Software Picks

Graphics & Photography

CatchColor – Simple system tray app that detects the colour under the mouse cursor in various formats
Microsoft Camera Codec Pack – Add support for camera RAW format in Windows Explorer (thumbnails) and Windows Live Photo Gallery

Miranda – Open source, fast, light instant messenger supporting all protocols with a huge library of plugins and customisations
Opera – Small, fast, full-featured pioneering browser with mail client, ad blocker, news reader, bookmark sync and much more included

SciTE – Scintilla Text Editor – Extremely fast and light customisable and extensible text editor with tabbed interface and supporting many languages and tools
Araxis Merge – File comparison and merging
AnkhSVN – Subversion integration for Visual Studio
TeamCity – Continuous Integration / Build Server
Snippet Compiler – Quickly compile and run C# code fragments
Zend Studio for Eclipse – PHP IDE
ReSharper – Visual Studio Add-in for refactoring, programming assistant, code cleanup etc
Reflector – .NET Assembly decompiler and inspector with lots of available addins
Dependency Walker – Great free utility for getting a dependency tree for a DLL file

CrapCleaner aka CCleaner – Registry cleaner, Startup Programs tool, File cleanup (Recycle Bin, Temp files, browser caches etc)
Defraggler – Free defragmentation tool
WinDirStat – Disk usage explorer, with filterable list and graphical views to help determine what’s taking up space
Recuva – Undelete / File recovery
ClearType Tuner PowerToy – Tune the appearance of ClearType on your monitor
TweakUI – Tweak and tune Windows
Speccy – View detailed system specifications in a clean and fast program

Sumatra PDF Reader – Portable, tiny tabbed PDF Reader (single .exe)
Sysinternal Tools – Suite of system maintenance, monitoring, troubleshooting utilities including alternative Task Manager
Junction – Symbolic and hard links for NTFS
Unlocker – Find what files are currently opened by what processes (and force them closed)
7-zip – File archiver that supports all the formats you could want (including ISO and RAR)
TeraCopy – Faster and more reliable Windows file copy/move replacement with pause & resume
Lammer Context Menu – Explorer right-click menu giving you ability to command prompt here, get file checksum, regsiter/unregister, rename, in single or batch selections for files and folders
Launchy – An application launcher similar to the Windows Vista/7 start menu search, using a popup dialog that will find and launch your apps and folders using a few keystrokes
Everything – Very fast file search. Unfortunately it can’t search file contents, but otherwise it’s a blazing fast way to find files by name on your entire system in a few keystrokes.

Media Player Classic Home Cinema – Light, fast, full-featured player
QT Lite – Free codec to allow you to watch Quicktime video in Media Player Classic or Windows Media Player.
Real Media Alternative – Free codec to allow you to watch Real Media video in Media Player Classic or Windows Media Player
GSpot – Video and audio file codec inspector so you can see what codecs a video or audio file is using