List of Useful and Free Software v2

[aimeeandbeatles]

Adds a tab for file hashes to the file properties. Free for personal use only. Annoyingly requires an email for the download link; I used a throwaway one but you can grab it at Softpedia.

http://www.implbits.com/HashTab.aspx

 

[da dick]

i highly recommend win32pad as a windows notepad replacement; they're also a bunch of other simple text editors you can try out at this page...

http://tinyapps.org/text.html

and then there's notetab if you want something with more features. but the full version is only 30-day trial.
http://www.notetab.com/

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

When I don't use Notepad++, my preferred replacement is metapad... when I remember its there, of course

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Looking for a media player with auto-resume capabilities and found this. I think I'll be holding onto it.
http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/

 

[Takhisis]

What's auto-resume, aimee?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

It means if you close the video and re-open it it'll go to where you left off. In MPC-HC there's bookmarks but I forget to use them most of the time and then I close the video by mistake when I have it paused to do something else..

There is an option for it in MPC-HC, but it's universal (meaning it does it for all the videos) which I didnt want really.

 

[Takhisis]

Oooh, das ist interesting.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

The only gripe I have so far with SMPlayer is that there's no way to go fullscreen without stretching out the video. I did throw together a sort of hacky solution involving blanking out the screen with a program (i think it's meant for checking dead pixels) and then getting the player on top of that in normal non-fullscreen mode. As I said, hacky, but it does work.

 

[Mise]

You can change the aspect ratio and zoom etc in SMplayer. SMplayer is a great player with plenty of options, but I find it crashes a lot... Maybe it's just that I mainly use it for streaming stuff online...

 

[Takhisis]

Maybe it's your connection itself that can't handle the streaming? Or have you tried streaming with another program?

 

[Mise]

Yeah, MPC and VLC work fine. But they have their own quirks and annoyances...

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I actually have a handful of different media players for different purposes. It sounds pretty silly at first but it ends up being kinda useful.

 

[Mise]

Yeah, same.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

If you use Softpedia, I found this. Basically they take a certain task (e.g. 'edit MP3') and then pick out what they feel are some of the best programs for the task. Not all of them are free but overall its pretty useful.
http://www.softpedia.com/hubs/

They also have a slightly better search than the one at the top
http://www.softpedia.com/progFinder

 

[Mise]

http://www.softperfect.com/products/networx/

This is a nice program that shows network usage in a little graph on your taskbar.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

That will be useful i believe.

Here are two very very very basic web browsers. Actually I just use them to quickly load local HTML files. A lot of them come out weird though.
http://offbyone.com/offbyone/
http://dplus-browser.sourceforge.net/

Also, I may have mentioned NirLauncher before. NirSoft has a lot of useful utilities and he packaged most of them into this which helps if you don't want 5 billion shortcuts. You can also add the Sysinternals Suite as well which is good. (Note that theres a lot of false positives associated with his software -- I just add the whole folder to the exemptions list.)
http://launcher.nirsoft.net/

Also heres a good program for dealing with MDB files if you dont have Access. (I used it myself because another application I tried out didn't have an export function and I didn't like the application and wanted to try another one.)
http://www.alexnolan.net/software/mdb_viewer_plus.htm

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

For Windows Vista, here's a quick registry edit that associates extensionless files with Notepad. From there you can also edit the default program and stuff. It'll probably also work with Windows 7 but don't sue me if it breaks things.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

This is pretty neat

http://www.rlvision.com/snap2html/about.asp

Here's a database program that's been around for years

http://www.cardbox.com/

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Would it be better if I made a thread especially for these useful little software bits I find?

I'm actually still working on getting that website I mentioned set up. Actually just organizing a lot of stuff.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Not a software but if you use GMail, put in has:nouserlabels and you'll get all the unlabeled messages. Its kind of buggy in conversation view though but it's better than the old "-label:whatever" trick. Google put it in not too long ago and it's still kind of undocumented.