Programs you couldn't live without or might not know about./ (1 Viewer)

I found allot of useful programs from the old thread that I beleive was on this forum, time for a new one..

Do a search for SpeedFan and give it a try. It measures the temperatures of the Hard Drive and CPU, plus gives you CPU usage stats. I knew my laptop AMD athalon was running hot, because I could feel the heat radiating from the bottom/side of the thing... But 64 fricken degrees at idle? The Hard Drive is at 30 degrees.

Case in point, my Core 2 Duo 2.4 GZ machine with Zalman fan runs at 35-40 degrees idle 10-20 in dos bootup.

Time to trot out the list again then!

http://www.privoxy.org - a web proxy that sits between your browsers and the web and filters out privacy-threatening things and ads. Indispensable. Just make sure you put hometheaterforum.com on the exceptions list so you can still see ads here and help contribute to the bottom line. Open Source freeware.

http://www.ntwind.com/software/taskswitchxp.html - TaskSwitchXP, replaces the dull display you get when switching tasks with Alt-Tab with a new pretty one that shows the window you're switching to. Freeware.

http://www.ntwind.com/software/winsnap.html - WinSnap, great screenshot program. If you need to take Windows screenshots this one will do it nicely with drop shadows etc. Usable for free, donations encouraged I think.

http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/index.html - JDiskReport. A Java-based program to do a size inventory of your hard drive, with graphs, to show where all the space has gone. Great for cleaning up stuff you never even knew you had and thus freeing up space on the hard drive. Freeware.

http://www.foobar2000.org/ - FooBar2000, a really good and simple audio player. Plays a ton of formats, etc. Great stuff. Freeware.

http://www.zabkat.com - last but not least, xplorer2. A file manager for Windows that kicks gigantic amounts of butt. Free version is great but the full version is definitely worth paying for. Adds a lot of value "out of the box", with a little customizing and delving into what it can do and it becomes even more useful (bookmarking folders on your drive(s) and making a button bar with those bookmarks readily available for instance springs to mind.) One can have dual panes with files visible, and even open tabs in those panes so it is simplicity itself to switch between many locations on your drive(s). Really cool stuff, in other words, especially for power users.

Just off the top of my head and my bookmarks folder.

If you like JDiskReport, check out WinDirStat. Not cross-platform, though

PC Format in the UK has a nice list of freebies.

http://www.pcformat.co.uk/downloads/default.asp?

Love this month's cover.

UK magazines tend to stick half-naked chicks on anything in sight. I read the funniest letter in a magazine called T3, which covers technology and new gadgets; there was a priest who had written in and asked them to please not put half-naked women on every cover because it was a pain for him to buy the magazine that way.

Thanks for the WinDirStat link, will have to check it out.

Excellent suggestions. Does anyone has a recommendation for a good freeware .mov to mpg convertion program?

http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/

Easy to use, supports lots of formats and best of all it's free. I use it all the time to convert movies over for my ipod. Versions available for Windows, Linux and OSX.

Like the Woody Allen movie Bananas: "Hey, how much is this copy of Orgasm?! This man wants to buy copy!!"

Tekara:

I downloaded the program but it looks like it doesn't support converting .mov files to .mpg which is what I need. Any other ideas?

Parker

It should. . . lest to say I've been able to open mov's in avidemux and have it turn out a movie using the mpeg container format.

Off the top of my head, do you actually have the mov file, or is it something for streaming video? Easy way to see is to check the size of the file, should be pretty obvious from that.

Aside from that, are you having trouble getting avidemux to open the file? Or are you having trouble getting it to turn out what you need?

MPEG Streamclip should also do the trick. Free. Does many conversions. Available on both PC and Mac.

Robert:

It is a .mov file I have on my system and when I clicked to save it as an .mpg it saved it to my hard drive but nothing was converted.

Dave:

I will try that program. Thanks.

Since I get 400 email messages per day the most important
program for me is MailWasher Pro

Not to insult anyone's intelligence, it's just so they're listed here....

AVG virus checker: http://free.grisoft.com/

Zone Alarm firewall: http://www.zonelabs.com/store/conten...try=US&lang=en

People do still pay money for resource hogging apps that do the same thing as these.

Here's something..

I'm about to cancel Vonage because I don't use it that often, only for recording celeb phone interviews. Is there a free Voip service like Skype? I'd use Skype, but there is ALWAYS an echo when talking to someone. You can only get rid of it by turning down the Volume, and then it's tough to hear the other person making the interview awkward.

Thanks

I like Microsoft power toys

I figure this thread should probably have a link to the original one: http://www.hometheaterforum.com/arch...hreadid=229882

Looking back at that, I've changed from...
ABC [Yet Another Bittorrent Client] to Utorrent http://www.utorrent.com/) for my BitTorrent needs. It has a very small footprint and is incredibly easy to use. I haven't played with the WebUI yet. I'm using version 1.6 as of this post which is very stable.

And these are programs that I use that now that weren't on my original list.

TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/)
It's a disk encryption program that "Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk." I mostly use it for my financial info & when I bring my work home with me.

KeePass Password Safe (http://keepass.info/) It's a password database I use for keeping track of the MANY passwords I use on a daily basis.

Mp3tag http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ I don't use this program oftern, but I recently used it to retag all of my MP3s. I originally used Foobar's masstagger to do this, but it created problems when I was transferring songs to an iPod. MP3tag fixed all the problems with my ID3v1 & ID3v2 tags.

I used Mailwasher Pro for a year or two, since I get about 100 spam per day. It seemed great at first, but I eventually dropped it for a new solution. I now route all my email through Gmail to serve as my spam filter. Gmail's not perfect, but it's much simpler and faster than MailwasherPro. And having an online email client is very useful. In fact, I find myself using Gmail more than Thunderbird on my desktop for personal email.

My absolute, must have, can't live without program is SplashID. I use it extensively to track my multitude of work passwords, web passwords, credit card #s, etc.

Avast! Antivirus: A great freeware antivirus with a low memory footprint. Best compromise between security and unobtrusiveness I've found yet.
Azureus: Best bittorrent client I've tried, and I've tried pretty much all of them.
CDex: I used to use this to rip and encode all of my CDs to LAME MP3s. After discovering Exact Audio Copy (See Below), I still use it as a friendly GUI for the LAME encoder.
Driver Magician: Backs up all of your third party drivers, removing one of the many uncertainties of reformatting your harddrive.
Exact Audio Copy: Your best chance for successfully ripping badly scatched CDs without distortion. I trust it so much, I use it to rip all of my CDs to WAV before converting with CDex.
Ghostscript & GSview: A great alternative to the memory-hog that is Adobe Acrobat. The two together provide a very solid PDF viewing functionality.
VLC media player: A cross-platform media player that plays pretty much everything but some Quicktime files. I don't use Windows Media Player any more thanks to this.

Does this do activation keys as well? Another annoying part is forgetting to transfer a photoshop CS2 activation, and thne having to call up and cancel it due to a hard drive reformat.

Also, here's a request. Can anyone find an internet radio station player that acts as a wake up timer? I want to set it to turn on at a certain time, tune in the net station, and use it as a wake up alarm.... I don't care if it can record or do any other function..

A breif search yeiled some players, but none that mention that feature