The Editors' Choice List: Our Selection of the Best PC Freeware

Welcome to the Gizmo's Freeware Editors' Choice List, where you'll find a collection of fantastic freeware from our site. Many freeware products here are as good as or better than their commercial counterparts.

To get high onto this list a product must have done more than win a Gizmo's Freeware award; it must have impressed our editors with its usefulness and professionalism.

Our volunteer editors did the difficult work in their freeware reviews, choosing a broad selection of must have free programs, exquisitely rare freeware treasures, and "Gizmo's Freeware Top Picks". Usually our top freeware picks must compete in a Darwinian struggle against many rival programs!

We suggest you browse the whole list at your leisure as you may be surprised what freeware gems you will discover. The pathologically impatient can use the category index below. This report contains selected freeware; you will find many other interesting and specialty articles as you search across our site.

Caution: Some of these recommendations involve risky tasks like cleaning the registry or installing touchy software that may conflict with your system, so be sure to backup and image your system first.

Quick Select Links (After clicking a link, use your browser's Back icon to return here.)

Basic Safe Computing Guides:

• Security Advice Wizard: Get personalized results from our security team.
• Safe Computing in Under an Hour: Secure your PC by following these simple guidelines.
• Secure Your PC: Provides an overview of safe computing practices. Then it details four novel ways to block the majority of malware from getting a foothold.
• Probably the Best Security List in the World: Antti Koponen's must read mega security list.
• How to Block Bad Websites: Three different ways to prevent your PC from being infected by accidentally visiting a malicious or compromised website.
   

Best Free Antivirus Software:

Avira AntiVir -- Download | Review

"My top pick if you're looking for the best protection against virus, spyware and rootkit threats. AntiVir is very light on resources and the detection rate of malware is outstanding, better than almost every other antivirus according to tests."

High Quality Alternatives:

• Microsoft Security Essentials: "By far the best choice for average users because of the minimal user interaction required and clean interface. The detection rates are very good, in particular the detection of zero-day threats and rootkits. Even more impressive, it has very few false positives and is light on resources."
• avast! Free Antivirus: "An excellent free antivirus program that many users prefer. Its detection rates are on par with AntiVir, it's light on resources, and it has the most features: full real-time capabilities (web, e-mail, IM, P2P and network shields), boot-time scanning, and a behavioral blocker."

Provides an essential layer of protection from a multitude of virus, trojan, worm, spyware, adware, dialer, keylogger and rootkit infections. Most current antiviruses have at least reasonably good detection rates of all forms of malware. We recommend using only one antivirus program for real-time protection.
 

Best Free Firewall:

Comodo Internet Security -- Download | Review

"The security effectiveness of the firewall and application monitor (Defense+ HIPS) exceeds the performance of many commercial products. On the minus side, it's rather talkative and this may alarm or annoy users. It has adjustable protection if you think it requires too much user involvement." The antivirus component is optional and not recommended.

High Quality Alternatives:

• Online Armor Free: "A solid contender in proactive protection, with a novel Run Safer feature that allows the added protection of a limited user account without the annoyances. If you can handle the ads and installation nags, it functions similar to Comodo with a few extra user friendly features."
• PC Tools Firewall Plus: "Provides excellent proactive HIPS performance comparable to Comodo. The installation and initial setup is amazingly easy and the popup alert format is fairly simplistic."

Firewalls not only filter incoming traffic to your computer but they also increasingly help you to control the activities of Internet facing applications on your PC. The ones that provide the most control and security, typically require the most user involvement to answer popup alerts. If all the popup alerts are meaningless to you, then at a minimum remember to enable the windows firewall. In any case, only install one software firewall.
 

Best Free Adware/Spyware/Scumware Remover:

SuperAntiSpyware -- Download | Review

"Top of the list once again in detection and removal of malware, with a fairly lightweight download and simple installation."

High Quality Alternatives:

• MalwareBytes Anti-Malware: Tied for second and recommended by our security wizard.
• a-squared Free: Tied for second and highest as a Trojan Scanner/Trojan Remover.

Additional scanners/removers will often find additional unique threats. Regular on-demand anti-malware scanning is still a must.
 

Best Free Intrusion Prevention and Detection Utility (HIPS Software):

ThreatFire -- Download | Review

"It has now bounced back to the top of the pile and is far less capable of causing system problems. It provides behavioral based detection and runs from the box without the need for additional configuration. Be aware that automatic updates are not provided with the free version if you elect to “opt out” of the ThreatFire Community."

If you need a lite HIPS alternative, try WinPatrol.

If you use a simple firewall (such as the built-in windows firewall), then a HIPS program provides a potent second layer of defense. But some anti-virus/anti-spyware programs have a behavioral component too. Learn about HIPS software here.
 

Best Free Browser Protection Utility:

Sandboxie -- Download | Review

"Creates a special sandbox environment on your PC [either for web browsing or any program]. So that within the virtual sandbox provided by Sandboxie the vital portions of your PC are totally isolated. If set correctly, any spyware, Trojans, keyloggers or other malware products that 'infect' your PC while browsing will be eliminated. It can cause problems on some PCs so backup before installing.

Alternatively, you can isolate your browser and other Internet facing applications with GesWall. It provides excellent security and is a worthy alternative to Sandboxie" (see the review above).

Browser protection utilities like Sandboxie and GeSWall can greatly increase your defenses against drive-by downloads and other vulnerabilities. Instead of only reacting to malware, they use proactive technology to protect your computer.
 

Best Free Anonymous Surfing Service:

xB Browser -- Download | Review

"A portable version of Firefox with a well integrated Tor engine that uses the free Tor network. It's easy to setup and doesn't require advanced knowledge, but you will have to use it as a second browser for anonymous surfing in contrast to Vidalia or JonDo that also allow normal browsing."

If you need a more flexible option that works with any browser, try JonDo.

Anonymity services safely transmit information with little risk of local interception, making them ideal for surfing on open Wi-Fi networks or in hotels while traveling.
 

Related Security Top Picks and Hot Items

• OpenDNS -- Download | Review. "After only a quick registration and configuration change, it considerably improves your pro-active protection against drive by malware. It's an excellent first line of defense."
• Best Free Rootkit Scanner -- "Several free applications specialize in the detection and removal of rootkits."
• Secunia PSI -- Download | Review. Scans for insecure software and helps you quickly update risky products like browsers, PDF readers, Sun Java, office software, email software, media players, instant messengers, download managers, P2P clients, etc.. You should also allow Windows to automatically update with its latest patches, for Windows itself often has security flaws (learn more).
• WOT -- Download | Review. Quickly rates sites and links, uses an automatic warning or blocking screen to help you avoid accidentally interacting with potentially bad websites, and provides informative ratings and user comments without censoring the visibility of sites.

Best Free PC Tune-up Utility:

Ashampoo WinOptimizer -- Download | Review

"It's very easy to use and has a sleek interface. Allows one-click cleaning for disk, privacy and registry cleaning tasks, and has an excellent tweaking tool."

Note that it requires registration and some components are not as advanced as other products, such as the disk defrag and disk cleaner.

Intended as an all-in-one PC performance optimizer and tweaker to simplify system tasks that typically require many separate specialty programs.
 

Best Free Registry Cleaner:

Wise Registry Cleaner -- Download | Review

"The most satisfactory product I have come across. It allows you to backup the Registry before you start and it doesn't check areas where most Registry tricks are played. I caution against changing the default settings unless you have a good understanding of the Registry and how applications use it."

If you use registry cleaners such as Wise, CCleaner, or WinOptimizer, be sure to backup and image first. Registry cleaning mistakes can quickly lead to the need to completely re-install windows.
 

Best Free Disk De-fragmenter:

Auslogics Disk Defrag -- Download | Review

"The latest release is way ahead of the competition. I found the defragmentation time to be incredibly fast, and for the first time in a while, the long process of defragmenting my hard drive was shrunk to minutes."

Defragmenting your hard drive on a regular basis is a sound housekeeping habit. It can greatly increase system performance and relieve stress on your hard drive.
 

Best Free File Cleaner:

CCleaner -- Download | Review

"Quickly and effectively remove unused or temporary files, unwanted cookies, and other unneeded files that accumulate from applications."

Additionally, it can scan the Windows registry for issues, securely erase, manage the startup, uninstall software, clean system restore points, and run automatically at startup or as a task.
 

Best Free Secure Erase Utility:

Eraser -- Download | Review

"Highly effective at wiping the free space, leaving behind only unrecoverable nonsense file names on modern size hard drives. It erases the unused disk space (or "free space"), cluster tips (or "slack space"), individual files or folders, and data in the recycling bin."

Normal file deletion doesn't prevent a common file recovery program from recovering your files, so eraser utilities are helpful to permanently delete any personally identifiable or unwanted files to protect your privacy.
 

Best Free Program Uninstaller:

Revo Uninstaller -- Download | Review

"It is the only freeware product I know of that will make a decent job of cleaning up a failed install. It finds leftover files and registry entries to help uninstall more cleanly, but it doesn't always find everything.

An alternative technique (requiring more work on your part) allows you to monitor before and after an installation to completely remove files and registry entries. For this, try ZSoft Uninstaller. But there is always the slight chance it will remove unwanted entries, so use caution."

The Windows control panel has limited uninstalling capabilities, but freeware programs like Revo and ZSoft allow for better deletion of programs by removing many files and registry entries that are usually left behind.
 

Best Free Startup Manager:

Autoruns -- Download | Review

Besides startup/logon management, Autoruns also allows you to manage services, drivers, sidebar gadgets, scheduled tasks, image hijacks, Winlogin entries (that many other startup managers miss), and more, but use it carefully.

Alternatively, average users could use Starter, CCleaner, Revo Uninstaller, etc.

If you have a system full of programs running in the background that don't do very much (and a start menu full of near useless tray icons), then startup managers are especially helpful for increasing system performance. Run programs when you want, not when they decide.
 

Related Cleaning/Tuning Top Picks and Hot Items

• CleanMem -- Download | Review. "Cleans system memory and cache, and actually seems to work. It doesn't run constantly in the tray. So you just set it and forget it (via the task scheduler at user-specified time intervals)."
• Ultimate Windows Tweaker -- Download | Review. "A well equipped tweaker utility that covers user account, security, performance and internet tweaking." Be sure to check out the complementary tweaking guide, here, which largely applies to windows 7 too.

Best Free PDF Writer:

Bullzip PDF Printer or PDFill Writer -- Read Review

"Both have more of the options I need (encrypt and password protect PDF files, add watermarks, append files, adjust output quality, edit metadata), and have worked flawless for me."

PDF writers act like a pseudo printer on your system. When you want to create a PDF document from pretty much any application you just choose to print it to the PDF printer and it creates a PDF document.
 

Best Free PDF Tools Utility:

PDFill PDF Tools -- Download | Review

"Clean and nice user interface, includes most features such as merge, split, reorder, rotate, header and footer with page number, watermark, encrypt and decrypt, convert PDF to images or vice versa, convert PostScript to PDF."

See here for related online apps and services.

Some programs in this review are designed to combine merging, splitting and other capabilities in a single application (like PDFill), but some perform a more specific task (see the Specific Tools section in the review).
 

Best Free PDF Reader/Viewer:

PDF-XChange Viewer -- Download | Review

"Loads reasonably fast, can print PDFs, allows basic annotation without watermarking, good text clarity, allows you to fill and save Adobe PDF forms, extract text and images, magnify text, and export PDF pages or documents to BMP, JPEG, TIFF, PNG formats."

Third party readers like PDF-XChange help you to replace the slow and bulky Adobe PDF Reader.
 

Best Free Office Suite:

OpenOffice -- Download | Review

"OpenOffice covers the basics of office document creation: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. It allows you to save your documents in many choices of file formats, so you'll have no problem exchanging documents with MS Office."

Free substitutes for MS Office like this go a long way to meeting the needs of home users, small businesses, and many others.
 

Related Home/Office Top Picks and Hot Items

• Jarte -- Download | Review. "A clean, light, and task oriented word processor. It provides outlining functions, basic spell checking, screenshot capturing, and PDF exporting. Additionally, it has extra interface layouts/skins, a wealth of formatting options, and support for Rich Text Files (RTF) and Word documents (DOC, DOCX)."
• Abiword -- Download | Review. "A popular, free word processor with an interface similar to Word & WordPerfect. It reads many document types (OpenOffice, MS Word, WordPerfect, RTF, HTML) and you will be pleased with its layout capabilities. Includes spell checking, annotations, common formatting tools, and support for many plugins."
• GnuCash -- Download | Review. "Eases you into accounting equations and helps you keep tabs on your budget."
• Best Free Text Editor -- "General purpose text editors that have more features than Notepad, such as tabbed interfaces and block functions."
• Palm Desktop -- Download | Review. "An excellent, full function PIM, much like Microsoft Outlook without the email client. Track expenses for multiple categories (and in different currencies) and quickly export them to Microsoft Excel and Word."
• Wim's World Clock -- Download | Review. "A light world clock with a choice of virtually any number of time zones."
• Stickies -- Download | Review. "Provides a plethora of advanced features (such as recurring reminders) that really makes it shine."

Best Free High Dynamic Range (HDR) Software:

Picturenaut -- Download | Review

"If you are looking for straight forward images without excessive tone mapping this has to be your top software. Provides image alignment, exposure correction, color balancing, noise level compensation, and derivation of the camera curve from the source images."

HDR photography combines several photos of the same scene, taken at different exposure settings, into one photo. The details of dark areas (from a longer-duration exposure) are combined with the details of brightly lit areas (from a shorter-duration exposure). The result is a single photo that is correctly exposed and also looks more dimensional.
 

Best Free Digital Image Editor:

LightBox Image Editor or Paint.net -- Read Review

"Lightbox is my top pick for basic image editing because it has an attractive user interface and it's simple and straight forward to use.

Paint.net is a very good choice for mid-level photo retouching because of its excellent design and attractive interface. It also has options and tools comparable to commercial software, but it requires you to install Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or newer."

See here for related online apps and services.

Basic editors like Lightbox allow you to quickly make small adjustments to the overall lighting, colors, and tones of your images (along with other tools: cropping, sharpening, red eye correction). But editors like Paint.net offer more advanced tools (layers, captions, shapes, selective adjustments, artistic effects, etc.). See the review for editors comparable to professional programs.
 

Best Free Digital Image Viewer:

Zoner Photo Studio Free -- Download | Review

"It is organized into a manager, a fullscreen viewer and an editor, and is perfect for the needs of average users. It reads many formats, generates thumbnails in a blink, complete with a powerful search with many filters, a lot of display options, full shortcut customization, the ability to temporarily rotate pictures and to straighten them by drawing a horizontal line. You can also organize pictures into albums, geotag, build calendars, stitch panoramas, make 3D pictures and more."

High Quality Image Viewer Alternatives:

• XnView: "It's probably the most versatile of all viewers because it can read nearly 400 types of graphic files and convert any of these to more than 50 formats."
• IrfanView: "This is a first-class product, an amazingly capable application and quite fast at displaying images. It offers plenty of functions for editing, converting, batch processing, slideshow exporting, etc."

Apart from the basic viewing and browsing functions, digital image viewers offer loads of features like editing, filtering, batch processing, organizing, publishing, etc.
 

Best Free Screen Capture Utility:

PicPick -- Download | Review

"A powerful and user friendly screen capture tool with a plethora of features. Captures full screen, active window, and other regions (rectangular, fixed, or freehand). Supports auto-scroll, dual monitors, sound effect and multiple formats. An image editor is included, plus several extras: color picker, screen ruler, protractor, cross hair and whiteboard."

As an alternative to the utilities that come with windows, free screen capture products like PicPick cover many useful features and functions: capture full or selected areas, auto detect windows, snap scrolling windows, allow delayed captures, etc.
 

Related Image Top Picks and Hot Items

• Project DogWaffle -- Download | Review. "Any one of these in the review will definitely satisfy the inner artist in you. My requirements include graphic tablet support and the feel of natural paint on a digital canvas, but support for animation or booklet pages is a plus."
• Picasa 3 -- Download | Review. "Organize photos and videos, import photos from cameras, send photos to many devices, and use many editing features (sufficient for what amateur photographers need)."
• Best Free Photo Noise Reduction Software -- "Noise on a digital image looks like random speckled-color dots in areas where the color should be more even. Noise-reducing programs cannot eliminate noise from your digital photos, but they can make it less obvious."
• Inkscape -- Download | Review. "Highly usable interface and comes with impressive tutorials to ease you into the world of nodes, lines, curves, and shapes" (review). "Suitable for web graphics, logos, creative art, images with text, technical illustrations, etc." (FAQs).
• Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) -- Download | Review. "If you have taken a series of photographs of a scene that you would like to piece together as one picture, then this is what you're looking for." ICE also recently made Gizmo go "Wow!" (here).

Best Free Web Browser:

Mozilla Firefox -- Download | Review

"It's safer and a tad faster than Internet Explorer at general browsing, and is very stable and more standards compliant. Version 3.5 made Firefox even more feature rich with such capabilities as Private browsing (similar to "Incognito Mode" in Chrome). It allows you to customize your web experience with over 2000 free add-ons, providing the most flexibility, expandability, and features of any browser to date."

To setup or backup Firefox, see Gizmo's guides: How to Install Firefox, How to Back up Mozilla Firefox (and Thunderbird).

High Quality Web Browser Alternatives:

• Opera: "Extremely fast at loading pages, loads of features. There's so much to like about it you could easily create a case that it's better than Firefox. Though, alas, there are not nearly as many widgets available as there are Firefox extensions."
• SRWare Iron: "Looks and acts almost exactly like Google Chrome, but without sending any information back to Google's servers. Amazingly fast at loading pages, minimalist interface, with impressive features such as an Incognito Mode for privacy."
   

Best Free Email Client:

Mozilla Thunderbird -- Download | Review

"Intuitive user interface and highly customizable and expandable through add-ons. More secure than Outlook Express and, unlike the latter, is still being actively developed."

In addition to sending and receiving email, email programs like Thunderbird can manage your contacts and calendar, read news groups and RSS newsfeeds, and even integrate with various web-based mail systems like GMail and Hotmail.
 

Best Free Bittorrent Client:

µTorrent -- Download | Review

"Small, efficient, many features, and excellent support. Tied for lowest memory use of all clients."

You may also want to browse the related guides, Optimizing µTorrent for Speed and Optimizing Bittorrent Clients.

Bittorrent quickly became an important download format for its speed, efficiency, and cheapness in distributing content over the Internet. Learn more about Bittorrent here.
 

Best Free Download Manager:

Gigaget -- Download | Review

"The fastest by far at downloading files. Use it to monitor major browsers and the clipboard, resume/pause downloads, import/export lists, encrypt data transfers, and classify downloaded files."

There comes a time when you are downloading a large file and the download stops part of the way through. Specialized download managers like Gigaget will allow you to resume a download, start several concurrent download sessions, and dramatically improve download speed.
 

Best Free Remote Access Software:

UltraVNC or LogMeIn -- Read Review

"UltraVNC offers all the features you need, including auto-configuration, easy user interface, extensive hotkeys and embedded file transfer. Add to that the fact that it's free, secure, reliable and reasonably speedy and you have a winner.

LogMeIn is possibly the fastest most reliable remote control freeware available. It will even allow a PC to remotely control a Macintosh. Excellent tool for accessing home computer or friends/family computers from anywhere."

Remotely administer another computer for off-site troubleshooting or for accessing your home PC while traveling.
 

Related Internet/Network Top Picks and Hot Items

• Best Free HTML Editor -- "Includes WYSIWYG editors for non-technical users who want to create an attractive web site, but also discusses HTML text editors for programmers or for anyone comfortable with coding raw HTML."
• Fire FTP -- Download | Review. "With a robust feature set, ease of use, and browser integration, FireFTP should serve the needs of all but the heaviest power user. FTP clients enable fast bulk file transfers; essential for website management."
• Pidgin -- Download | Review. "Easy-to-use and very functional multi-protocol IM client (see its download page for a long list of supported clients). It aptly calls itself the 'universal chat client'."
• Skype -- Download. "Allows free Skype-to-Skype Internet phone calls with video, but it also has instant messaging and many other features (voicemail, SMS, forwarding)."
• Roboform -- Download | Review. "Full featured and easy to use password manager. Seamlessly integrates with popular browsers, and allows your saved passwords to be used on any PC. But the free version allows only 10 to be stored."
• LastPass -- Download | Review. "A free password manager as good as Roboform and maybe even better. It uses a web service that works in combination with a program that runs on your PC, so your passwords are accessible from different computers."
• NetMeter -- Download | Review. "Provides a graphical representation of the network traffic going in and out of your PC. Has excellent graphics, usability, and configurability."
• InSSIDer -- Download | Review. "A WiFi network finder helps mobile users see the available wireless networks in an area. It also helps you identify the strongest wireless signals and the SSID of an access point. For example, it may help you solve slow and unstable connections that are due to overlapping signals."

Best Free CD / DVD Burning Software:

ImgBurn -- Download | Review

"Most powerful burning application with advanced features, support for every modern optical disc from CD to Blu-Ray, more than 10 image formats, authoring rewritable discs, etc."

Whether backing up data, preparing an audio mix CD, or creating a bootable Linux disc, finding the right burning software is essential.
 

Best Free Media Player:

The KM Player -- Download | Review

"Easy to use and install, awesome playback, and no need for extra codec packs, making it easy to use for those with less experience. Other features include setting multifarious audio and video effects, slow down or increase playback speed with regular tone, etc."

Capable of playing multiple types of media files, including various digital audio and video formats, CDs, and DVDs.
 

Best Free Music Player and Organizer:

Jaangle -- Download | Review

"The library is impressive for organizing music, the download capabilities enhance the music experience (get artist and album photos, reviews, bios, etc.), and the auto continue (or "auto DJ") mode chooses songs based on many tag categories (artist, genre, all music, etc.). It achieves a good balancing act between lightness, resource efficiency, and feature support for music lovers.

If you need more music managing features all in one program, try MusicBee."

Music players like Jaangle and MusicBee serve as excellent MP3 players and play most popular audio formats. As music centric programs, they may inspire you to rip or download music, organize your music collection, or learn more about your favorite artists or songs.
 

Best Free MP3 Tag Editor:

TagScanner -- Download | Review

"Supports basic and extended tags, complete with Music Renamer and Tag Processor. It allows you to preview tag information and cover art from online databases like freedb or Amazon.

But if you prefer a more normal user interface then Mp3tag is a good alternative."

Useful for when you need to playback audio files with their tag information shown correctly or to organize a large music collection based on tag information.
 

Best Free Audio & Video Format Conversion:

iWisoft Free Video Converter -- Download | Review

"Simple polished interface, file and preset editing allowed, good device presets. It even has a few pleasant surprises, such as a basic editing suite built in. In short, this program is an outstanding choice for almost any device conversion."

Despite its name, it converts a huge number of both video and audio formats, and as a nice extra also provides some video editing.

Converters like iWisoft make many different audio and video formats compatible for use with common devices or programs. Most devices will only take a few specific formats; for example, a DVD movie will not play on an iPod without being converted into an MP4 file.
 

Best Free Video Editor:

Avidemux -- Download | Review

"My personal favorite for multi-purpose video editing and processing because of its simplicity, wide range of tools, and well documented tutorials. Supports many file types including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF."

Video editing is becoming ever more prevalent and crucial; both to the aspiring young director and to the mom who just wants to save old memories.
 

Best Free Audio Editor:

Audacity -- Download | Review

"It does all the recording and editing I need, and is much simpler and faster to use than a lot of pay products. It easily applies noise profiles and saves in multiple compressed formats."

Excellent free products like Audacity give a professional touch to your recordings. For example, podcasting enthusiasts use them to record, edit, mix, and save sound on their PCs. They may even make entire downloadable shows that sound almost as good as a professional production.
 

Best Free Online TV Viewer:

JLC's Internet TV Viewer -- Download | Review

"A simple, but effective TV streams viewer that doesn't have much overhead. The channel guide is maintained by users and is very complete. User ratings help you choose good streams, and a favorites category helps you corral the streams you like. Requires Windows Media Player, Real Player, or VLC."

Get Podcasts, video on demand, reruns of past shows, and live video streams. Many TV stations make their over-the-air broadcasts available as Live streams, but quality can vary. You may also find independent and international networks that aren't carried by cable companies.
 

Best Free CD & DVD Emulation Software:

Gizmo Drive -- Download | Review

"Support up to 26 virtual drives, create ISO image, burn ISO files or folders to recordable disks, complete with Gizmo Manager and Image Wizard to perform tasks."

Emulation software allows users to run a CD/DVD image directly from a hard disk after mounting the image to a virtual disk drive. This works the same as or even better than the traditional way of running a CD/DVD from a disk drive.
 

Best Free Streaming Media Recorder:

Jing -- Download | Review

"Comes with an eye-catching interface, and outperforms the competition in the quality of its recorded stream. Allows you to manually select a recording area on your screen, capture images, play videos, save to vendor servers, and create links for public viewing."

A good option for most users is to use a free web service to record streaming media (such as ZamZar, SplanDoo and YouConvertIt), and if that fails, simply record the streaming media while it is playing on your PC.
 

Best Free CD Ripper:

Exact Audio Copy -- Download | Review

"Rips CD imperfections and scratches with ease. Of 800 or so CDs, I only had 7 tracks that EAC couldn't rip perfectly. Given the condition of some of my CDs, that's a mighty impressive performance. Rips to WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, APE, and more audio formats."

Digitize your music collection to use on a computer or other player.
 

Related Multimedia Top Picks and Hot Items

• Best Free DVD Ripper -- "Copy the audio and video content of a DVD to a file in MP4, MPEG, or other video formats. Edit, backup, share, or playback without the need to load a DVD."
• XBMC -- Download | Review. "Highly intuitive and usable features for listening to music, viewing photo albums, or watching digital videos. Organizes your media files intelligently (handling some that Windows Media Center does not), and downloads online information about them. Specially designed for better image and sound quality on big screens or while 'sofa surfing'."

Best Free Backup Software:

GFI Backup -- Download | Review

"It's the top recommendation for average users, with an easy to use backup scheduler and restore function (that restores complete archives or individual files). It also backups files even if they are in use and supports numerous backup locations (including LAN and FTP). You will find GFI similar to Titan Backup, with some nice extras."

See here for related online apps and services. Online backup services allow you to share your data, access it when traveling, or archive it in yet another extra storage location.

Backup software like GFI has wizards and step by step guides to make the process painless, giving you confidence that it will continue to work behind the scenes to protect your data. They include support for scheduling and backing up to local and online storage locations, verification of backup archives, and easy to use restore functions.
 

Best Free Drive Imaging Software:

Paragon Backup and Recovery Free -- Download | Review

"Overall a reliable program with some great features to handle the needs of most users: fast complete backup and restore, basic partitioning, differential backups, individual file restore, cyclic backup, hard drive cloning, and good compression options."

For guidance on drive imaging, see Gizmo's three part article, encouragingly named "Never Re-install Windows Again" -- Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Disk Imaging has rapidly become a must have tool for most users because of its convenience, speed, and ease of use. It nearly eliminates any reason at all for going through the painful process of completely reinstalling, re-updating, and re-customizing Windows. A user can quickly recover from a system crash or a bad virus infection by simply restoring to a backup image.
 

Best Free Software Update Monitor:

Software Update Monitor (SUMo) -- Download | Review

"This is perhaps the best software update monitor for expert users. It's faster than Secunia's PSI and easily adds portable software. It's not restricted to any one download site. However, it doesn't provide direct download links.

Warning: choose the download link."

If you have many scattered programs and programs that don't automatically check for updates, then an update monitor lets you know when new versions come out. They also allow you to scan custom folders to include portable apps. You can then update old software to get the latest features or security fixes.
 

Best Free Folder Synchronization Utility:

PureSync -- Download | Review

"Over all I was very pleased with its numerous features and ease of use, and heartily recommend it to the average user. It has a good preview of what files are going to be copied, updated, or deleted when performing a sync job. Supports scheduling and auto syncing."

Synchronization utilities are important in helping you keep identical versions of your files or folders, say, on both your home computer and office computer.
 

Best Free File Manager:

xplorer² lite -- Download | Review

"Offers more functionality and customization than Windows Explorer, but with an interface sufficiently similar to Explorer that most users will find it easy to learn and use. Supports dual panes and folder tabs."
 

Best Free File Encryption Utility:

TrueCrypt -- Download | Review

"Use this seasoned encryption program when you want an encrypted container that mounts as a virtual drive. You simply mount its encrypted files/volumes and then use the content like any other drive. TrueCrypt's open source status allows peer review of the source code, adding to its trustworthiness. It also comes with a 'Traveler mode' for portable encryption."

Encryption is normally used to protect highly sensitive documents, but it's a good way to stop people from looking at your personal stuff." Learn about other important steps/cautions beyond encryption here.
 

Best Free Partition Manager:

EASEUS Partition Master -- Download | Review

"Intuitive and user-friendly interface, features include resize, move, copy, create, delete, hide, unhide, convert, explore and format partitions with a single step."

One of the objectives of having multiple partitions is for the separation of user files from system files. By keeping user files in a separate partition from the operating system, user files can usually remain intact if the operating system needs to be reinstalled.
 

Related System Top Picks and Hot Items -- Disk & File

• Duplicate Cleaner -- Download | Review. Detect duplicate files.
• SpaceSniffer -- Download | Review. Analyze disk space; find space hogs.
• 7-Zip -- Download | Review. Archive files/folders to better transfer, store, and organize your data.
• TeraCopy -- Download | Review. "Copies large collections of files more quickly, integrates well with Explorer (and other file managers), and gives more stability and better error messages."
• WinMerge -- Download | Review. "Compare and merge the differences between two (or more) versions of the same text file, or detect variations between two different sets of data."
• PC INSPECTOR File Recovery -- Download | Review. Recover data after accidentally deleting it.
• Bulk Rename Utility -- Download | Review. "Rename your files for organizational purposes, including your MP3 libraries and digital image collections."
   

Related System Top Picks and Hot Items -- System Information

• System Information for Windows (SIW) -- Download | Review. "Displays many detailed specs such as CPU, memory, devices, installed programs, processes, services, network, and page file usage."
• SystemExplorer -- Download | Review. Investigate your system: view active processes, end processes, view resource use of processes, and much more.
   

Related System Top Picks and Hot Items -- Desktop & GUI

• Dexpot -- Download | Review. Organize your applications over several virtual desktops or work spaces, and work more efficiently and comfortably.
• QT TabBar -- Download | Review. "Provides some of the desirable features found in replacement file managers, like dual-panes, tabs, favorite folder access, etc., while retaining the speed and familiarity of Windows."
• Best Free Program Launcher -- "Provides a more efficient way of running programs than by using the Windows Start Menu or having your desktop littered with icons."
• Copernic Desktop Search -- Download | Review. Find files/folders faster; use advanced searches. Additionally, here are two lite search utilities reviewed by Gizmo: Everything, Agent Ransack.

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