The Best-ever Freeware Utilities

Venkateswara Pooja (open venkatesa pooja.swf after extracting from the zip file)

Customizable New Year Flash Greeting

Wallpapers

There are a lot of great freeware programs out there. Many are as good or even better than their commercial alternatives.

This is my personal selection of the best of the best.  I've used so many of these products in this list and find each to be a gem.  Of course other folks may differ but, hey, this is MY selection ;>)

Last updated May, 2004.

The Best Freeware List

Best Free Anti-Virus Software
I normally recommend the Norton Anti-virus suite but I'm fully aware that some folks simply can't afford to buy it.  If you fall into this category then you should check out AVG Antivirus 6.0 Free Edition. This product has been continuously refined since it was first released in 1991 and now offers very impressive protection capabilities. Additionally, it's relatively small, light on resources, has regular automatic updates and handles email scanning. There is a free and a pro version, the only difference being that the free version has a few non-critical features disabled and has no technical support. Even so, it's an impressive package and a offers the financially challenged a real alternative to the major anti-virus suites.(5MB)
http://www.grisoft.com

Best Free Browser Accelerator
There are dozens of products that claim to speed up your surfing but most have little effect. NaviScope is different - it actually works! Not only does it speed up your surfing it also offers optional ad, pop-up, cookie and JavaScript blocking, an extensive set of diagnostic tools and more bells and whistles  than you can imagine. My only beef is that the tool bar is very obtrusive so once you set up NaviScope, you should select the option to turn off the toolbar.  If you need it, you can always bring it up again though the taskbar icon. (614KB)
http://ftp.pcworld.com/pub/new/internet/internet_tools/nscope.exe

Best Free File Manager
Windows Explorer is fine for simple file management activities but when you have some serious work to do, you need a two pane file manager. I use Directory Opus which is excellent but costs $59.  Recently I discovered 2X Explorer.  It offers most of the functionality of Directory Opus and is totally free. As a bonus, its user interface is very similar to Windows Explorer, so most users will find this tool easy to learn and use.(392KB)
http://netez.com/2xExplorer/

Best Free Software Suite
GNUWin II is a free software compilation for Windows. This huge suite features dozens of programs including free alternatives to many expensive commercial products.  There is Abi Word as an alternative for MS Word, OpenOffice for MS Office XP, The Gimp for Adobe Photoshop, Gzip for WinZIP are dozens more.   Taken collectively this suite provides more than enough software to completely set up a PC without spending a cent on applications or utilities.  The suite is available or CD or you download the
CD image and cut your own.
http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/en/index.html

Best Free Notepad Replacement
There are lots of text editors and Notepad replacements. Some of these aspire to be programming editors while others try to be word processors.  What I love about EditPad is that, unlike the others, it concentrates on simply being a better plain text editor and it succeeds brilliantly.  It has a Notepad like interface combined with tabbed document windows and the ability to open as many documents as you like with no file size limitations. I use it every day for tasks as diverse as writing Support Alert Newsletter to examining my web log files. Some of the latter can be up to 100MB, yet EditPad handles these huge files with ease.  (849KB). http://www.editpadlite.com/editpadlite.html

Best Free Hotkey Utility
Hotkeycontrol XP is a free utility that allows you to define your own hotkeys so that a single key press can launch an application, insert commonly used text, change your volume, or just about anything else.  Hotkeycontrol works with all versions of Windows from 98 onwards, though some features will only work with Win2K or XP. (0.91KB)
http://www.digital-miner.com/hkcontrol.html

Best Free Registry Cleaner
To keep the registries on my PCs in top running order I use Fix-It utilities This is a commercial product but I must admit that Toni Helenius' Easy Cleaner performs almost as well and is totally free. As a bonus, it will also detect duplicate files and help you clean up temp files to make more disk space. Remember though, as with every Registry cleaner,  to back up your Windows Registry before use. (2.64MB)
http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ecleane.htm

The Best Bookmark Cleaner
AM-DeadLink scans your bookmark file for dead links or duplicate links. When I tried it on my huge favorites file I discovered 17% of my links were dead. I've now got a much leaner set of favorites and the comfort of knowing that the links actually work. (546KB)
http://aignes.com/press/deadlink140.htm

Best Free Route Tracer
3D Traceroute  graphically displays  Internet route information. You can use it for technical tasks such as diagnosing slow connections or for general purpose snooping like determining the location and owner of a web site or tracing spammers. (996KB)
http://www.hlembke.de/prod/3dtraceroute/

The Best Free Screen Capture Utility
I've used over half a dozen screen-capture utilities and none of them has really satisfied. Until now.  Gadwin screen capture does exactly what I want in the way I want. Further, it avoids the trap of providing lots of useless and confusing features. It's the little things that count like making the hot key PrtSc so I don't have to remember it, and automatically sequentially naming the output files for multiple screen shots. Gadwin will stay on my PC permanently. (976KB)
http://www.gadwin.com/printscreen/?prnscr

The Best Free Search Bar
Dave’s Quick Search Bar is a free utility that gives you the same easy access to Google searches as Google's own search bar but wait, there’s more.  It also provides access to the excellent Teoma, FAST and other search engines. Because it resides in your task bar, it's accessible from any application. Comes with a host of other features such as dictionary/thesaurus access and even a calculator. If that's not enough for you, it's totally customizable. A serious second choice is the new Google DeskBar which shares many of the features of Dave's Search Bar but is geared exclusively to Google searches.
http://www.dqsd.net/  (380KB)
http://toolbar.google.com/deskbar/ (452KB)

Best Free File Cleaner
I've tried quite a few commercial products designed to clean unneeded temporary files off your hard disk but must say that the free utility "Empty Temp Folders" ranks with the best. It takes a few minutes to set up but after that, just press a button to recover many megabytes of disk space. (667KB)
http://www.danish-shareware.dk/soft/emptemp

Best Free Download Accelerator
Star Downloader 1.32 is not only free of charge, it's free of ads, spyware and other undesirable extras packed into most free  download accelerators. On top of that, it is blindingly fast and  has a raft of features including automatic mirror site detection, automatic resumption of failed downloads, download  scheduling, anti-virus integration and more. If you are not yet using a download accelerator, go get this product and start counting the time you save. The faster your internet connection, the more you will gain. Users with slow modem connections will, unfortunately, benefit least. (1.3MB)
http://www.stardownloader.com