Archives

Softpedia
All sorts of free software available for download.

Desktop

Dexpot
A fairly slick virtual desktop manager for Windows.  Free for private use, and looks good.  It doesn't do quite the same things as sDesk (see below), but it might float your boat.
DS Clock
A nice, configurable, minimum footprint onscreen clock program.  I use this in conjunction with sDesk (see below) and make it sticky across all virtual desktops.
ESB Calc
A calculator that does not suck.  Good scientific functions.  Useful ‘paper’ trail for back references.
GMail Drive
An interesting little Windows shell extension, this lets you access your GMail storage through a drag & drop folder interface on the desktop.  Turn your oodles of unused mail storage into an Internet hard drive.  Make sure to look at GMail Space on the Firefox Extensions page, too, if you use Firefox.
sDesk
This is a virtual desktop manager for Windows.  The link above is for sDesk v1.2.0.  There is a very different incarnation, called sDesk v1.66s, which I personally do not recommend.  The latter creates a single large desktop for which your screen is just a viewport.  The older version is a true virtual desktop manager.
TClockEx
This is an excellent replacement for the Windows taskbar clock.  I particularly like it because I use a vertical taskbar on the side of the screen, and TClockEx makes good vertical layouts.
Virtual Dimension
Another virtual desktop manager.  Has some potential, but you might have to Google for mingwm10.dll if you experience trouble starting up the program.
WinTidy
This utility used to be free, but PCmag apparently now charges for access to its library.  The WinTidy I am talking about is a desktop app for keeping your icons organized, either in named layouts or for each screen resolution.  Do not confuse this with the HTML editor of the same name.

Documents

Acrobat Reader
Okay, it is a horrible piece of bloatware, but it shows PDF files correctly.  There are ways to make it less of a pig, though.  The best way to minimize Acrobat's resource hogging, though, is to use Foxit Reader (see below).
BabelMap
This is similar to the Windows Character Map utility, except it groks Unicode.  Very helpful if you are stuck with Windows software that makes it all but impossible to enter characters that don't appear on the keyboard.
Foxit Reader
The download is under 1MB.  It starts up quickly.  It shows PDF, and the average user might not even realize it isn't Acrobat at first glance.  Get it.  Now.  You can send your adulation later.  If you really want to streamline your online PDF viewing, run Acrobat (if you have it installed), choose Edit –> Preferences –> Internet, and make sure you unselect Display PDF in Browser.  Then go to your browser's plugins directory and nuke the Acrobat plugin.  Finally, tell your browser to open PDF by default in Foxit, and you will be a happy camper.
SciTE
The Scintilla-based Text Editor.  If you cannot get your mind wrapped around Vim, and you need a good text editor geared more for Windows users, then this is the best I have found.  Just remember: M$ Word is a (crappy) word processor, not a text editor.  This is an important distinction.  You need a good text editor, and Notepad most assuredly does not qualify as ‘good’ by any definition I would be comfortable with…
Vim
I will admit, vi is not for everyone.  Vi (iMproved), a.k.a. Vim, is a fantastic text editor.  It is my HTML editor of choice.  It is not easy to learn, but it is immensely powerful, and reasonably light-weight.  I ditched (X)Emacs in favor of Vim long ago and never looked back.

Media

20/20
An excellent free image viewer with decent basic image manipulation capabilities.  If the main link is down, it is also available from PC World.  The free version is adware, but not terribly annoying even so.
CD Burner XP Pro
A good, free tool for burning data DVDs or writing ISO images.  A pretty decent interface, though you won't find the bells and whistles (read: authoring capabilities) of commercial products.
CDex
I am sure there are plenty of capable CD rippers out there, but this one is capable of exact rips (hence the ex).  If you have ever tried to rip a live CD and hated the corresponding gaps between your tracks, this is for you.
DivX
The DivX MPEG4 codec—use this if you can't get those AVI files to play.  On a Windows box, just install the codec once and any (reasonably well written) video player will grok it.  This site also has a decent DivX player.  Nonetheless, I actually prefer the less commercially constrained XviD codec below.  DivX and XviD are both MPEG4, so only install one of them!
DVDshrink
Back up your DVDs to the hard drive, or burn them to writable media.  Your choice, and very simple to use.  Does some simple reauthoring by letting you pick and choose which tracks to copy.  This program needs a burner backend, though, so make sure you grab something like Nero or CD Burner XP Pro.
The GIMP
The GNU Image Manipulation Program.  Photoshop capability without the Photoshop pricetag.  A must have, indeed.
Inkscape
Pretty nice Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) design package.
iTunes
As near as I can tell, this is the least evil of the various music download services, and the client makes a reasonably good jukebox.  Remember, you can always burn your purchased iTunes music to a regular old audio CD—and who knows what else you might choose to do with an unassuming (and unencrypted) CDA file?
VideoLAN
<sigh> Yeah, okay, I admit it—this is French.  On the other hand, it displays all sorts of video, makes a good DVD player, and lets you stream media from one machine to another on your network.  I don't use this much anymore, but it is certainly worth mentioning.
WinAmp
An excellent free media player, customizable with skins and plugins. 
XviD
Open Source Software is good.  The GPL is your friend.  Use XviD instead of DivX…

Miscellaneous

GAIM
The all purpose, free, multi-network, standards-based chat client.  Use it with AIM (without annoying ads!), with Google Talk, or with any Jabber based service.
MBM
This is the Motherboard Monitor—as you might expect from the name, it monitors one's motherboard.  Get it all: temps, voltages, fan speeds…  Set alarms and automate events for When It All Goes Horribly Wrong!
Skype
A good, if somewhat overhyped, Voice over IP (VoIP) client.  It also supports dialing POTS numbers.  If all you want is a voice chat client, try Google Talk and GAIM (see above).

Networking

BitTorrent
THe souce of all evil…or a decent peer-to-peer file transfer utility.  All depends on whether you work for the RIAA or not.
PuTTY
An excellent SSH terminal program for Windows.  The entire SSH application family is supported.  It works really well with WinSCP (see below).  Also, if you happen to run an SSH server on your machine (such as through Cygwin), you can use PuTTY as your Windows shell terminal.  This, to say the least, blows the doors off COMMAND.COM.
RealVNC
A perfectly acceptable Virtual Network Computing server and client.  I have since migrated my setup to UltraVNC (see below), but there is nothing wrong with RealVNC.  If you are not familiar with VNC, this is basically a way to remote control your desktop.  VNC has no inherent security!!!  Make sure you check out SSH tunneling if you use VNC.
UltraVNC
A GPLed VNC server and client, with some more features than RealVNC (see above).
WinSCP
This is a very nice visual frontend for the scp program included with PuTTY (see above).  In particular, it is compatable with Pageant, the ssh-agent that comes with PuTTY.

Productivity

Mozilla Firefox
Okay, I may be crazy for putting a web browser under Productivity, but there you have it.  If you are stuck with Internet Explorer, please get Firefox instead.  If you use Safari or Opera or something, and have a good reason not to use Firefox, I will trust you.  But give it a try anyway. :-)   I find Firefox to have far and away the best combination of looks and standards compliance (W3C DOM, CSS2, &c.).  Oh, one of the great things about Firefox is extensions.  I happen to have a page of recommendations about them.
Mozilla Thunderbird
If I had to use a desktop GUI mail user agent, it would be Thunderbird.
Open Office
A very capable free, open source replacement for the entire M$ Office suite.  If you don't have a reason to shell out money to Microsoft, please try this instead.

Security

aVast!
This is a free anti-virus system.  Tired of shelling out money to McAffee or Norton?  Then this is for you.
KillBox
Kills bad files dead!  This program is what you use for cleaning up infected files that don't like to let themselves be deleted, or that reinstall themselves after reboot.  It's not foolproof, but it is a lot better than the Recycle Bin, that's for sure.
Rootkit Revealer
Good program for finding rootkits on your system.  (Check out the page if you do not know what a rootkit is; trust me, you want them gone…)
Spybot Search & Destroy
Kills Spyware fast!  A must have for a Windows computer.  If for some strange reason you actually still use MSIE, Spybot is doubly important—it can immunize against a number of IE holes.  Spybot also includes a utility for watching your Registry and preventing unwanted Registry changes.  One of its best features is a tool showing everything your system launches at startup.  Wondering why your 4GB Quad-Über-Pentium box is slow as molasses?  Probably because six-hundred bloated pieces of spyware, auto-updaters, and quick-launchers are already running before you even log in.  Make It Stop right now!