Nixadmins.net

As some of you might know I’m not a Windows only user. I do use an iMac at home for all my design and photo work. I also love the simplicity of OS X. It does what you expect it to and it does it well. This is probably why I feel the need to post some of the software’s I as a 1+ year Apple user have found useful.

I’m sure there are plenty more out there and if you whish to ad something to my list please do so in the comments.

I also want to point out that not all of them are free. Some cost, but as most programs for OS X they cost under 100 USD so it’s really not a big deal. The list is in no particular order.

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This is a short list of some of the most useful programs I have found for Windows. Some of these I use on a daily basis and some from time to time. One thing is true for all of them, they are free, as in free of charge. If you have favorites and great software you use in your daily work feel free to share by commenting below.

Mozilla Firefox

This one needs no introduction, as there are millions of Firefox users out there. I find Firefox the best browser out there. Firefox has many plugins that I use all the time. Some of them are

• StumleUpon, never get bored again
• FireBug, Extremely useful for web developers
• IETab, A great add-on so I don’t have to start Internet Explorer even to check if the website is compatible. And if you use Outlook Web access you can have IETab start as soon as you type in the address, goes for every site that doesn’t work in Firefox.

Firefox works and supports standards.

http://www.getfirefox.com

Windows Live Writer

If you are a fellow blogger like me this should be common knowledge. I still haven’t found a better offline editor for my Wodpress blog than this one. It supports spell check, you can preview your posts and it is quite small on resources.

What I like most is the easy way of dropping in images in posts and setting the properties of the image. If you haven’t tried it you can find it at

http://download.live.com/writer

Smart Defrag

Using Windows computers as much as I do I know how important defragmentation is. Your system will eventually clutter your drive and it will become unresponsive. Smart Defrag to the rescue.

Smart defrag is the best defragmenter I’ve found that’s free. You can set it to do scheduled defragmentation’s and it organizes your files according to how frequently you use them, so programs and files that are frequently used will be close together making the search time shorter.

http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html#

TrueCrypt

If you use USB memory sticks (and these days who doesn’t) you might want to take a look at TrueCrypt. With it you can encrypt files, folder even whole hard disks and as I said all these programs are free. I use truecrypt to keep a container for some more sensitive files on my memory stick. You can make a container and just mount it as a local disk whenever you need it. This way I can still access non sensitive material on my stick and protect the  sensitive material from prying eyes.

http://www.truecrypt.org

Paint.NET

Paint.NET is a free image editing program. Granted I don’t use this as much as I could, mostly editing screenshots but it had to get on this list because it is a brilliant light image editor. And when you don’t need a dinosaur like Photoshop then why pay for it. There are plenty of other software out there that you can sink your money into. One of them being donating to all great free software you are using. Even if donating to them always doesn’t work out as you would think se this post on codinghorror.com donating.

http://www.getpaint.net/index.html

FileZilla

Filezilla is something I found years and years ago and it is still the one FTP/SFTP client I always install on all my computers. It’s fast,easy to use and supports drag and drop in Windows. They also have a server version of FileZilla but I’m sorry to say I have never tried it out. If anyone reading this has experiences using it please comment and tell us your thoughts about the server.

http://filezilla.sourceforge.net

In closing

There are many lists of free software out there. These are the software’s I’ve been using and help me get my work done or get done faster. Your thoughts and comments are more than welcome and if you think you can replace one or more of these with something else that is free and better then please let me know.

Something I’ve been looking for a long time is a good RSS reader for my computer. Right now I am using Google Reader but something local is what I eventually want.