boot13I love great software. When I find something that’s clean, elegant, fast, and stable, I’m filled with joy. The really cool part is that even truly great software is often available for free.
On this page, I’ll post brief descriptions and links for the software I use. Longer reviews will appear as posts, linked from this page.
Here’s a quick list of software I’ll be talking about:
Network and Internet
- SpeedOf.Me – an accurate Internet broadband speed test, it also shows your previous tests results in a graph.
- Capsa – powerful and easy to use network monitoring software; normally $1000, the free version can monitor up to ten IP addresses for up to four hours.
- SmartSniff – an excellent free network packet monitor with a variety of useful modes.
Media
- Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) – feature-rich, powerful, and free, OBS captures video and audio from your screen and cameras, and records or streams it. Highly recommended.
- YouTube-DL – a command-line tool that allows you to download just about any YouTube video. The RIAA tried to wipe this useful tool from the web, but now it’s more popular than ever. You may be able to get the most recent version from the official site. Also see this Techdirt article.
- Clementine – a terrific alternative to the more common music players, with a lot of very useful features.
- Kodi – another terrific open source media player, this one turns your computer into a media center, with tons of capabilities and features.
- RadioSure – it’s not fancy, but it’s small and light on system resources. Radiosure provides a single interface to a lot of the available Internet radio stations. The station list is updated regularly, and you can add your own stations. Radiosure can also record what it plays.
- VLC is the go-to media player for those difficult-to-play videos. Supports just about any kind of audio and video media, using internal codecs, so you don’t have to worry about messing up your system.
- Paint.net is a full-featured image editor that’s much lighter and far easier to use than its expensive alternatives.
- ShareX is the best screen capture tool I’ve tried. It has loads of features and is very easy to use.
Text editors and related tools
- Notepad++ – an excellent, free text editor.
- Notetab – another great text editor with free and paid versions.
- WinMerge compares files and folders and shows their differences.
- Ditto – The Windows clipboard stores one item only. Ditto expands that massively, and includes features for handling different types of clipboard data.
System administration
- Autoruns
- CCleaner (formerly CrapCleaner) (caution: now includes crapware by default)
- Process Hacker 2
- OpenHardwareMonitor
- SpaceSniffer
- USBDeview
- Rainmeter
- WinSCP
- FileHippo App Manager
- VictoriaHDD