Freeware Apps I Can’t Live Without

Posted on February 2, 2007

There’s a lot of good – great, even – freeware out there. Some of it replaces the traditional apps like Internet Explorer or Norton Antivirus, and then there’s the apps that add completely new functionality that, once you live with it, you’ll never see how you lived without it. I’ve come across some fantastic stuff over the last couple months, so without further ado… Also, please keep in mind this article is nowhere near complete. There’s way more apps out there that deserve their day in the sun. I’ll probably have a version 2 of this article sometime down the road with more stuff.

Mozilla Firefox - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Quite possibly the mother of all freeware. I was one of the last people to convert to Firefox, it seems like, and I’ve been using it for at least two years now. Market share in the web browser world has seen a drastic change in the last five years, going from an Internet Explorer-dominated world to one that, while still predominantly IE, shows Firefox with at least 10% share and gaining ground by the month.

Firefox has so many selling points, it’s really hard to even figure out where to start. I guess the security is probably as good a place as any. There are far fewer vulnerabilities in Firefox than IE. Standards compliance is also a big selling point, especially as a developer. My favorite part of Firefox is the extensions. There’s so many different ones out there that do so many nifty things, from controlling your music player to telling you the weather and if you’ve got new emails. I think my list of favorite extensions is probably a whole separate article, though.

Launchy – http://www.launchy.net

Launcy is one of the handiest little apps I’ve ever seen. It’s a keyboard-activated task launcher, basically. Simply hit Alt-Space and a window pops up. Start typing the name of the app you want to run and before too many keystrokes, Launchy’s figured out the most likely app you want to run. Just hit Enter and bam, you’re done. It’s so fast and easy. I’ve gotten so used to having it around that I really don’t know how I could work on a machine without it. A side benefit that I don’t take advantage of is the custom indexing. You can tell Launchy to index files of specific extensions in a specific directory.

Hamachi – http://www.hamachi.cc

Hamachi is another of my recent favorite applications. To preface this, I don’t live closer than just under 200 miles to any of my friends but we always need to share files back and forth. Enter Hamachi. Hamachi is a zero-config – just install it and connect – virtual private network. Basically, your computer thinks and works like it’s on the same network as the other machines on the Hamachi network. We’ve got Windows shares set up for sharing files now and getting stuff is as simple as navigating to the directory in Explorer. Brilliant. I have a network that’s just my computers and I use it to access my fileserver from my laptop regardless of where I am. Home at Christmas last month? No problem. Just fire up Winamp and the paths to my fileserver are still valid because Hamachi is connected to my fileserver 170 miles away.

uTorrent – http://www.utorrent.com

There’s more BitTorrent clients out there than there are BitTorrent users it seems like. I’ve tried a few of them over the last couple years, most notably Azureus, which I always thought that, while functional, was very bloated and a giant resource hog. That’s where uTorrent comes in. uTorrent is small, fast, and easy to use. uTorrent is so light on the resources, it’s amazing. I’ll be downloading a full slate of torrents and uTorrent is sitting there happy as a clam using under 10MB of RAM. Counter that with Azureus that would have been using closer to 100MB. It also comes in an installed version and a standalone version. The developers are also beta testing a web GUI for it, too, which could be fun.

ParNRar - http://www.milow.net/site/projects/parnrar.html

Lots of things come packaged up in RAR archives nowadays. I searched for a while trying to find something that would monitor a directory and as it discovered completed archives, automatically unpack them to a specified directory. I tried several others that sort of worked like I wanted but nothing was perfect until I tried ParNRar. It’s one of the most useful little apps I’ve ever used. Lazy computer users unite!

TrayIt! - http://www.teamcti.com/trayit/trayit.htm

I don’t use this one nearly as much as I thought I would but it’s still good enough to make the cut. Sometimes you just want to minimize an application to the system tray. TrayIt! makes that easy. Just right-click on the close button and it’s minimized down to the systray. How cool is that?

Taskbar Shuffle - http://www.teamcti.com/trayit/trayit.htm

This is honestly something that should be built into Windows but it’s not. This app solved a long-standing issue I’ve had. Sometimes you just have to have the items in your taskbar in a certain order. Previously, you’d have to open and close the programs in the right sequence and there’d be hell to pay if something accidentally closed or had a problem and it messed up the order. Taskbar Shuffle makes that go away: just drag and drop taskbar items around to your heart’s content.

SpamBayes - http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/

We’ve all got problems with spam in our inboxes these days. There doesn’t seem to be a way around it no matter how careful you are. I have several server-side spam blocking tools between my mailboxes but something slips through every now and then. That’s where SpamBayes comes in. Using the same bayesian detection as the server-side utilities, it learns what’s spam and what’s not as you teach it. It gets pretty good at guessing what’s good and what’s not and unlike some other programs, has a Junk Suspects category where it puts things it thinks are junk so you can go through and say “Spam” and “Not Spam.” I’ve only used it for Outlook but you can install it for Outlook Express, although my understanding is that the implementation is nowhere near as seamless as it is in Outlook. It just sits in Outlook and inspects messages as they arrive. Very nice to have in the event that something slips in.

AVG Anti-Virus - http://free.grisoft.com/

Anti-virus software is pretty much a necessity these days with all the crap flying around out there. If you’re not interested in the big corporate offerings from Symantec and McAffee, AVG is one of your best bets. Coupling a small footprint with good detection rates and daily virus definitions, AVG is a wonderful anti-virus solution.

Folder Size - http://foldersize.sourceforge.net/

Like Taskbar Shuffle, this is probably something that should be built into Windows but isn’t. Ever been browsing your files and get annoyed that you can see the sizes of individual files but not the size of a directory? Well, Folder Size fixes that. No more right-clicking to find out how big that directory is. Just install and then disable the standard Windows “Size” option and enable “Folder Size” in its place. This is a seriously sweet addition to Explorer.

Synergy - http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

Synergy may take the cake as one of the most “Wow” freeware apps in my toolbox. I’ve recently set up a fileserver out of one of my old computers and attached my old CRT monitor to it and put it beside the LCD of my primary machine. The fileserver is already KVMed to another machine so there’s no good way to quickly pop over to the other machine short of opening up a Remote Desktop client or reaching across the desk to the mouse. Synergy fixes this and does a simply magnificent job of it. Synergy creates a KM, basically, letting you control multiple machines using multiple monitors from just one keyboard/mouse combination. The machines don’t have to be physically wired together, even; it works through the network. It’s a flawless system that is fast and configurable. You can set it up so that your mouse just flows from one monitor to the other or you can set it up so you hold the mouse there for a set number of seconds or if you double-tap the side of the monitor. Synergy is one of my favorite programs.

No-IP - http://www.no-ip.com/

This is more in relation to the No-IP Dynamic Update Client than the other DNS services No-IP offers but it’s cool nonetheless. The DUC is a lightweight service that just hums away down in the system tray, monitoring your IP address and reporting back to the main No-IP server. You just create a username.no-ip.org address and then associate your DUC with that address and you can access your home IP address by that address. This is fantastic for remoting in to your home network from work or a friend’s house. The DUC checks for IP changes every 30 minutes so you’ll always be able to get to your stuff even if you don’t have a static IP.

SyncBack Freeware - http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/syncback-hub.html

There’s a full version of SyncBack but this freeware version does everything I want. I was looking for a easy way to schedule backups of my files on my fileserver. SyncBack took a matter of minutes to set up two backup schedules that backup the entire contents of my two storage drives to another larger drive. You can set up backups or synchronizations of the files, so the ability to configure it your needs is nice. It works like a champ and has given me much more peace of mine about my files.

OpenDNS – http://www.opendns.com

Not entirely an application, but it’s free and it’s cool. A few months ago, my ISP’s DNS servers had a problem so while my internet connection still worked, it was rendered pretty much useless. I started looking for a replacement for their servers and OpenDNS is what I found. It’s a oft-updated DNS server, for starters. And it’s fast. There are two more cool add-on features in addition to just the DNS lookups. First is anti-phishing technology which comes up on the screen when you navigate to a potential phishing site. Most of us might be savvy enough to recognize a phishing site from real one, but why take the chance? The other is domain name correction. Say you accidentally type “google.con” in your address bar. OpenDNS realizes that you probably meant “google.com” and takes you there instead of a 404 somewhere. I’ve set up OpenDNS on my router so all my machines take advantage of it. Very slick.

Volumouse - http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/volumouse.html

I came across Volumouse just a couple of weeks ago and it’s already changed my computing experience. With the settings on the machine where I do most of my video watching, my volume is set up for Winamp since I listen to music all day at work on my laptop but when I get home and want to watch a video, the volume isn’t loud enough, so I’d always be opening up the Windows volume control to turn up the Wave volume. Volumouse gives you access to any of the volume controls using your mouse wheel and a hotkey. I’ve got it set up so I just hold Alt and then slide my wheel up and down to adjust the Wave volume. I wish I’d found this a long time ago.

HoeKey - http://www.bcheck.net/apps/hoe.htm

I’ve heard of many people using this app for all sorts of things but I use it for Winamp only, really. Basically, it’s a global hotkey program. You can configure all sorts of hotkeys for all sorts of functions in all kinds of programs. The media controls on my laptop aren’t well-placed and I’d like to be able to pause or stop or skip tracks in Winamp all the time without having to first make sure that Winamp is in focus so I just set up a few mappings to handle those functions. I use Alt but it lets you set up Shift, Control, and the Windows key, too, I think for your hotkeys so it’s got dozens and dozens of possible combinations.

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