LibreOffice is a complete office suite consisting of a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software, and drawing software. All applications are fully featured. LibreOffice can open and save a variety of formats (including Word and Powerpoint). https://www.libreoffice.org/
Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. The installer allows you to select from a massive amount of software, too numerous to list here. Cygwin brings the best UNIX tools and utilities to Windows systems and also features an updating feature that helps you keep the newest versions of software installed. http://www.cygwin.com/
7-Zip is a file archiver/compression tool which can achieve very high compression ratios with its native format, and improved compression ratios over PKZip/WinZip. Features support for: 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB. http://www.7-zip.org/
This mini-mini software will allow you to switch between desktops during extensive multitasking. It is created by Sysinternals, currently part of Microsoft. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/desktops http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc817881.aspx
IZArc is an easy to use archiver that supports many compressed file-formats including 7-ZIP, ARJ, B64, BZ2, CAB, GZ, JAR, LHA, RAR, TAR, UUE, ZIP (along with many others). Features archive testing, repair, conversion, file search, disk spanning, encryption. http://www.izarc.org/
An IT asset management application that allows small businesses to use enterprise-quality tracking and auditing of IT assets at no cost. EDIT 2020: It seems a lot has changed at Spiceworks since I initially posted this in 2010. It is now a cloud-based platform running many more services. It still looks interesting for small businesses.… Continue reading spiceworks
DVD Shrink assists in backing up DVDs by re-authoring and/or automatically transcoding to compress the video and adjust media size as required to fit on some media. Supports automatic burning using Nero (if available on system), or writing to either files or ISO images. http://www.dvdshrink.org/
DVD Decrypter can decrypt and rip or copy DVDs (or their parts) to a hard disk. http://www.dvddecrypter.org.uk/
I thought nothing would get me to drop Nero, but this one did. CDBurnerXP Pro can write data, audio, and video onto CD-R, CD-RW DVD+R/RW DVD-R/RW discs. Supports most IDE, USB, Firewire and SCSI drives. Features ISO image rip/burn including bootable images, data verification, and audio CD ripping including encoding to MP3, WMA, OGG. http://www.cdburnerxp.se/
Audiograbber, free CD ripper, mp3 encoder and audio recorder for Windows Audiograbber is a great audio CD ripping software allowing digital audio extraction from CDs and encoding to a several formats (WAV, MP3, OGG, WMA, other external converters). Features normalization, silence removal, freedb queries and track tag/description editing. https://www.audiograbber.org/