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Favorite Free Software Programs

• Hushmail - Secure, encrypted email service, very secure when used with appropriate pass phrases. The most secure email I know of.
• ICQ - "I Seek You", Chat with friends realtime, extremely popular. Comes in both Lite and Full-featured versions.

• Kazaa - P2P file sharing, probably the most popular right now
• LAME - MP3 encoder, generally regarded as the world's best MP3 encoder

• Mandrake - My favorite Linux distro, easy to get running. Everybody should have a copy of Linux installed and become familiar with it.
• Media Jukebox - Organize & play all your media files (audio/video)

• Monkey's Audio - Lossless audio compressor, considered the best for Windows-only. See here > Lossless Audio Compression < for more info about these types of programs.
• Morpheus - P2P file sharing [like Napster]

• MPEG Audio Collection - Organize and play your songs and other media files. Originally created by Jurgen Faul. Now developed by a team. Worth checking out. Nice, clean program.
• MPEG Plus - Lossy audio encoder [like LAME MP3], better quality than MP3 at higher bit-rates. Also known as MP+, MPC and Musepack. I use this encoder with the "xtreme" preset. See here. Many consider it the *best* lossy codec (when used with higher bitrates, e.g. >160kbps). See here for a discussion.

• NoteTab Lite - Text/HTML editor [like NotePad]
• Ogg Vorbis - Lossy audio encoder [like MP3]. Because Ogg is Open Source, many folks feel this is the format that will eventually supercede MP3, which is an old technology, as long as its (Ogg's) development continues. Ogg does everything well (encoding low bit-rates and high bit-rates), but doesn't excel at any one thing. If you enjoy lossy audio encoding and MP3s, you definitely want to become familiar with Ogg.

• OpenOffice - Suite of office programs [like Microsoft Office]. Becoming more popular everyday. The state of Massachusetts, for example, is dumping Microsoft Office in favor of OpenOffice.
• Opera - Web browser [like Internet Explorer or Nutscrape]. Made in Norway by ancestors of the Vikings. Recommended by Fravia.

• Outpost - Firewall protection. Like others, they also offer a full/pay version (comparison posted here).
• PCMark04 - Benchmarking, popular. See here for more > benchmarking programs.

• PGP - Pretty Good Privacy: Email & file encryption, popular. Note that you need v8 or better for Windows XP. And they have stripped many cool features (such as PGP disk, email plug-in integration) from the freeware version that were contained in v7 (which supports Windows 2000, but not WinXP). In other words, they want you to buy the pay version.
• phpBB - Bulletin board [like vBulletin], popular

• PHPNuke - An "Advanced" Content Management System / Web Portal. My web hosting provider won't let me use this because they say it uses too much of the (shared) server's resources (CPU), even though PHP is known for minimizing the load on system resources.
• PopFile - Anti-spam

• Pop-up Stopper - Put an end to those nasty pop-ups
• PostNuke - Content Management System. My web hosting provider won't let me use this because they say it uses too much of the (shared) server's resources (CPU).

• POVRay - Persistence of Vision Raytracer - Create 3D graphics [like 3D Studio MAX]
• Power Toys - goodies from Microsoft, especially TweakUI. Note that there are two different pages for these files. On e for the Home Edition version of WinXP, and another from the Pro version. I am not sure if these are two different files. Download from the appropriate page to be sure. The link I included here is for the Pro version. For the Home Edition version, see here.