Windows Application Selection

I'd like to share what I use for my Windows applications. While I'm still pretty much a Linux noob, my application selection in Windows has gone through significant comparative analysis, and I think that most of these are best-of-breed freeware. I've also included some of the games I play, 2 of which are free to download and play.

Archive / Zip application: Filzip
Filzip is a full-featured archive manager. It handles many formats, and has some excellent functionlality (zip spanning, "Install" an embedded Setup.exe, most recently used directories for extracting). It also has some useful shell extensions which you can expose by right-clicking on a zip file.

Jukebox / Music Manager: MediaMonkey
MediaMonkey is, hands down, the best music jukebox out there. It is a tight, fast, flexible and powerful database for songs. It includes an embedded player, the ability to rip and transcode songs, burning functionality, and a skinnable interface. You can also configure it to use the embedded media player, or Winamp 2.

MP3 tagger: The Godfather
The Godfather is an AWESOME mp3 tagging application. It has vast functionality, and some unique functionality. I wrote a letter to the author praising his work (I don't often do this) because I had a directory full of untagged MP3s and I didn't know what they were. Godfather was able to analyse them, go on the net, and give me their tags. This is very impressive.

Audio codecs: Ogg Vorbis, MP3
While Ogg is a technically superior codec, it doesn't have much hardware support. By this I mean that while your average iPod or MP3 cd-player can play MP3 and wma, most of them don't do ogg. In this coming year, I think we're going to see many more players (the new iRiver supports ogg, but I'm not sure about the Audible format for that one). If you don't have a hardware MP3 player, or a car CD player that plays MP3s, then you should encode your collection in ogg. Think the same quality at about half the file size.

CD/DVD Burner: CDBurnerXP Pro
CDBurnerXP Pro is a great burner program, period. It does what I need it to do and it's free. Can't beat that action!

Image Mounter: Daemon Tools
Daemon tools will allow you to take an .iso image (like a snapshot of an entire CD in one file) and mount it to a virtual DVD on your system. So if you rip the ISO, you can then mount it. This is great for games or any other application that requires you to have a CD in the drive to use it.

Video codec: Xvid
Xvid, if you haven't noticed, is Divx spelled backwards. Xvid is an open-source video codec that directly competes with WMV, MOV, and Divx.

Image viewer: Irfanview
Irfanview is the be-all-end-all of image viewers. This thing can handle anything, and can do basic transformations and cropping etc. It also has an EXTENSIVE plugin library which allows it to play MP3s, play RealMedia, and a host of other stuff. Don't miss out on this one.

Text editors: NoteTab Lite & syn
I am a newcomer to NoteTab Lite. At work, I recently had to edit some passwords on a bunch of batch files, and I didn't want to have to search & replace on one and then another. NoteTab Lite (as well as Crimson Editor) allows me to do a Seach & Replace among all open documents. It has a tabbed document interface (MDI) and a bunch of other cool features. syn has been a good standby for me. It's got a lot of great features, but lacks multi-doc search & replace and doesn't word-wrap.

Web Browser: Firefox
Firefox has seen a lot of news lately. This latest version, 1.0PR, adds a bunch of new features and cleans up the interface a bit. It's a super browser and pretty much the only one I use.

Email: Thunderbird
Thunderbird is another Mozilla application. Thunderbird has great integrated Bayesian spam filtering, excellent support for multiple accounts, and is super easy to use and configure.

Office application: OpenOffice
OpenOffice is the premire open-source competitor to Microsoft Office. It handles Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files.

IM client: gaim
gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging client. With gaim, you can connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, IRC, and some other less well known networks (like Jabber).

Voice communcations: TeamSpeak
TeamSpeak is a voice communcation server/client. With TeamSpeak, you and your friends can chat online for free using a headset. Great for gamers and online communities.

Remote control: Ultr@VNC
Ultr@VNC is a tweaked VNC application that is stable and fast. When you run the server, it allows someone else to connect using a VNC client (if they know the password) and control your computer with their keyboard/mouse.

System tweaking/maintenance: Ad-aware, Xsetup
Ad-aware is a great Adware remover. Xsetup exposes Windows settings hidden in the registry in an easy to use interface.

Games: Battlefield 1942, Battlefield Vietnam, Enemy Territory, America's Army, Savage
What can I say? I've played BF1942 since the demo more than 2 years ago and I still love playing it. BF:V came along more recently and includes some excellent interface enhancements, but is pretty much the same game. ET is free (as in beer), and has a large and active online community. The game is fun to play. AA is also free (as in beer) game that uses the UT2003 engine and has gameplay similar to the most popular game on the internet, CounterStrike. Savage is a great game in a genre all of it's own: it's a combination RTS/FPS. So one guy is the master strategist, while the rest of the players are the "units".