Other free stuff

Equip your Windows computer for free (2) : specialized tools

Summary

Audio editor
Video tools
Image editor

Audio tools

Audacity is a free (open-source) audio editor. You can record sounds, play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3 files, and more. Use it to edit your sounds using Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo), mix tracks together, or apply effects to your recordings. It also has a built-in amplitude envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode and a frequency analysis window for audio analysis applications. Built-in effects include Echo, Change Tempo, and Noise Removal, and it also supports VST and LADSPA plug-in effects.
Works on Windows, Mac OS, Linux & Unix.

Video tools

VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) (open-source). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.

YAAI - Yet Another Avi Info is one of the best tools to display information about your avi files. You can see data like the framerate, the used codecs, the running time, the author information and the exact bitrate of video and audio. You can also synchronize your video and audio stream in a very comfortable way. The best way to learn it ist to try it out ! You have the ability to undo changes before you quit the program. Free (open-source).

Image editor

The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Unix), in many languages. Free (open-source).