Small programs you'd recommend to others

[napho]

If anything tries to register itself to startup this terrific little proggie springs into action. http://www.mlin.net/StartupMonitor.shtml

Registry Crawler scans your entire registry in 20 secs. It comes in handy in so many ways. http://www.4dev.com/regc/

Windows search isn't nearly as good as this

http://www.agentransack.com/default.aspx

[vipp]

I would recommend FreeRam Pro. Great program

http://www.yourwaresolutions.com/products.html

[simian]

Reg Cleaner - As the name implies, it cleans out your registry. Manually or automatic. It's very fast . And it's free!
http://www.vtoy.fi/jv16/shtml/regcleaner.shtml

[Shadow, Thief of the Sun]

GIMP - Photoshop-like program:

http://www.gimp.org/

[matt merch]

Originally posted by simian
Reg Cleaner - As the name implies, it cleans out your registry. Manually or automatic. It's very fast . And it's free!
http://www.vtoy.fi/jv16/shtml/regcleaner.shtml

ALWAYS ALWAYS make a backup before cleaning registry

[grab]

Originally posted by napho
If anything tries to register itself to startup this terrific little proggie springs into action. http://www.mlin.net/StartupMonitor.shtml

so whats the difference between start up monitor and just using msconfig?


Here are some proggies i liked. These are all freeware

a program worth checking out is SystemSafetyMonitor
it has application firewalling, you can choose to be alerted every time a program not on your safety list trys to access the net. It tells you when programs try to change protected registry keys, and notifies when changes are made to the start up list, keeps a list of running applications and allows you to terminate any one of them immediately.

another program i found useful is MPEG audio collection . This handy tool scans selected folders or drives for mp3, ogg, mpc, wma and export the filenames to a text, html of excel file. You can choose to have these displayed in a number of different ways, and it has options to list a whole bunch of different properties of your audio files. This is really useful if you want to list all the music you have on your hard drive. The program has a host of other features, worth checking out if you have alot of music on your hard drive

Multi-Frontend is a neat little tool for decoding/encoding .wav files to and from (practically) any other format. Just download the appropriate codec, give multi frontend the path and your ready to go. Here are the encoders/decoders it supports:

BladeEnc, Fraunhofer Fastenc and MP3Enc, Gogo-no-coda, LAME, MAD, MPG123, MusePack, Ogg Vorbis, Psytel aacenc and fastenc, FAAD, Speex, TooLAME, FLAC, LA, LPAC, Monkey's Audio, OptimFrog, Shorten, WavPack, MP3Gain, ReplayGain, VorbisGain, WaveGain and Tag.

[napho]

Originally posted by grab
so whats the difference between start up monitor and just using msconfig?

Startup Monitor does what SystemSafetyMonitor does. It's Startup Control Panel which is like msconfig. http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml But even that program is useful because you can drag and drop shortcuts into the startup- eg defragging next time you boot.

[rainbowdemon]

Disk Pie. This prog shows all of the files on your hd in pie chart form.www.zornsoftware.com/

[dock0184]

Here's my fav 3 applications:
1. PGP or GnuPG. Both are the same things in different interfaces.
2. CloneCD v.3.0.5.1
3. RegCleaner

[[KwestSeeker]]

mp3utility - great app for scanning mp3s for bad frames.

[nasrules]

All fairly well known, but here goes:

EphPod
For those with iPods!

Invision
One of the best mIRC scripts.

SmartFTP
Probably the best FTP utility, IMO.

Resource Hacker
Make your own version of Kazaa Lite 2.0!

[isus]

Unfreez ( www.webattack.com do a search)

you make a bunch of gif's that are the same dimensions, then drag them into Unfreez and it will make an animated .gif for you. very simple. and free :)

[cpugeniusmv]

One little program, which I used to use a lot on 98...I think is INCREDIBLY useful...

HiderPX

You remember explorer crashes? I do, and they still happen on XP. what happens to things that were running in the tray? you can't get to them!!!

so use this program so show/hide ANY window that's going on in the back/foreground.

[Rahwgwar]

Nice apps ya'll.....

You should grab Leechget, http://www.leechget.de/html/download.html
IMHO, it's the best download manager.....provides great speeds and integration is seamless.....there are a few bugs, but the overall product is definitely well worth it.

AM-Deadlink and AM-Notebook I use for productivity purposes. Deadlink allows you to check the status of your bookmarks in real time. You can choose to remove duplicates or "deadlinks," bookmarks which take you no where. It's a good way to update and organize your bookmarks. AM-Notebook allows you to store notes and other data from your system tray. Very useful.....leaves a small footprint in memory
http://www.aignes.com/download.htm

As for monitoring utilities, I like to use PRCview and TreeSize. PrcView is a process viewer utility that displays detailed information about processes running under Windows. For each process it displays memory, threads and module usage. For each DLL it shows full path and version information. PrcView comes with a command line version that allows you to write scripts to check if a process is running, kill it, etc....It's much better than the Windows default task manager and allows you to see what programs use which processes.
http://www.xmlsp.com/pview/prcview.htm

TreeSize can be started from the context menu of a folder or drive and shows you the size of this folder, including its subfolders. You can expand this folder in Explorer-like style and you will see the size of every subfolder. This is very useful to see the status of all your folders and where your space is gone. You can also print out reports, which become increasingly handy.
http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

Need help getting up in the morning? Or you just hate the conventional annoying beeping of your alarm clock? Check out College Alarm Clock
It has many options such as being able to set the time you would like to wake up for the whole week.......and you can wake up to your favorite tune, or maybe AC/DC and Megadeth.

[Aaron73153]

AIDA32, shows a ton of stuff about your PC, get it here

Spybot S&D, best spyware remover.

Trillian : free IM that communicates with AIM, MSN,ICQ,IRC, and Yahoo.

Sygate makes the best free firewall.

Mozilla the best web browser.

Mailwasher: free program that allows you to bounce mail from you POP3 server before it reaches your inbox, its a great program.