Here's just a quick list of Windows programs I use (and recommend) :P
These are my recommendations/opinions.  This list isn't complete.


Disc related
Nero Burning ROM (not free) - basically, THE application for general purpose CD/DVD (and BD) burning; Nero has far more options than basically any other competing software (well to my knowledge :P).  CDBurnerXP can be used if you want a free solution.

Alcohol 120% (not free) - somewhat losing it's use now, but used to be a good application for copying game CDs which had copy protections.  You may still have a use for this...

DVDDecrypter - THE tool for ripping commercial DVDs with copy protection systems; defeats most copy protection systems, and is a very versatile application.  There are a few DVDs known which DVDDecrypter can't rip - for these, use DVD Fab Decrypter and FreeDVD.

DVD Shrink - the popular application used to shrink those dual layer DVDs to a single layer.

Daemon Tools - probably the best virtual CD/DVD image mounting tool (mounts a disc image as a virtual disc drive).  Simple, small, supports all the common formats and has some copy protection bypassing ability...

UltraISO (not free) - a general CD image manipulation tool.  Supports many image formats, if you happen to come across some obscure one.

ISO Buster (not free) - Has some interesting features in regards to handling discs, such as the ability to access "masked sessions".  Can also perform some recovery of some "broken" discs.

CD Check - Probably not the best application, but it does the job.  If you're worried that your burn may not have been good, just run the CD/DVD with this tool.  I recommend using this with Daemon Tools if you already have a disc image.

CDex - This tool is for ripping CD audio.  Although your media player may have CD ripping support, I would recommend against using them, as they probably don't have good jitter correction like CDex has.  In addition to that, CDex supports a wide range of audio output formats, and doesn't apply DRM (unlike some media players >_>).
Another popular tool for this is Exact Audio Copy - I haven't tried it, so can't give any recommendation about it, or which of these two tools are better.


Multimedia related
Winamp - Has plenty of skins, a good input/output plugin interface, has a small memory footprint, global hotkeys support, wide integration, a powerful library...  Basically all you need for an audio player.  Supports more formats than most other music players.  Note that I wouldn't use it's CD ripper or use Winamp as a video player however.
For those that favour an iTunes type interface (yuk, iTunes), I recommend Media Monkey.
Portable versions of this application are available. (never tried it myself though)

The KMPlayer
A good DirectShow based video player with many features.  The menus are somewhat bloated, I must say, and at times, Media Player Classic has taken my appeal.

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack - Pretty much all the DirectShow filters and VFW codecs you'll ever need...

IrfanView - A nice simple image manipulation program with batch conversion abilities, supporting a wide range of input and output formats, and having many convenient image rated manipulation functions.  Also fully portable.

Multimedia Editing
Photoshop (not free) - all graphics enthusiasts should know that this is THE tool for editing images.  For a free alternative, the GIMP exists.

IcoFX - This is an application I stumbled upon.  Not particularly excellent, but handy.  Can extract icons from various places, supports alpha, is free and fully portable.  May be better ones out there, I dunno...

MediaCoder - Later versions of this program have become quite "bloaty" without many features... (yes, I'm not sure how it does that).  But my v0.5 still works well for batch audio conversion.

SoundForge (not free) - Probably one of the best tools for audio manipulation - has plenty of features.  A free alternative, Audacity, exists for those that don't need all the features.

Goldwave (not free) - Another sound editor - I mainly use it because it's a handy application for reading audio data from DirectShow.

Vegas and Premiere (not free) - The two major video editing applications out there.

Tools & Utils
Notepad++ - Excellent text editor with syntax highlighting for most languages.  Also comes with a hex editor plugin, which is reasonable, though I would prefer using a dedicated hex editor.  This application is also fully portable.

7-Zip Archiver - Interface isn't the best, but, considering that LZMA is one of the best compression algorithms used publicly (and unlike RAR, 7z is open source).  Also can be used to make GZip files (may be useful in some instances for Windows users).  x64 versions are available as well as a portable version.

Acrobat - Well, sure, some people prefer Foxit, but I find the former program lacking too many useful features.
With this speed hack however, Acrobat loads reasonably fast.
And everyone knows the importance of being able to read PDF files :P

CamStudio - Ever wanted to make some video tutorials, and needed to capture what you're doing on screen?  Here's a nice free app to do it :P

WinMerge - Handy diff tool, if you need to compare the difference between two text files.  Can be used off your USB stick.

Fraps (shareware) - Shows how fast your games are running on your system - useful for tweaking settings.  Also the preferred tool for capturing your games (or anything that uses DirectX, actually).

Hex Workshop (not free) - One of the best hex editors out there.

WinRAR (not free) - RAR is already a popular format used across the internet.  Unfortunately, since RAR is a proprietary format, you're pretty much stuck with WinRAR for making them (everyone, use 7-Zip!!!).  So if you don't want to be left out, you may as well get this app...
(WinRAR does have a much better interface than 7-Zip though)

UPX - one of the most popular WinPE (EXE, DLL etc) packers.  If you have a rather small-ish USB drive, might be useful to use this to help squeeze out some extra space...

Resource Hacker - if you like fiddling around with (or stealing) resources in EXEs...

HashMyFiles - tool for CRC32/MD5/SHA1 hashing files.  Also try hkSfv for .sfv (CRC32) and .md5 files.

Paperless Printer - somewhat dodgey program, but can be useful for "printing" stuff into image files.  Unfortunately doesn't work on x64 Windows.  I'm using Zan Image Printer, however it isn't free (and is somewhat dodgey too).
(if you find better applications for this, please tell!)

DOSBox - have fun emulating old DOS games with this :P

Unlocker - never really used this myself, however, is a popular tool for determine what application is locking various files.

RAMDisk - actually, I think there's a number of applications by this name.  The one I'm using on x64 Windows (named "SuperSpeed") isn't free.  RAM disks are useful if you have a large amount of RAM - it allows you to designate part of your RAM to act as a disk drive.

Registry Workshop (not free) - alternative to regedit.

Process Explorer NT - recommended alternative to Task Manager

Autoruns - recommended alternative to msconfig (note, be careful with this application though!)

Filemon and Regmon - useful if you want to see what exactly various applications are doing to your system.


Internet Related
Firefox - Oh yes, the increasingly popular web browser.  Although IE7 and Opera offer attractive features, Firefox's extensibility is unmatched.  Offering good W3C compliance and supporting a number of extensions introduced by IE, Firefox should break much less pages than rivaling browsers.
To the user, there's pretty much everything you need.
For those who do not like the memory that Firefox tends to hog, I'd suggest Opera.
Portable versions of this application available (good for public computers)

Thunderbird - well, a free email client which gets the job done...  (only other one I've used is Outlook)
I believe portable versions of this application are available.

FileZilla - A nice open source FTP client.  Although lacking a "Favourites" feature (geez, how hard can it be to add that?) it has a reasonable interface and does the job.  This application is also portable.

FlashGet - FlashGet originally lost a fair bit of popularity with it's included adware.  FlashGet is now free of adware, so there should be little reason to be afraid of it.  Although it does support downloading from BitTorrent and eMule, I'd probably suggest using another client for these.
Nonetheless, Flashget is an amazing downloader.  With support for scheduling, mirror searching, integration with pretty much all the web browsers you'd use, download resuming and "repairing", multi-proxy-ing, selectable number of split parts, batch downloading and more, it surpasses many competing download managers.
(unfortunately, settings are stored in the registry, but otherwise, this can be portable-ised)

uTorrent - One of the most popular BT downloaders out there.  It consumes much less memory than the other alternative, Azuerus, and has a much, much smaller size footprint, whilst retaining pretty much all the features that you'd ever need.  Not to mention that it also doesn't require the JavaVM to be installed.
It's small size makes it excellent, portability wise (and also hiding on compromised computers :P; unfortunately, its settings are stored in the UserData folder).  Also, it's relatively small memory footprint allows you to leave it running in the background.

TortoiseSVN - if you've needed to download anything from a Subversion repository, this is a nice application to do the job.

Burp Proxy - a simple Java based proxy which will allow you to intercept sent data which you direct through it (mainly useful if you want to attack a website, or if you want to debug something).


System Applications
Diskeeper (not free) - apparently, this is one of the best defragmenters out there.  (probably more than you need though)

HideFolders (not free) - if you need to hide some stuff...  There may be free alternatives available (but I've never been interested in this anyway)

Partition Magic (not free) - general purpose partitioning tool.  Free alternative GParted exists if you want that.

SpaceMonger - see where your HDD free space went to...

CPU-Z - the tool used to identify your CPU information.

EasyBCD - if you have Vista, useful tool for managing it's bootloader (and booting into Linux)

TweakUI - basic XP tweaking tool.

nLite and vLite - excellent XP/Vista customisation tool




Probably complete this later...
Hope it helps someone :P

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Other lists:
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(This post was last modified: 01/08/2008 05:40 PM by ZiNgA BuRgA.)

vinrose67 Wrote:this really helps me a lot bro Z thanks i enjoy reading on it!

m2 very helpfull,. (some vista suport and should be stickied! :) )

most programs i already use,. some i have never seen before,.

cool notepad++ is so handy... tanx!!!