First the biggies - OpenOffice and Firefox. I love them both and neither really need any introduction.
SiSoftware Sandra Lite. This is another pretty common one - but not something you'll use every day. It gives a fairly detailed rundown of the spec of you machine, and the components therein - great if you're not sure what processor or memory you have. It also gives performance boosting tips, details on software installed and a whole host of other useful bits and bobs including burn-in tests and the like. The Lite (free version) is missing some functionality available i you stump up the cash, but all-in-all its a must-have, especially when working on machines of uncertain parentage.
Trillian. This is a fairly well known IM client, and while, as no particular fan of IM I'm not the best person to judge, its my client of choice when I do partake. Its fairly light, it talks to Yahoo, MSN, AIM and ICQ and puts each conversation into a tab (like Firefox) which is nice (I'm a miser for screen real-estate) and its free...my only gripe is that the chat window if fairly wide and (on my lappy at least) will not squeeze down as far as I'd like. Maybe I need to buy a better laptop :)
Another piece of software I've found that absolutely fascinates me is this Paperback. To quote the site...
| PaperBack is a free application that allows you to back up your precious files on the ordinary paper in the form of the oversized bitmaps. If you have a good laser printer with the 600 dpi resolution, you can save up to 500,000 bytes of uncompressed data on the single A4/Letter sheet. Integrated packer allows for much better data density - up to 3,000,000+ (three megabytes) of C code per page. | |
I must admit I've had limited (ie no) success in scanning a backup in again, so I suspect I'll not be trusting my tax records to it just yet, but I love the concept.
