More Freeware For the Masses

To follow up on my freeware security suite post, I'd like to point you towards some excellent, regular use freeware you might want to take a look at. These are all programs I use on a regular basis, and frankly, find indispensable. At the time of this posting, all of the software below was free, and these are in no particular order.

1. The Gimp - The poor-man's Photoshop - Awesome in it's capabilities. Not quite on par with Photoshop (yet) but probably more than you'll ever need.
2. AM-DeadLink - Checks your bookmarks, tells you which ones no longer work, which one's have moved and (if you want it to) downloads those nifty favicons for your browser.
3. HNSKY Hallo Northern Sky - Planetarium software. Very cool if you have any interest in astronomy.
4. Google Earth - Mapping and satellite images all in one.
   
5. Exact Audio Copy - Audio grabber (i.e. "ripper") for CD's.
   
6. Visual CD - Ever wonder which one of the 10,000 CDs/floppies you have contains that file is you're looking for? Wonder no more. With Visual CD you catalog your CDs/Floppies/removable media so that you can search the contents of all of them, right from your desktop.
7. Firefox - You haven't been convinced yet? 10X better than Explorer, and that's not even counting the endless free "add-ons" that have been developed for it.
   
8. Winamp - The de facto mp3/media player. The Shoutcast streaming music (Think: thousands of commerical free Internet radio stations) is more than worth the price of admission (Yes...free).
9. CD Burner XP Pro - Your new computer didn't come with any CD/DVD burning software? Try this out. Will even create/burn ISO images, rip and burn music cds.
10. Moffsoft FreeCalc - Makes the Windows calculator (Calc) look like the anemic, poorly designed calculator that it is. Even has a virtual paper history tape!
11. Process Explorer - Shows you what's running on your PC now, and what's chewing up all your system resources. Useful in determining if you have spyware/adware running on your system as well.
12. ZipGenius - An compression/decompression utility that supports 99% of the files you're likely to encounter.
13. OpenOffice - Wow. That about sums this one up. If you can't afford Microsoft Office, then you must have this office suite. Even if you can, you might want this one as well. It will open Word, Excel and Powerpoint files...but you can also create them as well. At a price of free, this is nothing short of amazing. The database piece still needs work, so if you need to create an Access database, you're going to have to buy Microsoft's product.
14. CutePDF Writer - A plug in that will allow you to "print" to a virutal PDF printer, so you can e-mail or archive documents you would have printed in the past. If you don't have a printer (or want to create Acrobat PDFs), this is a must. You'll also need to install Ghostscript as well (if you don't already have it...and you probably don't) for it to work properly.
15. IrfanView - The best image viewer/editor available. Oh, and it's free.