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  1. PicaView 2.0 (Old but really great for previewing multiple images and converting images with a right-click) * Does not work on Windows 7 64-bit. XnView Shell Extension or NConvert with a plugin for the Windows Shell may be a replacement.
  2. PDF-XChange Viewer 64-bit (fastest and most stable one out there + allows basic editing)
    • I find I like to Uncheck add in for browsers (makes things more stable)
  3. PDF Creators
    1. PrimoPDF (Note this is still not as good as Adobe's PDF creator. You might want to verify the output on an Adobe Reader first). However, it is the only free product so far that passes the printing of a Word Document with an embedded Visio diagram test.
  4. VLC Media Player - play DVDs and almost any video format
  5. Microsoft Office - Really I tried alternatives but this is the de facto standard for work.
  6. Microsoft Visio Professional - Again the best drawing tool out there.
  7. Can't stand using the Lotus Notes client - And of course IBM makes it next to impossible to download http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/damo/ and http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21161211 and http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nflsblog.nsf/dx/latest-damo-release?opendocument&comments
  8. Resize Browser Window - Useful for consistent screenshots.
  9. HMA Online Proxy Browser - I use to change my country to see appropriate prices when browsing.

Manage Your Music

  1. TuneUp - Automatically fix songs and add album cover art based on song samples and TuneUp's database.
  2. http://www.discogs.com/ - If you can't find your album art on TuneUp use this.

Desktop Sharing

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Video Conferencing

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  1. Erase - with a right-click you can securely delete or move confidential file
    1. Disable running of scheduled tasks
  2. Metapad* - almost as tiny and fast as notepad but with unlimited undo's and a couple of other nice features. However, I do find I use notepad++ more often now.
  3. Snagit - screen capture utility. Most used feature, autoscroll, which scrolls to capture all contents of a window.
  4. GoFullPage - Chrome Browser extension to capture entire webpage
  5. Quick SFV 64-bit - use md5 or sfv files to ensure integrity during transport of files.
  6. Synergy - Control multiple computers from one keyboard and mouse over your network.
  7. Oscar's Renamer Pro - I have not tried this, but it promised to be similar to Chgname 3.2 which allows renaming of multiple files or folders by converting the list into a text editor. Really great way of renaming things on mass.
  8. TeraCopy - Consider TeraCopy when copying lots of files over a network. It is faster, verifies files, allows pausing and keeps track of failed copies which you can redo.
  9. Any Video Convert - This was the only free utility I could find that works with VOB files and could combine them. VLC and Handbrake could convert, but they had trouble loading multiple VOBs.

Secure Your Data

  1. AntiVirus I use different ones on different computers. As a power user I disable the on the fly scanning to conserve cpu and memory.
    1. Avira Personal Edition - has highest detection rate but has pop-up advertisement. Though it can be disabled, I actually recommend buying a license.
    2. Avast Home Edition - Recommended by Dickson. Very good but I don't like having to renew my keys every once in a while.
    3. AVG - Free version does not check for malware.
  2. Telnet - you actually have to go into Windows 7 and install this manually.
  3. Any Password - centralize your passwords. Now I am looking at an open source alternative called KeePass which I can hopefully hook up to an application server and make online. Even more ideal, I can perhaps hook up KeePass with a java web app with 2-Factor authentication.
  4. KeePass* - a central place to keep your important data with one master password or master key file. I currently am using the Kepass 2.10.
  5. LastPass - Looks to be better than Any Password and KeePass in that it keeps passwords centrally on a server. Master password is hashed locally on desktop. Also has browser plugins.
  6. Second Copy - I have been using this forever to backup my data. My favourite feature, it can keep versions of you backups, like the last 3 versions of the file.
  7. SyncToy - Microsoft provides a free product for syncing folders. Not sure if feature rich as Second Copy (multiple backup versions) but will ask Roderick to install and check it out (since he's not using anything at the moment).

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  1. FTPDMIN - Minimal ad-hoc zero footprint command line FTP server with no password required. Use for quick transfer.

SSH and SFTP Clients

If you heavily use SSH consider putting together an web page that will launch an ssh application.

Critical for administrator in order of preference,

  1. Termius - My new favourite on the Mac and may be better than BitVise.
  2. BitVise Tunnelier - The simplest and most reliable program I have found for SFTP and Tunneling that is also free for personal use and individual use within a company.
    1. No Putty Integration (console included is not as universally compatible)
    2. GUI for tunneling
    3. Hides in System tray
    4. Does not support drag and drop from desktop
  3. Kitty (Portable Version)* - Takes the actual Putty code base and improves the interface with the following key features. Here are the details of my personal configuration file,
    1. Portable option - instead of Windows Registry saves to local file in the directory
    2. Transparent Windows (CTRL-Up Arror and CTRL-Down Arrow)
    3. CTRL-F7 Pin Window to always be on top (useful with Transparency and especially with second or third monitor) - though I tend to use Winkey+F9 using Hoekey
    4. Improved sizeable, searchable, folder based session manager, but still not as good as Putty Connection Manager
    5. Change default or individual colour scheme to one of these collections
  4. Putty - I find this to be the most reliable compatible and universal. However, the interface is dated and Kitty is much better. I now package this as part of Putty Connection Manager. Generally I adjust the defaults to:
    1. Window - Columns = 100, Lines of scrollback to 2000
    2. Window, Translation - Received data assumed to be in which character set: UTF-8
  5. Putty Connection Manager mremoteng.org - Has a unzip package version. It is not truly zero footprint, but you can export all your connects and import to a new computer.
  6. Super Putty (code based from Putty Connection Manager which appears abandoned)* (evaluating move to mremoteng.org) - An updated tabbed and tree based listing interface to Putty (no install, though it does use the registry consider talking to this developers about not doing this)
    1. For convenience I create a manual package. Just download the manual package and unzip to a directory of your choice and then execute puttycm.exe.
  7. SecureCRT - Cross platform and has all the features you would want. Approximately $100 for a license.
    1. Moving Sessions btw Mac and Windows
    2. Launching from Browser (it's just a checkbox)
  8. BitVise Tunnelier - The simplest and most reliable program I have found for SFTP and Tunneling that is also free for personal use and individual use within a company.
    1. No Putty Integration (console included is not as universally compatible)
    2. GUI for tunneling
    3. Hides in System tray
    4. Does not support drag and drop from desktop

This is a very important tool to my everyday work these days,

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  1. ieWatch (watch all details of traffic flow in browser)
  2. Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers where I manually bundle Java and Tomcat.
  3. TortoiseSVN + improve performance + configure to integrate with Araxis
  4. Adobe Photoshop 7.01 - Small and light and does everything I need compared to the newer editions.
  5. Photopea - Free Web Version of Photoshop. For some people this is all they might need. Also, extremely useful when on someone else's computer with not graphics software.
  6. Tail for Win32 - Nice tail utility which can watch files. Got it from Dimitri.
  7. JAD (JAva Decompiler)
  8. WinTask - Record Windows actions as macros. Great for repetitive testing of websites.
  9. Notepad++* - Recommend by Shawn. No installer required. No install necessary. There is also an option to make it portable so nothing is kept in the registry. Check out my configuration. More neat things about the editor,
    1. “Alt + Left Mouse Click” puts you in Column Mode Select
    2. To select columns without using the mouse use ALT+SHIFT and the cursor keys
    3. UTF-8 support
    4. text highlighting for many languages and more via plugins
  10. TopStyle - The best CSS editor and as of version 4.0, a very good all around editor for HTML too. The search and replace functionality I find to be particularly easy to use (allows simple * type searches), powerful (regular expressions) and reliable (unlike Windows built in search). From the creator of HomeSite if you still remember that.
  11. RegexBuddy - Still to try. Looks like promising GUI based builder for making Regular Expressions.
  12. SoapUI - Web Services simulator. Watched a developer use it and it was pretty impressive.
  13. ??? - with the 2012 rising of mobile devices, we once again need to simulate slow downloads.

Security

Test Old SSL on Browsers - Badssl.com let's you see how your older browsers might react to older SSL setups.

LDAP Browsers

  1. JXplorer* - recommended by Shawn who's a PKI expert so it must be good.
  2. Softerra - polished but I recall not as good as JXplorer and it costs money.

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