thebottle Blog

The best of the best, the cream of the crop. Yes, this software will blow you and your brother for nickels.

Foxmail – An extremely fast e-mail client with built-in access to Hotmail, a WYSIWYG editor for html templates, customizable spam filters, and more.

Firefox – A browser with a customizable layout, tabbed browsing, and built-in spell checker.

TrueCrypt – An encryption application with many different algorithms.

FreeProxy – A highly, yet easily configurable proxy server which supports many options.

Winamp – The most popular multimedia player. (Replaced by foobar2000)

foobar2000 – I replaced Winamp with this because it is much more customizable and configurable.

mPlayer – Lightweight video player.

VLC (VideoLAN) – Video player with a whole host of features.

PimEX – Calender, notes, tasks, and diary.

Crimson Editor – Great notepad replacement with syntax highlighting.

AutoIt – Need to automate something? Just write a script with AutoIt.

KeePass – Generate and save your passwords in an encrypted database. Why? It’s better than saving your passwords in an unencrypted database.

OpenOffice – The most popular Microsoft Office replacement.

WAMP – Setup Apache, MySQL, and PHP with one simple install.

Pidgin- A multi-protocol instant messenger.

Guifications – Plugin for Pidgin that pops up messages when user signs in or out.

xChat – A popular IRC client.

7zip – A lightweight file archiver.

uTorrent – Download stuff. Check out this article to see how to set it up to automatically download TV shows.

KCeasy – Download stuff. It’s like playing Russian roulette! You never know if your Justin Timberlake download is going to turn out to be some homemade porn. (Replaced by FrostWire)

FrostWire -P2P software, useful if you just need to download one or two popular songs.

eMule – P2P software. Yes, more reliable then KCeasy, many discographies.

TightVNC – Remote control of computers.

UltraVNC – Remote control of computers.

RSSOwl – Automatically download news from news sites. (Replaced by FeedReader)

FeedReader – Download news from sites to your desktop, or stay updated on the new movie releases from rlslog. :)

Launchy – A great tool to quickly open applications/programs. If you are a quick typist then this is much faster then using any type of menu. I use version 1.25 as it is lighter on system resources.

ImgBurn – CD/DVD burning software. I was using CDBurnerXP, but stopped using it once I found out that the discs it was burning were not compatible with my X-box. Even when burning with the correct settings it still could not create discs readable by the X-box, but ImgBurn has no problem with it.

Daemon Tools – CD/DVD emulator which allows you to mount image files without having to burn them to disc.

Comodo – Free firewall that has many great reviews.

PeerGuardian 2 – Program that blocks IP addresses of potentially threatening organizations. Used by many people that use P2P software to download music.

Sandboxie – Allows you to run any program in a sandbox where it can’t damage your computer.

bitdefender Anti-virus that is light on system resources. It doesn’t have real-time detection which I actually prefer.

Unlocker – Allows you to unlock files that are in use by a program so that you may delete/move/rename it.

Converber – Unit conversion calculator.

CCleaner – Scan and delete temporary files on your computer, registry cleaner, and secure delete. The uninstall program list is also very useful; it loads quicker than Windows uninstall list.

Money Manager Ex – Budget your money and see just where your money comes from and where it goes every month.

IrfanView – Quick loading image viewer.

Snapter – If you don’t have a scanner then you can use your digital camera and this program to digitize documents.

Audacity – Lightweight sound editing/recording program.

MP3Gain – Allows you to adjust gain levels on your MP3s which is very useful if you want to burn a mix CD. See my walk-through here.

PuTTY Tray – A portable version of PuTTY that is able to minimize to the system tray.

FileZilla FTP Client, also FileZilla Server is great if you need a FTP server.

WinSCP – GUI application to transfer files with SCP.