Having a corporate laptop (compaq nc6000) running Windows XP Pro and not wanting to dual boot into Linux to use a real operating system, I have configured my laptop to run all free (most open source) software for various tasks. Here is my list for anyone interested:

• OpenOffice — word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and formulas.
• Firefox — best browser in the world.
• Eclipse — programming IDE for Java, C++ (using CDT and g++ from cygwin), ColdFusion (cfeclipse), Perl (with active state activeperl), XML (XMLBuddy (free version of course)), and any other programming language.
• Picasa — photo organization, printing, slideshows, slurping images off of camera. Great program.
• Gimp for Windows — open source photoshop replacement for creating/editing images.
• iTunes — Apple’s great audio player. Listen or rip CDs, radio, shop and download in store. Amazing and comes with Quicktime.
• 7-zip — a Winzip replacement, superior in many ways.
• PDFCreator — print any document as a PDF.
• Gaim — A multi-protocol IM client. Some also use Trillian, I am just used to Gaim.
• Thunderbird Mail — I use mostly web mail clients (Gmail), but for those who don’t, this is an excellent POP/IMAP mail client with news reader, spam filtering, etc.
• Putty SSH — Great SSH/SCP client for Windows.
• RealVNC — The original VNC viewer/server.
• Skype — free Internet telephony.
• Mplayer — A good overall media player, I also have the Divx Player. Use XMpeg to convert DVDs into Divx/VCD, or use Vidomi.
• Audacity — A free audio editor.
• Blender 3D — A free 3D creator with an unintuitive UI but extremely powerful and free.
• Object Dock — like the Mac OS X dock bar, for windows. Organizes my most used apps.
• Textpad — Great windows text editor.
• Dia — Visio-like diagrams.
• Bloglines — Blog and news aggregator. Ok, this is a web application, so I am cheating, but I use this all the time so I thought I would mention it.
• The SWORD Project — Free Bible software with over 200 texts available, bookmarking, cross reference. Great program.
• Azureus — A great BitTorrent client to download .torrent files, more information here: BitTorrent.
• Celestia — a free 3D space simulator — very accurate with thousands of space objects to explore.

Anti-virus, Adware, Firewall — being Windows, keep up-to-date with OS patches, but here are some other free tools that keep your system more secure:

• Avast Anti-virus
• Sygate Personal Firewall
• Ad-aware — adware buster

There are even many fun games around the Internet that you can download for free:

• Retro Remakes — a great collection of classic games remade, many of which I played growing up (Check out Highway Pursuit for a decent SpyHunter remake).
• Star Wars Games — Bruno Marcos does a great job with these fun, challenging Star Wars remake games.

You can find a lot more programs on the GnuWin. The only programs suite I have that costs money is Macromedia’s Flash MX 2004 Pro. Can’t get around that Flash thing.

Anything I missed that you use often and is free (as in beer) and/or open source on Windows? Please add a comment!

For those of us forced to use Outlook (XP/2000) on Windows (XP/2000) at work, I have found a couple of very useful free plugins that help me in my daily work:

• Lookout email search — parsed almost 5 years of email in a couple of minutes, finds messages in seconds.
• SpamBayes — To filter out that Spam that hounds us all. This works extremely well, with only a few false positives.

Interesting site that lists a lot of good security tools, many of which have Win32 ports or can work under cygwin. This is an old list but a good one:

Insecure.org’s Top 75 Security Tools

A couple of highlights:

• SamSpade — collection of network query like whois, dig, traceroute, finger, parse email headers, and so forth.
• fport — reports all open TCP/IP and UDP ports and associated applications.
• pstools — command-line tools for managing Windows systems (process listings, command execution, etc).
• Ethereal — network protocol analyzer.

I had a need on a Windows 2000 box running ColdFusion on Jrun to determine the files and ports that machine was using. Netstat -an on Windows doesn’t show that, so I use fport and pstools to find out the information. Very handy.

Also, this wasn’t listed, but there are many handy open source Linux applications that have been ported to Win32. Check out the GnuWin site. I use grep and other command line unix tools a lot, so check out UnixUtils.

Found this truly interesting hack for IE for the Mac with a great explanation. It describes a “band pass” hack that uses comments to use or not use a particular stylesheet.

Click here for the full explanation.