Free - Self-described "audio swiss army knife", does tagging, renaming, transcoding, encoding, and a bunch of other stuff.

Free - Digital audio player OF THE GODS. Playlist-centric, rather than shiny-button-centric like Winamp. Also features a ton of plugins, like a file transcoder, MassTagger/MassRenamer, and a bunch of other stuff

Shareware ($20, free version available) - Full-featured tagging, library management and player sync. Scriptable/skinnable/supports Winamp plugins; free version supports most tagging/library features.

Free / Open Source - Foobar2k, iTunes and amaroK had a giant mp3-player orgy and this was the glorious result.

Free - Audio File Manager. Tags, Renames, Moves, Searches, Filters, Etc.

Free - Winamp, the definitive music player for Windows. Winamp 5 is a continuation of Winamp 2.x, with Winamp 3 skin support and video playback. You're better off using a different video player, however.

A "software relaxation tool" much like a sound spa. Real recorded audio that loops seamlessly. It has many different environments to choose from, including MIDI windchimes that you can configure yourself.

portable, very small and fast for playing full directory

replaces Foobar2K/iTunes - Whereas most of the GTK+-based library-style players like RhythmBox and Muzik are unstable, slow, and memory hogs, the Qt/KDE-based JuK is beautiful, fast, and flexible. Sensible sorting, fast searching, and a tree view that shows all of your artists and albums. What more do you need?

internet radio

the tool you need to extract individual MP3s from an AlbumWrap album archive (typically, these files have a '_ALBW' notation in the file name). AlbumWrap is extremely easy to use, much like any file extractor. But the features are impressive... You can list, rename, and even preview the MP3s in the album! And extracting chosen tracks is painless!

Free - Mp3 analyzer and database. It will help determine what your mp3 is by running it against their huge database of music.

Free / Open Source - Sound Editor. Not a whole lot to say. It's free and it's about the best you'll get for free.

Another alternative for MP3 editing.

simple MP3 editing

This is the only program that can edit-down MP3s accurately 100% of the time. It can handle the files that MP3directcut chokes on. It also accepts cuesheets as input, so you can auto-cut rips that are in cue/MP3 format.

tool for creating audio CDs with CD-Text from various audio files from wav, mp3, mpc, ogg, aac, mp4, ape, flac, ofr, wv, tta, m3u, pls and fpl playlists and cue sheets

Free / Open Source - Another good CD Ripping application. Compatible with numerous codecs. Very simple to use.

dbPowerAMP is a Win32 GUI frontend for encoderes like LAME (you can use any version of the dll you prefer) and Ogg that integrates with Explorer so that you can simply right click and select an encoding method. It also adds more information to the tooltips for audio files and other goodies. It's quite useful.

convert music files from audio CDs

Shareware ($20, free version is crippled) - CD to anything ripper/encoder.

Free - Best CD Ripper ever created. Can be made to interface with your encoder of choice. Uses secure mode to practically guarantee perfect rips.

free drum synthesizer program

Ever needed to record a radio concert? This is the tool for that. No need to record to wave and then encode to another format afterwards. This program handles that on-the-fly. It supports mp3s and oggs, it can be scripted and it does normalization should you want that. Recommended++.

Full featured, open source AC3 codec.

lossless audio codec

mp3 encoder

Loseless audio compression.

Arguably the best lossy audio compression out there. It encodes fast as hell, too.

open source audio encoder (better than mp3)

Another flavor of lossless audio compression.

AC3 decoding (and other de-/encoding).

Free - Works in conjunction with most players, including Winamp and Foobar2000 - runs off to the internets to acquire lyrics for whatever's playing.

great graphical frontend for LAME mp3 encoding.

text-to-speech. good quality, does not output to file.

text-to-speech with definable parameters; poor definition. No output to file

Free - Replaces the default Windows sound mixer with a new one, with customizable hotkeys, and other bonus features.

tag editor

Awesome tag editor.

Shareware ($29.95, Free trial available) - a great tool for editing data tags in audio files of different formats

Shareware ($30, Free trial available) - Incredibly powerful Mp3 tagging and renaming software.

Free - Powerful tagging and renaming software. Interface can be a little tricky to learn, but it's fantastic once you understand it. Coded by Russians.

A lightweight ID3 tag editor that is really easy to use for cleaning up all of your crap mp3 files.

Analyzes mp3 files to determine which codec brand and version created them.

Easily gauge the sound quality of your computer if you don't feel like taking the audio snob Pepsi challenge.

Free / Open Source - Plays back almost every video format known to man, many sound formats, captures video from sources, and plays several different types of video streams. Good software to have around just in case, although other things are better as your main player (due to some bugs in VLC).

Play quicktime compatible movies as your background picture

Free / Open Source - Remember Windows Media Player 6.4? This is that but with modern features.

Multi-platform video player with support for dozens of formats.

Movie codec and player

most common formats (except Quicktime and Real) "with nice integrated design."

replaces Windows Media Player - Support for XviD/OGM, DivX, RealPlayer, QuickTime, WMV, and a slew of other formats, in addition to DVD playback with the d5d plugin, and your choice of interfaces like kxine, gxine or Totem. This is the definitive video player on Linux.

Free - Zoom Player is a video player which relies on external codecs and filters.

multitrack video editor

A program that can do everything that Virtualdub doesn't, such as keep audio sync, edit between keyframes and run on other platforms. It can also fix lots of AVI problems that hardware players are known to choke on.

Works great with the above for editing and applying filters to videos.

audio/video muxing.

Video compositing.

DivX/XviD encoding

VirtualDub with vcd, svcd, vob and experimental .wmv/.asf support. For those that have know the versatility of the regular VirtualDub, it works great for ripping small segments off of many DVD's for animated GIF's or AVI's or whatever.

DivX/XviD encoding

Free - Video editing software

Outputs AVI. (For making video files to be used in computer tutorials)

join SWF files

Free / Open Source - Bestest TV Tuner App ever created in the history of ever. If you have a TV tuner, you are required by law to trash whatever piece of shit you're using right now and switch to DScaler immediately.

Free / Open Source - Tool for capturing off a Digital Video Device.

script generator and dvd audio demuxer for use with virtualdub.

contains all you need for DVD2SVCD conversion (exept for SP/TMPG, but here's a CCE demo and a TMPG demo ): vStrip 0.8f, mpeg2dec.dll (one by Dividee and one by trbarry), Avisynth 2.08 & 2.52, BeSweet 1.5b16, IVTC Plugin 2.2 for Avisynth, Decomb 4.05, Madplay 1.5, Pulldown v0.99c, SimpleResize.dll, WinSubMux 0.1.0.1, VCDImager 0.7.12, DVD2AVI 1.76 CLI, bbMPEG 1.24b18 modified.

Video capture software, primarily used for recording gameplay.

A wonderful package of tools to use to rip DVD video and audio

A free universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution.

paste together media files; change format and compression

Translate any video format to any other video format

Today's Gordian Knot. If you are looking to encode your videos into high quality mpeg-4 this is what you would use. Easily encode x/h.264. Megui also has an audio encoder, avs creator, one click encoding ala AutoGK and plenty of other great features.

tool for streaming and archiving video screen captures

Free - Video capture software

Video file format conversion

Free - Convert damn near anything to MPG.

Free - Converts DV Type I to DV Type II. If you know what this means, it might be useful to you.

outputs SWF

Free - Video playback pack targeted mainly at anime watchers, but works great for anybody. Has filters and codecs to play back almost every video format on the planet and includes MPC and ZoomPlayer. It is updated regularly and extremely well tested and stable.

Free - The DefilerPak is a goon-made (sup Defiler, :cool:) package containing just about all you should ever need to play back any kind of video file ever. Uninstall K-lite, uninstall Divx 5 or 17 or whatever version they're up to, and install this. It is all you need. Works wonderfully with MPC.

Can decode DivX 3.11a, DivX 4, DivX 5, XviD, MJPEG, and more.

Media Player Classic can play Quicktime files, and fullscreen too!

Media Player Classic can play Real Media files too, you know

Open source and excellent video codec.

Optimized builds of XviD for your CPU, compiled from the latest CVS.

turns your PC into a very advanced Multi-Media Center / HTPC

Download ASF streams to your hard drive.

Does loads of useful things with ASF files, including lossless conversion to AVI and file joining. Good for basic AVI tasks too.

A powerful tool for dealing with problematic codecs.

media file codec identifier

Repair incomplete DivX AVIs.

Remove corrupt frames from DivX:-) movies.

Free / Open Source - Desktop customizable TV-Guide.

image browser/simple editor. can acquire from scanner/camera.

Free - THE image viewing program.

view and convert graphic files, really simple to use, with support of more than 400 graphics formats!

a Comic reader based on CDisplay. It use the popular 7-zip plugins to read many archives types like cbr cbz cbt rar zip tar 7z lzh arj cab tar.gz tar.bz2. It supports jpeg png gif and bmp images.

the perfect free image viewer. If you're like me and IrfanView always kind of bugged you, this is what you're looking for.

Picture and Fax Viewer for Win2K. over 100 formats.

Win95+

Awesome image management

The best HTML photo album software in existence.

Free - Google-owned image viewing / management software.

image editor. Win95+

creating or editing images, simple .avi or .gif animations, photos, picture albums and screensavers.

Lossless JPEG cropping is possible and it's free.

OSS PNG image optimizer

batch-style conversion with command-lines such as "peg_it.exe /45 filename.bmp", which will compress filename.bmp to a jpeg of 45 (out of 99) quality

advanced paint program

shrinks GIFs without any noticable reduction of picture quality.

Virtual Reality mountain generator

Create high speed 3-D animation

paint and animation program for image creation, viewing, and animation. DOS

diagrams and flowcharts.

vector editor graphics program which can serve as a flow chart tool

Fractal image generator.

make/edit animated GIFs.

Free - Advanced screenshot-taking utility.

Free / Open Source - Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor. It saves to .svg by default, and is really quite nice.

render Julia fractals using quaternions numbers

3D animation and effects software

3D animator

Free - MSPaint from the future.

Seamless background texture creator

replaces Adobe Illustrator - An absolutely excellent vector graphics editor. I haven't used it much since I really suck at this, but it seems quite feature-rich.

Free / Open Source - Not a whole lot to say about the gimp, it's the gimp. It's free, and people tend to claim it's "just as good as photoshop", but I don't believe them.

Image thumbnail creation utility. This program will scan an entire directory and create thumbs based on the max height or width that you specify. It also creates a html index so you can view all of your thumbs at once.

Free - ColorCop is a color picker. It can zoom, sample and average samples, and do a number of other neat things.

which I think has probably saved me about 6 years of my life.

For those who use FireFox/Opera. This version also now supports themes, Illustrator AND Photoshop output with some more abilities.

Free - ColorPic is another color picker. It works slightly differently than ColorCop, but it does the same basic thing.

Digital Dream Software. 3D image generating and editing software

Free - Another global colorpicker.

One-click scanner-to-printer copy software.

Enlarge images without pixelation. Standard edition is free.

Free - Checks images in a directory and determines if there are duplicates. Even checks "near" duplicates or resized duplicates.

Free / Open Source - WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor. W3 compliance DEFINETLY known, since they MAKE IT.

Free - Lets you sync bookmarks across multiple computers over the INTERNETS.

GUI for TinyWeb Server

Free (Pro version $55) - Web development centered editor - includes integrated FTP providing remote editing

Free / Open Source - Mozilla Composer! Rise from your grave!

Free - WYSIWYG HTML editor. W3 compliance level unknown.

a tool for on-the-fly conversion of compiled HTML help(chm) to full-blown online help system, ready for publishing on the web within several seconds.

Design your own web pages without any HTML knowledge.

creates an .html file of your selected directory.

drag-and-drop website building.

An alternative interface to the Internet Explorer rendering engine.

Free / Open Source - If you need an explanation, you have been living under a rock for the past four years,

Free - A portable web browser that fits on a floppy. Not really for home use (it doesn't have a permanent address bar) but great for kiosks, etc.

full-featured web browser

Another very powerful internet content filter thing. Privoxy is open source, and cross platform. I've used it on OS X, although I still use Proxomitron on Windows.

IMNSHO, the absolute best web proxy for Windows. Fairly easy to set up and use, with a graphical interface for managing filters. Stops most popups and ads, as well as blocking the irritating ActiveX and Flash garbage infesting the web these days.

Caching web proxy. Indispensable on 56k and slightly less so on broadband. Runs on anything with an "x" in the name, and also Windows NT/2K/XP.

Free / Open Source - full featured web server

The quick, easy way to make your machine a web server. Its just a toy compared to something like apache, but it can be useful.

Complete web server, WWW supports MIME file typing, CGI, common log format, and multi-hosting

Shareware ($40-$100, Free trial available) - Streaming or still-capture webcam software.

Free - The one true malware detection and removal device. Logfiles can be parsed by the, to give you an idea of what should stay or go.

Open link in any browser that's installed on your system.

For those who don't want to deal with configuring proxomitron and other similar programs

This utility blocks ActiveX spyware from ever installing or ever being downloaded.

Makes it much easier to import/export bookmarks when using different browsers

these things are fantastic, once you've got things like wordcount, link listings, autofilling forms with anonymous, making new pages from selected text, and so on all just a click away, you'll never go back.

IE google search toolbar

Free - Too much of a mouthbreathing retard to learn how to spell? Let computers do it for you!

Manage Firefox extensions and themes.

A framework for building web applications.

EZPics is a sequential image downloader. What does that mean? Well imagine a website hosts a set of images named: image001.jpg, image002.jpg, image003.jpg, and so on. EZPics can be used to easily download all the pictures in the set. EZPics works with what I call EZCodes. EZCodes contain all the information needed to download an entire series of images. And now with the new EZCode format, making EZCodes is even easier. The idea is that people can trade EZCodes for easy image downloading. Now with the newest version of EZPics you are no longer limited to just downloading images. Any kind of file can be downloaded.

for downloading anything & everything.

download manager

Free / Open Source - HTTrack is a website archiver. It'll spider through a site and download everything.

an alternative to EZPics

Free / Open Source - Goon-Made frontend for wget. You give it files and it downloads them for you. Use it in conjunction with the Firefox Extensionto get a really good and potentially silent download manager linked up with your browser.

Download entire web sites.

For downloading stuff.

The proxy-only version tends to run faster than the suite, but both are nice

Useful little proggie to check if the forums are up again. Also comes with system tray mode.

Free - Website Monitor, sits in your tray and checks sites on a periodic basis, informing you when they update.

Free - Checks through browser bookmarks [IE/Mozilla/Firefox/Opera/etc] and determines if links are dead.

complete POP3 email client

Free - A small and lightweight e-mail client with POP3 support. This is a modified version of the official release that has a few additional features the original lacks.

Pegasus Mail is a free, standards-based electronic mail client suitable for use by single or multiple users on single computers or on local area networks. A proven product, it has served millions of users since it was released in 1990. It is extremely feature-rich and powerful, yet remains small and fast.

Free / Open Source - A Mail/News/RSS reader. Built in adaptive spamfiltering plus an easy-to-adapt-to ui, along with the established theming and extension power of Firefox.

a small application that allows you to check your Hotmail account e-mail from a normal POP mail client (such as Eudora, IncrediMail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Opera, Netscape, etc). Unlike standard mail accounts which allow users to retrieve their e-mail through a POP mail client, Hotmail can normally only be checked on the web. With Hotmail Popper, you can use your favorite POP mail client to retrieve your e-mail from your Hotmail account. In addition, Hotmail Popper allows you to send e-mails through Hotmail's service, as if it was a normal SMTP (outgoing mail) server.

Checks all your mail from multiple accounts before you download it and lets you bounce it back if it's spam.

Free / Open Source - Another free adaptive spamfilter program. You train it, It learns, Spam Goes Away.

Free / Open Source - Standalone Bayesian Spam Filter Proxy. It sits around and gets mail run through it before it gets to you. If said mail sucks, it goes away. Useful if for some reason you can't be bothered to use Thunderbird.

Free POP3 access to Yahoo! mail

Mercury is a free, standards-based mail server solution, providing comprehensive, fast server support for all major Internet e-mail protocols. It is supplied in two versions, one hosted on Windows systems, the other running as a set of NLMs on Novell NetWare file servers.

A free GTK LDAP client. I have trouble finding commercial products that match this.

A free open source implementation of LDAP.

Free - Program that lets you map a Gmail account as a windows drive. Note: Google appears to be more or less blocking this utility now, and using it may result in a temporary "security lockout" on your gmail account.

POP3 compliant email notifier for Windows

Fast, friendly, and efficient email checker which resides in the system tray. It can check several POP3 accounts at regular intervals, it can preview mail, and it can even decide what to do based on rules you give it. Plays sounds or changes its icon to reflect the number of new messages.

Free - A tool for recovering messages from Outlook Express databases (.dbx files). It even works on damaged databases ... this is a "must have" for my toolkit CD when I go to fix someone's system.

Voice chat application from Google.

IM client for those who don't like Trillian

Free - AIM client. No ads, and just 85 kB.

Awesome alternative to Trillian, supports all the same things Trillian does and more. Especially good since it is open-source and has good plugin support, as well as a good plugin-making community. Nightly builds of the core program are also very good at eliminating bugs AND they run pretty stable.

OSS multi-protocol IM client, formerly known as Gaim.

Free - VoIP for the masses. Also IM. You know, for good measure.

Great little AIM client. No ads, wicked small. Awesome.

Free or $25 for one year - Sorta it's own style of messaging, but again for every service ever

Chattin'

Free - PC answering machine and caller id. You've got a spare modem sitting around, right?

alternative to DeadAIM, with features such as remote control, idle control, buddy list appearance options, selective user ignore and blocking, talking while away, safety away, chat logging, automatic screen name formatting, extra information storage, scripting, and the display of various statistics.

Free / Open Source - Yet another great IRC client.

Free - Another really good IRC client.

Free / Open Source - A standalone windows port of arguably the. Though, all the cool kids run it over ssh.

very slick Windows IRC client.

Free / Open Source - Super-good GTK-based IRC client. "Official" Windows builds are shareware, but it's opensource, so "Unofficial" builds are free.

replaces XChat - It would replace mIRC if you ran it on Windows. But if you're running such an old, featureless, bug-ridden and ugly application on Windows anyway, what are you doing?

Free / Open Source - RSS Reader for Windows.

Binary News Reader / Binary News Reaper, software specifically tailored for binary newsgroup articles.

UseNet binary downloader

replaces GrabIt - The best all-in-one Usenet program ever. Has support for both MIME and yEnc-encoded binaries, and will make downloading from your MP3 groups very, very simple.

Newsgroup reader.

KorrNews supplements MorVer and allows you to do snazzy stuff to your headers among other things.

I happen to prefer OE when reading newsgroups (yeah, I'm odd like that). The problem is that OE is pretty careless about Usenet standards such as signature seperators[1]. MorVer fixes that. It acts like a proxy and filters both the inbound and outbound connection for things like unwrapped lines and stupid people who toppost.

a nice simple FTP client, I've been using for years.

Free / Open Source - Standard two-pane (or four pane, if you count the trees) FTP client. Supports SFTP via PuTTY.

Nagware ($25) - Best two-pane ftp client ever created by man.

Nice FTP client for OSX, supports one-way mirroring

Nagware at random times of the day ($36) - Crazy FTP client with 37 different queues which for some reason certain people really enjoy.

Send/receive files over a LAN or the Internet and have it actually work consistently! Amazing! Easy to set up and has fun features like virtual file systems (Why can the Windows file sharing still not do this? ) and remote administration.

a free FTP server for the Windows operating system

A very secure/robust/stable FTP server. It can use LDAP/Active Directory/NT domain security and user groups for authentication. Freeware/GNU

Shareware ($39, free for 6 weeks) - Like WebDrive but cheaper and easier to use. Also actually worked for me, unlike WebDrive.

Shareware ($49.95, free for 20 days) - Seamlessly makes ftp, sftp, or WebDAV servers appear as Windows drives.

A freeware utility that lets you upload files to an FTP server of your choice with just a few clicks. It also outputs the URL of the uploaded file and you can have certain tags appended to it, so if you wish to upload an image and show it to the forums, you can right click on that image and have the world see it in just a few clicks.

shell-extension ftp uploader

Free implementation of the SSH protocol.

Free / Open Source - Suite of SSH-related goodies, including a SSH terminal, an SCP client, an SFTP client, and a bunch of other stuff. Like PuTTY, but want clickable links and the ability to minimize to tray? Check out, a fork that adds these capabilities.

a free software terminal emulator (communication program) for MS-Windows. It supports VT100 emulation, telnet connection, serial port connection, and so on.

A decent yet bloated BitTorrent client. Written in java, so it's cross-platform.

Completely open source Limewire replacement client. Think what Kazaalite++ was to Kazaa.

Free - A quick and simple way of transferring files, especially to people who don't "get" computers.

The best BitTorrent client ever created by man.

Free / Open Source - FREESCO (stands for FREE ciSCO) is a free replacement for commercial routers supporting up to 3 ethernet/arcnet/token_ring/arlan network cards and up to 2 modems. Why should you use Freesco? It's insanely easy to set up. It's thoroughly documented. It runs off one floppy and 6MB of RAM, and it has a unique Web Control Panel.

Quick and easy VPN solution.

Free, easy to use FreeBSD-based router/firewall package. Requires a PC with a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, and two NICs to run. Features include web interface, wireless support, stateful packet filtering, NAT/PAT, DHCP client, PPPoE, PPTP, IPsec VPN, PPTP VPN, static routes, DHCP server server, caching DNS forwarder, DynDNS client, SNMP agent, traffic shaper, host/network aliases.

Routing software (OSPF,BGP,RIPv2,IS-IS,etc)

Free - a utility to link LANs together over the Internet for network gameplay. It can also be used to bridge many configurations of IPX or IPv4 packets and frames from once point to another. Formerly known as the Gamer's IPX tunnel, GIT now tunnels TCP and UDP ports as well, in order to work with modern games.

Free / Open Source - Yet another VNC Client/Server. It's the real deal.

Shareware ($2-15 per PC) - software allows the user to view desktop of remote computer and control any programs remotely using keyboard and mouse.

Browser-based remote desktop.

Free / Open Source - Another VNC Client/Server. Also Doesn't suck.

Free / Open Source - Ever wanted to run your very own phone system at home? No? Are you sure?

Free / Open Source - VNC Client/Server (remote desktop) that doesn't suck.

nice IP scanner, small & fast

Packet Sniffer

Network security tools.

Network/Host monitoring application.

Security tool.

Security tool.

Network/Host monitoring application.

internet connection speedup toolkit

Free - ANM tells you what seems to be accessing what port and what it seems to be doing with it.

Down2Home is a program that monitors your ADSL/Cablemodem/Dialup traffic and provides you with useful statistics about the amount of data your PC has transferred. Use it to see what's happening on your Dial-up/DSL or Cable connected on your PC. Check if there is data transferred when you don't want it (Spyware, backdoors, whatever). Or use it to keep control over your transfer volume

Free - Tray Application that shows your current upstream and downstream speeds. Also logs total throughput, and can be used to alert you to when you're about to hit your monthly download/upload cap.

Free / Open Source - Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor which has stood the test of time since 1975. It is geared mainly toward programmers but it can also edit any type of other file. The learning curve can be somewhat steep due to heavy use of unconventional shortcut keys but in the long run you can code very efficiently and fast using emacs compared to other editors.is a good Windows build.

Free - Another Text editor out there. Standard advanced features: syntax hilighting, tabs, etc.

green on black, full screen (good for old school tech nerds or people who need to concentrate)

Free text editor

Free - Another super light-weight text editor. Just about as many features as you can possibly cram into 30k.

For quick editing or when X11 is not available.

and its trusty plug-in buddy !

A simple MDI Rich Text editor

As much as I used emacs with the TeX modules, this just save me pain++.

Free - Yet another super light-weight text editor. metapad sells itself as a notepad replacement--and indeed you can replace the notepad executable systemwide with this program--with a number of small but useful features added.

uses the font Terminal 6x8, white on black, other features.

Free - Barely any features at all. It's notepad, but with tabs.

Free / Open Source - Scintilla-based text editor with syntax hilighting and code-folding.

Free - A simple text editor designed to be a notepad replacement but with a few extra features.

text editor with blowfish encryption

Free / Open Source - The ORIGINAL Scintilla-based text editor.

full featured notepad replacement with unicode.support

Free / Open Source - Again another super light-weight text editor. Like notepad, but with few extra features (among which tabs and syntax highlighting for many programming languages).

Free / Open Source - Notepad. But with UML.

Free / Open Source - The text editor for manly men. A GUI verison (gVim) is available for those of you scared by the commandline. If gVim is still a bit too scary for you, check out, a set of addon scripts that makes gVim look and work like a regular normal windows text editor, while still preserving all the wonderful power of Vim. Both gVim and Cream have an optional rudimentary tabbed ui.

Free / Open Source - It's a notepad, but with wiki-style text formatting and interlinking . . and now it's open source! Hooray!

Shareware (~$30-70, free trial available) - Text editor with strong LaTeX abilities, including code highlighting and integration with MiKTeX for Windows.

provides a quick, easy-to-remember way of creating accents like é Ü ç î æ and special characters like ƒ ² ‰ © £ ± ß ° 1/2 ¿ « » ™ „ in most Windows programs.

An improvement on Microsoft's Character Map not least because it allows you to see the characters at a decent (i.e. readable) size.

Free - Well, it's text editing RELATED. PureText strips all RichTextFormatting from a selection. So you can paste it into word or whatever and not have word shit itself over trying to format it however the source was.

premiere-quality, freeware string-replacing utility for Windows. At its core, ReplaceEm is essentially a text search-and-replace program. However, unlike the search-replace functionality of a standard text editor, ReplaceEm is designed to operate on multiple files at once. And you need not only perform one search-replace operation per file -- you can setup a list of operations to perform. If different groups of files need to have different operations performed on them, this is no problem either. You can also specify a backup file for each file processed just incase the replace operation didn’t do exactly what you wanted.

stickies/notes

Free / Open Source - A Calendar / Reminder utility in the same vein as Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. NOTE: still in VERY EARLY stages of development.

Free - A Calendar Program of a different sort

Free / Open Source - Full office productivity suite, and a free one at that. Native export-to-PDF capability.

Acrobat now loads in about the same amount of time as Foxit, but has more features.

Free - Super Fast Lightweight PDF reader.

PostScript / PDF viewer

a graphical interface for Ghostscript.

If you can't install Office, you don't have to.

allows MS Word to read MS Works text files

Xpdf is an open source viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files. (These are also sometimes also called 'Acrobat' files, from the name of Adobe's PDF software.) The Xpdf project also includes a PDF text extractor, PDF-to-PostScript converter