Other free stuff

Equip your Windows computer for free

See the specialized tools here.
You can also submit a freeware on the forum.

Summary

• Free antivirus
• Free firewall
• Free compression/decompression tool
• Web browser and offline browser
• Instant messaging software
• Free office suite
• Some media freewares

Free antivirus

We recommend you AntiVir. Free for personal use.

Free firewall

The most famous free firewall is ZoneAlarm... but it's also famous for its slowness and system resources consumption. We recommend you Sygate Personal Firewall. Free for personal use.

Free compression/decompression tool

We recommend you 7-Zip. Free software distributed under the GNU LGPL.
We think there are 2 reasons why you really ought to use it :
1. It's free (nothing new for the moment... ;))
2. It achieves better compression than zip, rar and ace !

Web browser and offline browser

Okay, we know you already have a browser, since you're here. But there is, let's say a 95% probability that you are using MSIE (Microsoft Internet Explorer).
We recommend you Mozilla Firefox. This is a free (open-source) browser whith way less security holes than MSIE. You can compare them on Secunia :
→ MSIE, 20 unpatched holes as we are writing these lines.
→ Mozilla Firefox, 3 unpatched holes as we are writing these lines.

HTTrack is a free (GPL, open source software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer.
Works on Windows, Linux/Unix, BSD, OSX...

Instant messaging software

Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise Messenger, and Zephyr networks.

Free office suite

If you don't need perfect compatibility with MS Office, we recommend you to use the free OpenOffice.org office suite.
This suite is a free equivalent to MS Office, and is highly compatible with it. What's more it can export documents to PDF and Flash format, and it runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris and FreeBSD.

Some media freewares

• The XviD codec : available here, official website here.
  XviD is a video codec close to DivX, but unlike it, it's completely free (open-source). It is as efficient as DivX, and is more and more used.
• Ogg Vorbis codecs : MediaXW includes Ogg codec for Windows Media Player. For more Ogg links, see our MP3 to ogg page.
  Ogg Vorbis is an audio codec which is much more efficient than MP3 (I would say you can save at least 35% of filesize if you use it instead of MP3). Like XviD, it's more and more used and supported on most major Linux distributions.
• VLC media player (formerly VideoLAN Client) : it's a is a highly portable (works on Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, QNX...) multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. Note that we played an XviD movie file with it and it took only 2% of CPU time versus over 30% with Windows Media Player ! Simply amazing. Open source.
• Winamp : available here. We strongly advise you the Lite version. We are using the Lite 2.81 version (current version is 5.x, here is our 2.81 + plugins installation), and it's really fine. Our point is : the heavier the version, the longer the loading time... and we advise you Winamp because it launches way faster than Windows Media Player, so... no need to make it run slower.