications will reduce their memory use to the required amount, giving you as much RAM available for your work as possible.

Alternatives: Free RAM XP

BEST FREE SYSTEM RESOURCE METER

SysTrayMeter – Tiny resource meter that sows you the CPU and memory usage. You can easily close it by double clicking on the icon in the system tray.

Alternatives: – TinyResMeter

BEST FREE FILE COMPRESSION PROGRAM / ZIP UTILITY

TUGZip – Very good free compression utility, works fine with almost any archive file format, fast and reliable.

Alternatives: jZip, 7zip

BEST FREE WINDOWS TWEAKING PROGRAM

TweakUI – Free from Microsoft? Well, it’s for real A must have for any Windows XP user, allows you to tweak the setting you wouldn’t have access to normally.

nLite – freeware tool that allows you to customize your Windows installation bootable CD. That means you can remove Windows components that you don’t want to be installed right from the start.

Alternatives: -

BEST FREE BITTORRENT CLIENT

uTorrent – Best BitTorrent client, lightweight and reliable. The new version brings better functionality and some new features.

Alternatives: Azureus, BitLord

BEST FREE VIDEO EDITING PROGRAM

VirtualDub – Legendary open source editing tool, great for cutting and transcoding your video files for best quality avi output.

RichFLV – A very good freeware tool for basic flash video files editing.

Alternatives: – ZS4, Jahshaka

BEST FREE DICTIONARY

WordWeb – Great free dictionary and thesaurus, I’m already in love with it. It can be used to look up words from almost any program, showing definitions, synonyms and related words. It includes pronunciations and usage examples, has spelling and sounds-like links.

Alternatives: – Lingoes

BEST FREE FILE SHARING PROGRAM

DropBox – allows you to share files with the world quickly and easily. The bad thing is that the free account has a 2 GB limitation.

Alternatives: GigaTribe, TeamViewer, Waste

BEST FREE WYSIWYG HTML EDITOR

Kompozer - easy to use “what you see is what you get” html editor, simple but powerful.

Alternatives: – PsPad

BEST FREE INTERNET CONNECTION OPTIMIZER

TCP Optimizer – great freeware tool that allows you to tweak your internet connection in order to get the most speed out of it.

Alternatives: – DrTCP, SpeedNeed

BEST FREE BROKEN LINKS CHECKER

Xenu’s Link Sleuth – very good freeware program for webmasters. Just type in your website adress and scan it for broken links.

Alternatives: – Link Evaluator

BEST FREE PROCESS MANAGER

Process Tamer – great tiny freeware tool that allows you to control the processes that are running in your system.

Alternatives: – Process Explorer

BEST FREE PROGRAM UNINSTALLER

Revo Uninstaller – uninstalls your programs and helps you to clean the leftovers that remain after the uninstalling is completed.

Alternatives: – MyUninstaller, ZSoft Uninstaller

BEST FREE CONTEXT MENU MANAGER

Mmm Free – freeware program that allows you to tweak the windows context menu.

Alternatives: -

BEST FREE HARD DISK BENCHMARKING TOOL

CrystalDiskMark – You can use it to test your hard disks and even USB sticks and external hard disk drives.

Alternatives: – Active@ Hard Disk Monitor

BEST FREE DISK SPACE ANALYZER

Sequoia View – Innovative freeware program that gives you the tools you need to analyze the files and folders on your hard disks and find those huge files that you forgot to delete.

Alternatives: – jDiskReport, WinDirStat

BEST FREE FILE MANAGER

FreeCommander – A very good alternative to the standard Windows file manager.

Alternatives: – xplorer² free

BEST FREE PROGRAM LAUNCHER

Launchy - Open source Windows and Linux program that helps you to launch the program you need without browsing through your Start Menu or looking for a shortcut on your desktop.

Alternatives: – FARR (Find and Run Robot)

BEST FREE ACCOUNTING PROGRAM

GnuCash – Powerful open source accounting program, suitable for both common and advanced users.

Alternatives: – AceMoney Lite

BEST FREE COLOR IDENTIFIER

ColorCop – Helps you identify the colors on your screen and gives you the respective code for each color. Very useful for webmasters and designers.

Alternatives: – Just Color Picker, Pixeur

BEST FREE WEATHER INFORMATION PROGRAM

Weather Watcher – Fast, lightweight, reliable. I don’t know if you could ask for more.

Alternatives: Weather Pulse

BEST FREE LYRICS FINDER

Evil Lyrics – Automatically searches for lyrics as your song is played in your player, it works great with Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes, MusicMatch, Foobar, MediaMonkey, Real Player, QCD, AlbumPlayer, Y!Music, XMPlay. It even has a karaoke mode.

Alternatives: -

BEST FREE GAMES

Frets On Fire – Outstanding open source game, similar to the very popular Guitar Hero.

BEST FREE STICKY NOTES PROGRAM

Stickies – Once you get used to it you won’t be able to live without it. Easily creates sticky notes on your desktop.

Alternatives: – StickyPad

BEST FREE AUDIO FILES TAG EDITOR

TagScanner – Complex tag editor that supports almost any audio file type you might think of.

Alternatives: – Mp3Tag

BEST FREE TASK MANAGER

Task Coach – Open source, multi platform, you can easily create and manage “to do” lists and monitor your tasks.

Alternatives: – Project Timer

BEST FREE PROGRAM SCHEDULER

System Scheduler – An alternative to the Windows Task Scheduler, with more features and flexibility.

Alternatives: – XStarter

BEST FREE FIREWALL

Zone Alarm – The most popular free firewall, lightweight and easy to use.

Alternatives: – Sunbelt-Kerio Personal Firewall, Comodo Firewall

I almost forgot… I’m going to continue searching for, testing and reviewing freeware programs, and the list will be updated every time on this page! Happy New Year and have a speedy download!

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