Computer Software you might not use but probably should

[R00k]

WinDirStat:

http://windirstat.info/

The best disk space management app for Windows I've found, for free. Gives you extremely useful information about exactly what is taking up space on your hard drive. There is a tree view that tells you how much space is taken up by each specific folder, and lets you drill down as far as you want. There is also a block view on the bottom, that shows you what file types are taking up the most space.

Extremely useful.

[bitWISE]

ReNamer - http://www.den4b.com/projects.php

Amazing file renaming tool with support for many different rules. Just used it to rename a bunch of files back into their rar/r00 format.

[bitWISE]

QRCode reader and generator for desktops (linux,osx,win)

http://www.jaxo-systems.com/download/in ... arcapture#

[Foo]

f.lux
This sits in your taskbar and automatically adjusts your monitor colour temperature to match your room lighting. It takes your timezone and light type (incandescent/flourescent) and when the sun goes down, tones the temperature down to match your indoor lights.

The effect is subtle but it's much easier on the eyes when working under artificial lighting. By default it comes setup to emulate sunlight by day, and indoor lights by night. But if you work in an office with little natural light, you can adjust the sliders to match artificial light during the day.

The pinkish colour tint it adds seems odd at first, but stick with it. It's really neat.

http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/

[bitWISE]

f.lux
This sits in your taskbar and automatically adjusts your monitor colour temperature to match your room lighting. It takes your timezone and light type (incandescent/flourescent) and when the sun goes down, tones the temperature down to match your indoor lights.

The effect is subtle but it's much easier on the eyes when working under artificial lighting. By default it comes setup to emulate sunlight by day, and indoor lights by night. But if you work in an office with little natural light, you can adjust the sliders to match artificial light during the day.

The pinkish colour tint it adds seems odd at first, but stick with it. It's really neat.

http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/

Thats neat. What is funny is my cheap secondary emachines monitor at work turns piss yellow while the primary macbook display is fuschia. It didn't really fade in though. Seemed pretty instant.

[prince1000]

i will pimp a couple open source tools i've grown accustomed to over the last couple years, not sure if they've been mentioned already:

Clonezilla - Cross-platform imaging tool that can be used over multiple network protocols or save/restore disk images to local device.
http://clonezilla.org/

DRBL - Open source mass imaging and deployment tool used for Linux clients via various network protocols, no local OS install necessary. Live CD contains server version of Clonezilla for imaging of Windows and Linux clients.
http://drbl.sourceforge.net/

OpenDiagnostics - Stripped down Ubuntu Live CD/USB with various essential security tools, most notably ClamAV.
http://www.volatileminds.net/opendiagno ... /Main_Page

SystemRescueCd - Another Live CD/USB tool (Gentoo) with many uses.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

[Lieutenant Dan]

f.lux
This sits in your taskbar and automatically adjusts your monitor colour temperature to match your room lighting. It takes your timezone and light type (incandescent/flourescent) and when the sun goes down, tones the temperature down to match your indoor lights.

The effect is subtle but it's much easier on the eyes when working under artificial lighting. By default it comes setup to emulate sunlight by day, and indoor lights by night. But if you work in an office with little natural light, you can adjust the sliders to match artificial light during the day.

The pinkish colour tint it adds seems odd at first, but stick with it. It's really neat.

http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/

I absolutely love this program.

[Silicone_Milk]

f.lux
This sits in your taskbar and automatically adjusts your monitor colour temperature to match your room lighting. It takes your timezone and light type (incandescent/flourescent) and when the sun goes down, tones the temperature down to match your indoor lights.

The effect is subtle but it's much easier on the eyes when working under artificial lighting. By default it comes setup to emulate sunlight by day, and indoor lights by night. But if you work in an office with little natural light, you can adjust the sliders to match artificial light during the day.

The pinkish colour tint it adds seems odd at first, but stick with it. It's really neat.

http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/

I absolutely love this program.

That is a pretty awesome program.

[Foo]

KeePass

CoolDown mentioned it a while back but it's worth mentioning again because this program is top quality. Stores and serves up all of your various website/email/application accounts or any other little snippets of information you want to keep locked down.

One good use of the app is to go through your online accounts and set all of them to random passwords generated with the program, then you don't need to worry about a Sony-like breach in future because none of the accounts have common passwords. You can also use it to store all of your CD-Keys.

There are clients available for Windows, Linux, Android, Blackberry etc, and it'll run from a flash drive. Put it in a truecrypt container if you want a super security nerdgasm.

http://keepass.info/

[obsidian]

DisplayFusion

If you're running multi-monitors on Windows, you may be using a program like UltraMon to handle multiple taskbars, wallpapers, window spanning and other features. DisplayFusion is a hands down better alternative to UltraMon and sees far more updates and features. All around better implemented and works well with Windows Vista/7. It comes as a freeware version as well as a paid version ($25). I purchased the full version though the freeware is pretty full featured as well.

http://www.displayfusion.com/

[duffman91]

ITT, cool free shit that deserves to be part of everyone's software lineup:

VMWare
VMWare is a company that produces virtualisation software in use both on desktops and server environments. Despite the 'enterpriseyness' of what they do, they have free versions of both VMWare Player and VMWare server available for download on their site.

Virtualising an operating system basically entails having a 'fake' PC running inside your PC, on which you install another OS such as a Linux distro, or another copy of XP, or even a windows server. That virtual PC is then totally self-contained and can be turned off and on at will without interacting with your 'real' operating system that's actually running on your PC.

This is useful for:
- Playing around with new linux distros and livecds without needing to reboot
- Running a second copy of XP to test software installations on
- Running old OSes to play legacy dos-mode games
- Running a web server or other web-connected service with minimal risk.
- Uh, porn.

One quick comment about virtualization: VMware allows for the over allocation of resources where competitors do not (Hyper-V). You won't need to allocate CPU or Memory 1:1 when you build VM's. This allows for stacking more VM's on the same hardware if consumption is low.

This is a different methodology that's largely used in the enterprise, but is very useful for home users trying to get the most VM's running on the same hardware.

Personally, I've had great success with Oracle VirtualBox and VMware Player/Workstation and recommend both.

EDIT: Also, VMware's HCL now includes several desktop manufacturers. ESXi 5 is only a few hundred megs and is now the preferred Enterprise solution.

[duffman91]

Libre Office
http://www.libreoffice.org/

Alternative to Open Office. Several Distributions have moved onto this flavor.

[coltonquake3]

Launchy - http://www.launchy.net
Alt+Spacebar will open anything on your system.

Eraser - http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser
Instead of just killing files with Shift+Del, this works in a way that it kills the files, douses them in kerosene, burns them to a crisp and dumps their ashes into a strong current which transports it to all parts of the globe, removing all traces or memory of it.

KeePass Password Safe - http://keepass.info
KeePass is a portable password management utility, passwords are stored in highly-encrypted databases. For anyone with more than 6 different passwords, KeePass is indispensable.

Eraser still exists, just it now uses a different link. New link: http://eraser.heidi.ie/

[graceinc]

Eraser looks like a good software.

[MrHarleyBen]

Give me some good windows 10 apps and new softwares that one should use. I see this post is quite old. An upate in this list would be nice.

[graceinc]

If you are looking for something for online Privacy and security or you need to download torrent files safely on your Windows 10 I would definitely recommend using NordVPN service. One of the best vpn for torrenting

[graceinc]

f.lux
This sits in your taskbar and automatically adjusts your monitor colour temperature to match your room lighting. It takes your timezone and light type (incandescent/flourescent) and when the sun goes down, tones the temperature down to match your indoor lights.

The effect is subtle but it's much easier on the eyes when working under artificial lighting. By default it comes setup to emulate sunlight by day, and indoor lights by night. But if you work in an office with little natural light, you can adjust the sliders to match artificial light during the day.

The pinkish colour tint it adds seems odd at first, but stick with it. It's really neat.

http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/

Amazing filter.... one advice will be to download only form official sites or you got viruses like this softonic review

[Therac-25]

Amazing filter.... one advice will be to download only form official sites or you got viruses like this softonic review

Doesn't Windows have that built in now?

[Foo]

PowerToy for Windows 10

It's like the ones for before Windows 10 but more better-er.
Installation of such will provide the following ball-polishing nerd enhancements to one's desktop lifestyle:

FancyZones - Create virtual boxes on your desktop and windows will snap to them when you shift-click and drag. Like DisplayFusion but cheaper.

PowerRename - Bulk rename of files including regex.

Image Resizer - Resize images from the right-click menu aka perform a basic task which Paint 3d and photos for some reason really struggle with.

Keyboard Manager - Re-map and create custom shortcuts on your key-board with the key and pressing oh my goodness.

Obtain from the following uniform resource locator: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/releases/. I kinda like it, comes with a recommendation or whatevs.


p.s. lol I started this thread thirteen years ago imagine that.

[Foo]

NDI Tools 4.5

Found this a few days ago - Genuinely amazing for 'video sending on LAN' stuff. Get this while you still can because I *swear* it won't be left free-to-dl forever: https://ndi.tv/tools/

What does this do? Install it on a window PC and you'll get the ability to 'export' every one of your desktops for screen sharing. All the time, no hassles, like VNC except it actually works and is fast. Plus, you'll get 'NDI virtual input' which turns any of those desktop exports into a virtual webcam that you can use in Skype, Zoom, Teams or whatever zoomer nonsense you prefer. This one piece of software replaces HDMI Matrix hardware anywhere you might find it.

[Eraser]

PowerToy for Windows 10

Holy moly. I remember using PowerToys in the Win98 (possibly even Win95) days. I'm not exactly sure what I used it for back then, but I do know it was a considerable quality of life improvement.