The worlds most famous browser which is completely free and open source. It runs on Windows too.

FileZilla is a fast FTP and SFTP client for Windows with a lot of features. FileZilla Server is a reliable FTP server.

OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute

VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Install Gaim from http://gaim.sourceforge.net and chat with your friends who are using any major messenger application. Currently, it supports Yahoo, msn, Aol, Jabber and many others.

7-Zip is a file archiver with the highest compression ratio. The program supports 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB formats. Compression ratio in the new 7z format is 30-50% better than ratio in ZIP format. Has performed well on Windows.

The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows XP/2000/2003 and Linux

Simple to use, powerful, and customizable, Thunderbird is a full-featured email application. Thunderbird supports IMAP and POP mail protocols, as well as HTML mail formatting. Easily import your existing email accounts and messages. Built-in RSS capabilities, powerful quick search, spell check as you type, global inbox, deleting attachments and advanced message filtering round out Thunderbird's modern feature set.

ClamWin is a (world class) Free Antivirus for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP and 2003. It provides a graphical user interface to the Clam AntiVirus engine. ClamWin Free Antivirus comes with an easy installer and open source code. You may download and use it absolutely free of charge.

Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, your desktop icons, and your file manager. Launchy indexes and launches your applications, documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

Eraser is a secure data removal tool for Windows. It completely removes sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Eraser is an advanced security tool (for Windows), which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Works with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP and DOS. Eraser is FREE software and its source code is released under GNU General Public License.

The minimal server solution for windows - 3.6Mb only. It includes latest versions of Apache2, Perl5, PHP5, MySQL4, phpMyAdmin,... NO INSTALLATION REQUIRED! NO REGISTRY DUST!!! Just unpack and start. Set up your webserver in seconds and web away....

Ethereal is a network protocol analyzer for Unix and Windows. It allows you to examine data from a live network or from a capture file on disk. You can interactively browse the capture data, viewing summary and detail information for each packet.

UltraVNC is an easy to use, fast and free sotware that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows 2000, XP, or Server 2003. It started development at Washington State University as an undergraduate senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. It is meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating systems. The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#.

PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. It is written and maintained primarily by Simon Tatham.

WinMerge is an Open Source visual text file differencing and merging tool for Win32 platforms. It is highly useful for determing what has changed between project versions, and then merging changes between versions.

Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement) which supports several programming languages running under the MS Windows environment. Extremely light and with huge number of features.

eMule is a good file sharing client which relies on edonkey and kad networks

Really Slick Screensavers is a collection of "crazy OpenGL" screensavers to be run on Windows.

A spam filtering tool for Outlook. The SpamBayes project is working on developing a statistical (commonly, although a little inaccurately, referred to as Bayesian) anti-spam filter, initially based on the work of Paul Graham. The major difference between this and other, similar projects is the emphasis on testing newer approaches to scoring messages. While most anti-spam projects are still working with the original graham algorithm, we found that a number of alternate methods yielded a more useful response. This is documented on the background page.

Vnc2swf is a screen recording tool for X-Window (X11), Windows and Mac OS Desktop. Vnc2swf captures live motion of a screen through VNC protocol and converts it a Macromedia Flash(TM) movie (.swf)."

Tor is an implementation of second-generation onion routing - an anonymity system enabling its users to communicate anonymously on the Internet. Originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory, Tor became an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) project in late 2004. The EFF supported Tor financially until November 2005, and continues to provide web hosting for the project. Easily configured and run from Windows.

MaxFisher is a powerful and convenient search engine for personal computers and intranets. It is implemented in pure Java with indexing done by the very efficient Lucene engine. MaxFisher can be thought of as a cross platform replacement for Google Desktop with enhanced file support, security and privacy. Can serve not only as Google Desktop replacement, but as a free replacement for Googles search appliances.

K-Meleon is an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser for the win32 (Windows) platform based on the Gecko layout engine (the rendering engine of Mozilla). K-Meleon is free, open source software released under the GNU General Public License.

Shareaza is a peer-to-peer client for Windows that allows you to download any file-type found on several popular P2P networks.

The Windows port of the famous Vim text editor on Windows.

WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows (all current variants).

DocSearcher uses the Open Source Lucene and POI Apache APIs as well as the Open Source PDF Box API to provide searching capabilities for HTML Document HTML, MS Word Document MS Word, MS Excell Document MS Excell, RTF Document RTF, PDF Document PDF, Open Office Document Open Office (and Star Office) Documents, and Text Document text documents. Other file formats are currently not supported.

Runs on all systems with JAVA support.

An audio production & mixing tool, featuring a - Sequencer, Beat Box, Wave Recording, Frequency Modulation, DJ Scratch interface and sampler playback (the ability to assign any sample to any key) - For Windows, written in C# .Net 2.0 utilising DirectX

IMGV is a powerful, free and open source, Image Viewer that tries to do what other image viewers cannot. It can run on most versions of Microsoft Windows and Unix systems (Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and others)

Summary: Includes standard and unique features such as a File and Directory Browser. Slideshows. Zooming. Rotating. EXIF support. Gamma Correction. Histograms. Full-Screen support. Wallpaper Setting. Ability to view four images at a time (and slideshow). Adjustable thumbnails. Playlists. View and download images from URLs. MPEG movie playing. Image searching and filtering. Multiple-directory and sub-directory loading. Customizable interface. Transitional effects. Image hiding (with password protection). And much more.

An excellent light weight fast http web server. Very easy to setup and available for almost all platform. The source code is available. It has received rave reviews from many people and is being used in production boxes to support huge websites.

Lighty Tray is a system tray menu to control and configure LightTPD. It is easy to use and simple to understand. I don't think anyone would have to go through a learning curve to use it. Best of all anyone is free to edit and configure the entire tray menu whichever way.

FreeMeter is a simple, friendly network monitoring and diagnosis tool, written in C# using the MS .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. Its primary function is to display graphically how much data you are transferring over the network interfaces in your computer. It is also a handy tool for tasks such as copying broken URLs to your browser, pinging and tracing other computers, and watching for new email.

Every office seems to have one vital person who is the only one who can find anything in the file cabinets. Wilbur wants to be the electronic equivalent of that person for your computer. His Qualifications:

    * He's fast
    * He's efficient
    * He's FREE!.
    * His source code is available

Give him a chance and he will quickly make an index so he can tell you where to find files containing any information you need now.

"The File Seeker" is an application for find files in hard disks quickly.

Wilma is a program for quickly finding text lurking in the files on your computer. It does this by creating an index of what words are in which files and this allows it to later find files containing a given word or set of words almost instantaneously. More at http://open-source.onestop.net/2006/02/wilbur-wilma-and-file-seeker.html

TestDisk is a powerful data recovery utility! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally erasing your Partition Table). Find more here:http://open-source.onestop.net/2006/03/testdisk.html

regain is a search engine similar to web search engines like Google, with the difference that you don't search the web, but your own files and documents. Using regain you can search through large portions of data (several gigabytes!) in split seconds!

A computer recorder. Record audio and video from your computer screen into .mov-files and .wav-files. Can be used to e.g. make instructional videos or record games. Could also be used to record streaming video and audio.

TaskSwitchXP is an advanced task management utility that picks up where the standard Windows Alt+Tab switcher leaves off. It provides the same functionality, and adds visual styles to the dialog and also enhances it by displaying thumbnail preview of the application that will be switched to. TaskSwitchXP also has a powerful process and window management capability that allows you quickly to close/minimize applications and their groups. The unique capabilities of TaskSwitchXP make it useful for tracking down multitudinous windows, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work.

Folder Size for Windows adds a new column to the Details view in Windows Explorer. The new column shows not only the size of files, but also the size of folders. It keeps track of which folders you view, and scans them in the background so you can see complete size of all files within the folder. It's very useful for cleaning up your disk. Once you get used to having that information available, a directory listing simply looks incomplete without it!

Hide Windows Basic can hide any desktop window with keyboard shortcuts, or via its own user interface. The windows can be restored to the same state at any later time.

WinSCP is an open source freeware SFTP client for Windows using SSH. Legacy SCP protocol is also supported. Its main function is safe copying of files between a local and a remote computer.

The Unidentified Flying Raw (UFRaw) is a utility to read and manipulate raw images from digital cameras. It can be used on its own or as a Gimp plug-in. It reads raw images using Dave Coffin's raw conversion utility - DCRaw.

Jarnal is an open-source application for notetaking, sketching, keeping a journal, making a presentation, annotating a document - including pdf - or collaborating using a stylus, mouse or keyboard. It is similar to Microsoft Windows Journal and to the earlier Mimeo whiteboarding and Palm notepad applications. There is also a commercial knockoff of Jarnal called PDF Annotator - for $50 you can enjoy a subset of the capabilities that Jarnal provides for free.

Dave's Quick Search Deskbar is an add-on for the Windows Desktop Taskbar that lets you launch searches quickly. With dozens of search engines, a calculator, clock, calendar, and more in one little textbox, it's monster functionality in a flea-sized GUI.

Winpooch is a Windows watchdog, free and open source. Anti spyware and anti trojan, it gives a full protection against local or external attacks by scanning the activity of programs in real time. Associated with ClamWin antivirus, Winpooch keeps safe your computer against virus.

No frills music player is what I will call that. Indeed no installation and no nothing else. Just click and start playing. It can support a huge list of fomats and plays good.Features: GNU General Public License Freeform Skins Simple User Interface Advanced Playlist editor Internet streaming ID3 Multitagger File Renamer Fast mp3->wav converter MAD mpeg engine OGG Vorbis support Winamp input plugins support Smallest executable programmed in blazing fast 'C' Continuous play 8 band precision equalizer Lot's more... Try it to know it... Its just 548Kb of a elephant ;)

Virtual Desktop will create new desktops for you and let you to switch between desks and windows quick and easy. This project consist in two applications: one NT service which manage desktops and another which create desktops. Service requires 2MB ram.

VirtuaWin is an application for the Windows user community that misses the wonderful virtual desktop functionality often used on Unix systems. It is simple, powerful and highly configurable.

The project tries to create a free, fast and feature-full virtual desktop manager for Microsoft Windows.

The eLearning XHTML editor (eXe) is a web-based authoring environment designed to assist teachers and academics in the design, development and publishing of web-based learning and teaching materials without the need to become proficient in HTML, XML or complicated web-publishing applications.

Virtual Magnifying Glass 2.35 is a free, open source, screen magnification tool for Windows. It is simple, customizable, and easy-to-use.

RAMpage is a Windows utility that displays the amount of available memory in the System Tray. It can also free memory; by double clicking the tray icon, by setting a threshold that activates the program automatically, or by having it run automatically when an application exits. RAMpage is free to use, and the source code is also freely available.

AstroGrep is a windows gui grep utility. Grep is a UNIX command-line program which searches within files for keywords.

A utility which converts PDF files into HTML and XML formats.

AutoHotkey is a free, open-source utility for Windows. With it, you can: * Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder.

And much much more...!

It is a tool which completes a word or a piece of text we type dynamically. As we type the words the application gives us the next few possible words which might complete the sentence for us. The application learns what we type and then suggests the possible words that we might be using. A very cool and very useful tool for anyone.

A Note is a program that lets you create post-it like notes on your Microsoft Windows desktop. The program sits in the system tray and with either one click or a double click a new note appears and you can write the message directly.

HandyNotes is a small software program that makes it easy to keep all your notes organized in one easily accessible place.

With HandyNotes, any time you need to jot something down you can just click on an icon and create a new note. If you need to refer to previous notes, you can easily browse them, or search for a keyword.

Stickies for Windows lets you put yellow sticky notes on your Windows desktop, much like the popular MacOS application. It is very simple, very customizable, and completely free!

A cross-platform image viewer "written in Python + wxPython + PIL. It doesn't pretend to be complete, fast, or even useful, but I like it and it is the viewer I use on both Linux and Windows. It has been inspired by the famous Windows-only ACDSee."

TrueDownloader is a open source download manager/accelerator with good features like Pause/Resume downloads, simultaneous downloads, segmented downloads for acceleration . Both HTTP and FTP protocols are supported , and it's very fast ! You can even improve it or adapt it to your needs since it's open-source. Some special features like HTTP/FTP Proxy support and ZIP previewing are supported too.

Adds mouse gestures to Internet Explorer. Use your mouse to control your browser!

CoolMon is a program for monitoring vital system stats and almost anything else you wish to display on the desktop. It can also display stats from remote pc's and publish real-time stats on a webpage. The application can display CPU, RAM and page file usage, hard drive usage, MotherBoard Monitor temperatures and fan speeds, various network stats and much, much more.

Vital Desktop is a desktop animation utility, a program designed to bring a fresh new look to your desktop. Never again will you be faced with the same static background every time. Now, your desktop actually comes alive!

The idea behind Vital Desktop is simple. You have a favourite screensaver. Why wait until it starts? Or you are bored with the static picture on your desktop. Well - pick a screensaver. Run it on your desktop. Make it vital!

All about the open source applications which I use.

great little "run bar" for launching programs, website etc. Very customizable. Nice little "useful" program.