heres a couple, anyone care to had any others feel free;
Regcleaner
Cleans up the registry and also identifies everything that wants to start up automatically
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download460.html

majorgeeks are also a good source for all sorts of freeware/shareware

Pop up stopper
http://www.panicware.com/

Avast anti-virus software
http://www.avast.com/

DiskCheckup
Want to know what temperature your disk drive is operating at?
This program lets you read all the parameters of S.M.A.R.T drives
http://www.passmark.com/download/index.htm

StartUpMonitor
This is a handy little program runs in the background and pops up a warning when any new program wants to add itself to your startup files - very useful!
http://www.mlin.net/StartupMonitor.shtml

Microsoft Anti Spyware www.microsoft.com/spyware

It's currently in Beta Version but it sources from a company that Microsoft Gobbled Up as they had a good product.

Sorts out a huge load of mess

Freshmeat's a pretty good site for open source downloads

Firstly I'e always found this site to be very useful.

As for apps. My security line up.

Sygate Personal Firewall Free
AVG Free (anti-virus)
Ad-Aware SE Personal (spyware scanner)
Spybot Search and Destroy (spyware scanner again)
Spyware Blaster (helps prevent spyware)
WinPatrol (another general malware preventative)
RegCleaner (highly recommended, manages startup and general registry and can help speed the boot up time)


General Applications

Firefox (Web Browser)
Thunderbird (E-Mail Client)
OpenOffice2 (application suite analogous to MS Office, has high compatibility with MSO formats)
VMWare Player (allows the running of virtual machines within XP so you can get 2 OS's running at once)
Gaim (IM client capable of handling many systems including MSN)
Emacs for Windows (text editor. Just couldn't accept Notepads general crapness)
uTorrent (BitTorrent client)

Non Free but trials available
WinRAR (general archiver and massively superior to WinZip)
Alcohol 120 (superior disc burning tool)

Thats enough to be getting on with. This thread should be stickied.

I'd like some ABSOLUTELY COMPLETELY TOTALLY FREE MP3 download sites

I trust you are talking about LEGAL mp3's Rick, as of course we don't condone illegal filesharing

There are many out there Rick, but as Chris says it cannot be condoned!

I don't mind ripping the music indutry off

Its a joke having to pay £17 for a double-CD when they cost 75p to make

'fully built up' cost ?

Rick - Here you go mate http://www.slsknet.org/ Soulseek is the daddy for ripping the music industry off

Do they cost that much. I could do a double CD for about 5p if I was that way inclined and generally pressed discs are cheaper than CD-R's.

The best solution is to go for something like iTunes (but not iTunes since there are cheaper, superior options out there) and just burn the songs onto a CD.

Cheers boss

I like this little freebee too


http://www.winpatrol.com/

An interesting little app* I picked up a few days ago is Zim. What it essentially provides is a Wiki for the desktop. When you load it up you pick a directory to act as your repository and then it provides you with a blank home page. From there you can add more and more txt files and link them together seemlessly to form your own desktop knowledge base. You can link to outside sources (I've tried weblinks and they work, I think pdf files will be fine as well since it loads into Firefox but haven't tried anything else yet) as well so you can have your most important sources next to your journal. A journal can be done via a built in calendar** where you click the date and it automatically generates a text file for a journal entry, you can obviously return at a later date by clicking on the same date again. It has a built in spell checker** as well. All in all I'm finding it useful so far.

There are some drawbacks, its still v 0.15 with all that entails (personally I'd say its closer to release than that but obviously the author has big plans). There are a few dependancy holes to jump through in Linux as well, I'd imagine the Windows version follows the Windows style install everything method so will have less problems, you'll still need Perl and gtk2 for Windows at the very least I'd imagine.


*the most interesting apps are always little of course
**a compile time option in Linux, you need the gtk calender/spell checker to run it.

Not a bad app for MIS research for me then.

There are other similar ones out there like Tomcat which is a .Net/Mono app which will run practically natively in XP (provided you have the .Net framework installed of course). Haven't used it myself but intend on doing so shortly.