A few months ago I was looking for a lite-weight photo editor that would do a few more things than IrfanView, which is a neat little freeware app that comes in handy to quickly paste and save copied pics and screenshots,, etc., and came across Photofiltre, a French freeware application that turned out to be in some ways even better than Photoshop.
While Photoshop is still the real deal when it comes to bigger jobs, if you need a small and quick application that isn’t as heavy on resources as PS (plus, it’s free!), a small, uncomplicated, super-easy to use program to quickly edit or produce blog illustrations, simple CD- or eBook-covers, greeting cards, you name it, I highly recommend Photofiltre.
The tiny (1.6 MB!!!) but potent app easily converts gifs, jpgs and all sorts of different formats into any other, has an easy-to-use text feature, and a variety of quick-to-use filters and effects, that will save you a lot of time that you would have used trying how to figure out how to do the same in Photoshop.
While this may not be something you’re looking for if you’re a professional graphics designer, in any other case, you might wind up as gaga over this neat little program as I am.
The portable version of Advanced System Care is great for small notebooks you wouldn’t want to load down with the full install version. It easily cleans up your registry, optimizes your System and browser, roughly defrags it, and has a variety of other features you can make use of, such as registry defrag and a few others. Great for quick clean sweeps on computers you don’t want to install any more programs on.
For proper defragging I’ve been using the free app MyDefrag lately, btw, and it seems to do the trick.
The stripped down, but fully functional version of Winamp. My audio player of choice. While recent versions of Winamp Lite have increased in size and are up to a whopping 6 MB, I still use the older version 5112, at not even 1MB. Lite-weight and easy functionality guaranteed.
The video player that plays just about any format. Combined with Media Player Classic, there's probably no video file in the world you won't be able to play (except for Real Media files, for which I'd recommend RealAlternative, and QuickTime, which, personally, can k.m.a.)
Freeware volume optimizer for mp3 files. Say you want to slap together an audio CD of different songs from different albums, perhaps even different eras, like 60s, 70s, 80s, etc. You’ll notice that mp3s of older songs are usually quieter than more recent ones. You can copy all the mp3s for your compilation into one folder and then open that folder in MP3Gain and choose “album analysis” from the menu. It will tell you the average album volume, which is the value you can then type into the “target volume” slot and then press “apply track gain” to have each song brought to the same volume (or “apply album gain,” if you want to allow minor volume variations).
Personally, in order to avoid distortions in places of older files, I usually play it safe and use a volume value that’s a little closer than the quietest song in the compilation, rather than the average volume.
MP3 Gain does for you in minutes what would have once taken hours of editing work.
A long time ago I would get super annoyed by the bulkiness of Adobe Reader, and have been using the Freeware alternative, Foxit Reader for my PDF files ever since.
While Adobe would ceaselessly get online to check for updates, Foxit is less than one tenth the size of Adobe, never messes around with you by “phoning home” and spying on you, and opens any PDF file, contrary to Adobe. It also easily lets you copy images and text out of PDF files.
Why throw fits with Adobe, when life is a breeze with Foxit?
Just a few days ago I googled (yes, I admit it, I still use Google) around for a “free mp3 editor,” which I needed to edit some larger mp3 podcasts, and lo I came across WavPad, which totally does the trick (contrary to other free apps I tried).
The advantage: you don’t have to convert mp3 files to wav before editing a sound file (cutting portions out, etc.), nor do you have to install heavy-weight and costly programs one would have to rely on for such jobs previously.
One drawback: WavPad does not offer volume altering, which can be done with the optional add-on MixPad, or done with MP3Gain.
Since Nero has totally gone insane and came up with its monstrous versions of what once used to be a neat burning program, my favorite freeware and lite-weight alternative has become DeepBurner, also available in a portable version, which doesn’t even have to be installed.
If you tired of monster software that pastes itself to every media file on your computer and want a program that simply burns CDs and DVDs (audio or data), DB saves you a lot of headache.
Free video editor that can come in handy to save smaller clips from a larger video file, even though you need to make sure you save it in the right, compressed format, otherwise your clip will come out humongous.
Runs like a standalone or portable app without having to install.
Converts mp4 clips (from Youtube or elsewhere) to avi, etc. for integration into your own videos.
My favorite security apps:
My free firewall of choice for PCs is Comodo, although I have been using the smaller PC Tools Firewall on my notebook without any bad surprises for a few months now.
My favorite Spyware checker currently is SuperAntiSpyware, and as a free Antivirus app I recommend Avira, although the program is quite bulky, and the daily pop-up prompt for upgrade to pro can be a pain, and thus we use Avast on some machines.
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