If you're like me, you're curious about computer software and applications that weren't originally bundled with your computer and find an endless amount of relatively Cheap or Free Software offers online. These are my 10 personal favorites, which are indispensable to me. I've divided them into 2 Catagories: Free Software and Cheap Software.
Free Software and Applications I Love:
Auslogics Registry Defrag and Auslogics Disc Defrag - Actually these are two great free software applications - I've cheated and counted them as one! Auslogics Registry Defrag quickly compacts and optimizes your computers windows registry by removing extraneous gaps and wasted space which can greatly improve computer performance. Auslogics Disc Defrag quickly speeds up your computer and eliminates crashes by defragmenting the file system.
Belarc Advisor builds a privately detailed profile of your computers software and hardware along with missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, and Internet Security benchmarks. The results are displayed on your web browser. All of your profile information is kept private on your PC and is not sent to any web server.
Mike's Marketing Tools Search Engine Rankings offers immediate, online web site rankings in 8 top search engines and web directories, including Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN, AOL, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, Yahoo! Directory, and Open Directory (Dmoz). Great for anyone with a website.
Torrent Harvester searches for Torrents on multiple websites and compiles them on a single list. Torrent Harvester works similar to Google but is for Torrents only. If you right click a torrent on the list for certain torrent websites, the torrent will download without you having to leave the page.
VLC Media Player - I prefer VLC Media Player to Windows Media Player as it seems to play more multimedia formats (without adding more codecs)and for some reason seems to sound better on my computer as well (maybe this is my imagination!). VLC is a cross-platform media player supporting a large number of multimedia formats needing additional codecs. Features include video on demand and on the fly transcoding.
Cheap Software I Love (Under $40):
(ESET) NOD32 - Great anti-virus software that allows your computer to run faster then most computers running anti-virus software because it requires less memory and CPU power, making more room to surf the web, play games, email and more. It offers fast file scanning and product updates and runs quietly in the background while accurately identifying known and unknown threats. It is recognized for having zero false positives. Nod 32 ThreadSense Technology offers great internet protection from threats.
(Uniblue) Speed Up My PC easily ensures your PC is automatically optimized for maximum performance. It increased my broadband internet downloading speed greatly. Its 2008 software currently comes with free Uniblue System Tweaker software which speeds up start and shut down times and makes windows more stable and secure.
(TuneUp Utilities) 1-Click Maintenance quickly cleans up your registry and hard drive with one click. 1-Click Maintenance is part of this software and is the basic application I use from it.
(Webroot) Window Washer erases traces of websites you visited, cleans up your cache for browsers like IE, Firefox, Opera and more and removes extraneous files which slow down your computer speed.
(Rarlab) WinRar Is the perfect software for me to open up ZIP, RAR, CAB, ARJ, LZH, ACE, TAR, GZip, UUE, ISO, BZIP2, Z and 7-Zip files. It is fast and great for multimedia files and automatically recognizes and selects the best the best compression.
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