Make the best of Windows

Even if I can avoid Microsoft Windows both at home and at work, I also realize that some less fortunate people are forced to use Windows on daily basis. The Windows experience can be made a lot more pleasant with some free software.

In this post I have tried to collect links to some useful free Windows software. These applications might not be fully equal with their commercial counterparts. Sometimes they are better sometimes worse, but they are free and get the job done.

Most of these programs are also less resource hungry then their commercial counterparts and are thus excellent for use on netbooks.

Office:

• OpenOffice.org - MS Office alternative (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access )
  
• AbiWord - Lightweight MS Word alternative
  
• Scribus - Page layout software (PageMaker, FrameMaker)
• Dia - Drawing program inspired by MS Visio
  

Internet:

• Firefox - Powerful Web browser (Internet Explorer replacement)
  
• Thunderbird - MS Outlook alternative e-mail client
  

Graphics:

• Gimp - Adobe Photoshop / Corel Photo-Paint alternative
• Paint.NET - Adobe Photoshop alternative
• Incscape - Adobe illustrator / CorelDraw alternative
• Hugin - Panorama photo stitcher
  
• Blender - 3D content creation suite

Audio & Video:

• MPlayer - Most advanced video player available. Works well on older hardware because of very good resource usage.
  
• VLC - An advanced but more user friendly media player than the one above.
• Audacity - Sound editor
  
• CDex - Audio CD extractor
  

Misc:

• 7-Zip - Advanced file archiver with a high compression ratio.
• Notepad++ - Advanced text editor, people used to Pfe will like this.
  
• ISO Recorder - Quickly burn ISO-files to CD/DVD