MP3 Player (and organizer)

winamp

Extremely useful because A) it’s a complete library, B) it’s fast and (most important) it saves ALL DATA (library stuff like ratings and so on) in a database file which doesn’t get lost when you are reinstalling your windows machine. Check it out! (Yes, I know WinAmp and MediaPlayer – but they all can’t cope with musikCube).

Replaced by:

Archiver (ZIP,RAR,ARJ,…)

Virtual CD drive (mount ISOs and more)

Daemon tools – Mounts many kinds of CD/DVD/…-images into a virtual device.

Videochat and audio-conferencing

Skype is the best allround tool regarding audio and video conferencing.

Messenger

Texteditor

Movieplayer

Best on-the-market video player – plays nearly every format and has the necessary codecs already onboard.

Bittorrent client

uTorrent is one of the fastest, smallest and easiest uTorrent client out there. Compared to other clients the download speeds are really fast. And uTorrent also runs on linux (using wine) without any problems.

myTO

Homepage

Plan your tasks and track your effort.

Replaced by my own tool: myTO

DateEdit

Quote:”My Media System is an application that manages, displays and plays media content such as videos, music, pictures, and more. MMS runs perfectly on anything from a Set-Top-Box connected to your TV-Set, to your specially tailored multimedia PC and HD display.”

My experience is that MyMediaSystem is very very fast, lightweight (perfect for my EPIA system) and capable of doing everything you expect from a HTPC!

LINUX ONLY!

MediaPortal

Quote:” MediaPortal is an Open Source application ideal for turning your PC / TV into a very advanced Media Center. MediaPortal allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch and store your videos and DVDs, view, schedule and record live TV as a digital video recorder and much much more. You get MediaPortal as Open Source software. This means you can help in developing MediaPortal or tweak it for your own needs with lots of innovating plugins from our great community. “

Very sophisticated media centre solution, but you have to have a DirectX9 graphics hardware and plenty of CPU power to get it really going…

WINDOWS ONLY!

Backup / Synchronization / RSYNC tool

cwRsync

cwRsync is a port of the famous “rsync” to Win. It’s based on an easy- to-configure batch file which expects two folders and some options. It’s just transfering the delta between these two folders. It can also transfer data over SSH.

Synchronisation tool for windows

SyncToy

Quote from microsoft.com: “SyncToy is a free PowerToy that provides an easy to use, highly customizable program that helps users to do the heavy lifting involved with the copying, moving, and synchronization of different directories. Most common operations can be performed with just a few clicks of the mouse, and additional customization is available without added complexity. SyncToy can manage multiple sets of folders at the same time; it can combine files from two folders in one case, and mimic renames and deletes in another. Unlike other applications, SyncToy actually keeps track of renames to files and will make sure those changes get carried over to the synchronized folder.”

Windows XP Administration

Sysinternals suite

Sysinternals created a huge amount of tools you want to have (at least when you’ve used a linux once).

The suite includes nice tools to control your PC remotely per commandline, and also some graphical tools that e.g. replace your taskmanager with a much better one.

As Microsoft kind of bought Sysinternals, you can find the sysinternals tools on the microsoft homepage. Best tools are

- process explorer

- ps tools suite

- autoruns

Remote desktop

A specially enhanced VNC server and client called TightVNC. Should be installed on every machine.

Virtualization / virtual machines

VMWare server. The #1 virtualization team now offer their (former) top product for free!!

SSH Client

Putty

The most famous client on Win for SSH.

Port of SSH to windows (I used it especially for tunneling requests over port 80 ;D).

Sound editor

Audio editor first class, comparable to former tools like “SoundForge”. If you want to edit many

CD Ripper (CD->MP3)

You want to rip a CD to mp3? Then this is definitely the tool to go for!

Video editing tool

virtualdub.org

Whenever you want to change a movie codec or you want to extract streams out of a movie – you have to use virtualdub.

OS

A linux operating system, easy to install, easy to use, and smarter than nearly every other linux out there – some say it’s even easier to use than windows. (btw. that was me )

Ubuntu was (is) derived from the even more famous linux distribution called debian!

If you are searching for an easy but perfect up-to-date linux for your home desktop or server (router e.g.) – check the ubuntu site.

OS

From my point of view nothing is as “hard” as debian! And “hard” doesn’t mean hard to use but “hard” to crack.

Debian should be used whenever you want a very very very secure but still maintainable server (e.g. root server). Everything “harder” than debian will end up in OpenBSD or similar (which is – from my point of view – not comfortable enough).

Content management system

“Website Baker” is a great flexible but very easy to install and use content management system. You can create each kind of design with it in CSS2 without having to touch existing php code. Also there are a lot of modules for nearly every kind of usage. For sure, if you’re developing a high performance non-plus-ultra intranet application you should better go for an application framework.

But if it’s a homepage you want to maintain – go get yourself a copy of Website Baker. I’ll promise you will be pleased with it.

Version Control System

Subversion is a really GREAT stable centralized version control system. And shell extensions for it are available for many operating systems. Whenever you want to develop something really fast with a few developers -> use SVN.

And for everything you’re doing for your own -> ALSO use SVN. Versioning is essential!

Version Control System

Bazaar is the most potential and also a very impressive decentralized version control system (please don’t ask me for the difference between centralized VCS and decentralized ones – use wikipedia instead). Today there are less stable shell extensions for it available, so I currently prefer SVN. But I’m pretty sure in half a year or so Bazaar will be at least as enhanced as subversion is today.

ARM development

If you want to develop software for an ARM-core microcontroller and you want to debug your software afterwards using your JTAG-device… this is what you want. Really, believe me. Using Eclipse for debugging a microcontroller is really really exciting!

AVR development

The standard free development toolchain containing everything you need to start the development of software for ATMEL microcontrollers.

The absolut perfect software for merging files – nearly every file format is supported (or can be by the usage of plugins). It also supports folder and FTP sync PERFECTLY!

Use it once and you now why I love it!! free