Dan’s Tech-n-Stuff Weblog

BlogJet

Easily create, edit and delete blog postings. Compatible with a variety of blog services, such as Live Spaces, SharePoint, Blogger, WordPress, and many others.

Trial available? Yes
Price: Û29.95 (about $40 US dollars)
Homepage: http://www.codingrobots.com/blogjet/

Windows Live Writer

Easily create, edit and delete blog postings. Compatible with a variety of blog services, such as Live Spaces, SharePoint, Blogger, WordPress, and many others.

Trial available? n/a
Price: Free!
Homepage: http://get.live.com/writer/overview

Communication

Skype

Great instant messanging program with text chat, VoIP, video chat, SkypeIn for receiving phone calls from land lines and SkypeOut for placing calls to land lines.

Trial available? n/a
Price: Free!
Homepage: http://www.skype.com/

Graphics & Video

HandBrake

Great, easy to use DVD ripper.

Trial available? n/a
Price: Free!
Homepage: http://handbrake.fr/

Paint.NET

My (current) favorite free Photoshop alternative for Windows.

Trial available? n/a
Price: Free!
Homepage: http://www.getpaint.net/

Picasa

Organize, tweak, and share your digital photosin this easy to use app. Great alterntive to iPhoto for Windows users.

Trial available? n/a
Price: Free!
Homepage: http://picasa.google.com/

VLC

Great freeware video player that can play pretty much every video format in the world. Having trouble playing a video file? Check out VLC.

Trial available? n/a
Price: Free!
Homepage: http://www.videolan.org/

Misc.

IE7Pro

IE7 pretty much sucks, but IE7Pro helps it suck less by adding things like inline search, crash recovery, proxy switching, user agent switching, ad blocking and web page capturing (among others).

Trial available? n/a
Price: Free!
Homepage: http://www.ie7pro.com/

IE Tab

Using Firefox as your web browser is a good idea, but for some sites you need to use IE. You can open IE, or you can install the IE Tab addon for Firefox and open a new tab in Firefox using IE’s rendering engine, in effect opening an IE tab inside of Firefox.

Trial available? n/a
Price: Free!
Homepage: http://ietab.mozdev.org/

Vista Drive Icon

Say what you will about Windows Vista, but the drive icons that show the remaining free space on the drive is nice. Now you can add that feature to XP too with Vista Drive Icon.

Trial available? n/a
Price: Free!
Homepage: http://drvicon.sourceforge.net/

Maintenance

CCleaner

Great program for cleaning up what other programs leave behind.

Trial available? n/a
Price: Free!
Homepage: http://www.ccleaner.com/

PDF

Foxit Reader

Adobe Acrobat is bloated crap. Need to read PDF’s on Windows? Check out Foxit Reader.

Trial available? n/a
Price: Free!
Homepage: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

RSS Readers

Thunderbird

Thunderbird is a great email client, but did you know its also a nice, free RSS reader?

Trial available? n/a
Price: Free!
Homepage: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/