A List Of My Favorite Free Software

Below I give a list of my favorite free software that I use during my daily computer life. Some of them are open source, some are not. I hope they prove useful to you. If you have any questions, please feel free to mail me.

1. Network: Internet · Utilities
2. Multimedia: Graphics · Audio · Video · Utilities
3. Various Utilities: Editors · Software Development · Other

1. NETWORK

Internet

Mozilla Firefox Web Browser	My number one web browser is Firefox. I revert to Microsoft Internet Explorer only when I meet an ill-behaving web site. There are versions of Firefox for various platfoms, including Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
Mozilla Thundebird Email Client	I haven't used Microsoft Outlook for more than 10 years. Thunderbird is my main email client. It is also the only news reader I use.
ArGoSoft Mail Server Freeware version	If you want a lightweight and free SMTP/POP3/Finger/IMAP server for Windows ArGoSoft Mail Server is a good solution. I have used the SMTP functionality of this software for almost ten years.
Azureus Java BitTorrent Client	From time to time, when I need to download large open source software from the Internet using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) protocol. For this, I use Azureus, the most popular BitTorrent client.
eMule eDonkey Client	And, to access the eDonkey (ed2k) and the Kademlia (kad) peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) network, I use the open source eMule Windows client. Having a large user base makes eMule excellent for finding rare content. It is considered the most complete implementation of the ed2k and kad protocol.
Pidgin Multiprotocol IM	In the old days, I used to run multiple instant messengers (IM) on my computer. In order to simplify management and have less programs on my computer's memory, I chose to use a single IM client. Running both on Windows and Linux platform Pidgin is the right choice. Pidgin (formerly known as Gaim) supports multiple IM protocols like Yahoo! Messenger, XMPP (used by Google Talk), MSN, IRC, etc.
Skype VoIP Application	If you want to make free phone or video calls over the Internet Skype may be right choice. Having features like instant messaging, file transfer, short message service, video conferencing and the ability to circumvent firewalls makes Skype a popular peer-to-peer (P2P) communication software.

Utilities

Apache HTTP Server	Being an open source and multi-platform software, Apache HTTP Server is the number one choice of web servers. I run Apache httpd on my PC for testing locally my web site. The same software runs on heavy-load enterprise Internet servers.
FileZilla FTP Client	If you want a GUI FTP client for Windows, instead of the command line client which comes by default you should give FileZilla a try. If you want to run an FTP server on your PC, you can try FileZilla Server.
WinPcap Windows Network Packet Capture Library	pcap is an application programming interface for network packet capturing. The implementation of pcap for Windows is called WinPcap. After installing WinPcap on your computer, you can run utilities like WinDump or ngrep for capturing and dumping network packets.
Cygwin Environment	Cygwin is a collection of free software tools that make a Windows system to act like a UNIX system. There are many utilities (some are network-related) which are ported from UNIX environments. I use very much OpenSSH client (ssh, scp, sftp) and server (sshd), Cygwin/X X Server, and network utilities like links, lynx, rsh, wget, whois, etc.
Dimension 4 NTP Client	I prefer not to use the Windows time synchronization. Instead, I use Dimension 4 and synchronize my computer's clock manually with NTP servers on the Internet. If you want to keep your computer's clock in sync continuously have a look at TPTime.
Sysinternals Networking Utilities	There are some very useful free utilities for Windows prepared by Sysinternals which is acquired by Microsoft in 2006. Whether you are an IT professional or a developer, you can use these utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications.

2. MULTIMEDIA

Graphics

Sw name	xxx sw name xxx.

Audio

Sw name	xxx sw name xxx.

Video

Bsplayer Multimedia Player	BS.Player is a multimedia player that supports almost any existing video and audio data formats. It can display subtitles, AVI files with more than 2 audio streams, and much more. Beware: The free version is adware supported.
Cole Codec Pack	xxx sw name xxx.
VirtualDub video Processing Utility	VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for Windows platforms. It has batch-processing capabilities extended with third-party video filters and it is mainly geared toward processing AVI files.

Utilities

Sw name	xxx sw name xxx.

3. VARIOUS UTILITIES

Editors

Sw name	xxx sw name xxx.

Software Development

Sw name	xxx sw name xxx.

Other