Drivers and Freeware

J

Jonty

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
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1,411
Hi guys

Please find below a list of popular drivers and freeware for your reference. I will update this list every month, but let me know if you notice any inaccuracies or dead links.

If you have suggestions, you're welcome to reply or private message me. Of course everyone has different opinions, so not all suggestions will be added in order to keep the list at a manageable size.

Kind regards

Jonty


Drivers

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Important! Always make sure you download the appropriate drivers for your particular product, operating system, language etc. Installing the wrong drivers may damage your system!

Graphics Cards

Desktop

Laptop

Motherboards

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Tip! It is recommended that you check your motherboard manufacturer's website for the latest specific downloads for your board.



Entertainment

Players

Codecs

  • Combined Community Codec Pack (Allows you to play a variety of media files without installing separate players, similar to K-Lite. Thanks nath!)
  • DivX 6.8 (Allows you to watch AVI and other videos encoded in the popular DivX format)
  • Quicktime Alternative 2.6.0 (Allows you to watch Quicktime files without installing Quicktime itself)
  • Real Alternative 1.8.0 (Allows you to watch Real files without installing Real Player)
  • Xvid 1.1.3 (Allows you to watch AVI and other videos encoded in the popular Xvid format)


Internet

Browsers

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Tip! Beta software is usually intended for advanced users only. It offers the latest features, but may be unstable.

Plugins

Email

Instant Messaging



Productivity

Office

Design and Photos

  • GIMP 2.4.6 (Powerful open-source drawing software)
  • Paint.net 3.1.1 (Microsoft-backed free drawing software)
  • Picasa (Google's photo management and touch-up utility)
Security

Miscellany

  • 7-Zip 4.5.7 (Powerful archiving software for ZIP, RAR, GZ etc. files)
  • FileHippo (Checks your installed software is up-to-date)
  • Notepad2 2.1.19 (Highly-customizable Notepad replacement)
 
J

Jonty

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
1,411
Hi nath

Thanks for the tip! I've added your suggestion. I'll bump your rep when the forums next allow me to :)

Kind regards
 
MYstIC G

MYstIC G

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For what it's worth, I've found the following to be very useful in keeping those version numbers up to date:
FileHippo.com Update Checker - FileHippo.com

CCCP is also well worth the download, much better than 90% of the other bloated codec packs out there.
 
J

Jonty

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
1,411
hehe, thanks Meg, added :) I didn't know about that service before, it sounds handy.

Kind regards
 
MYstIC G

MYstIC G

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It's quite good. The fact that you can install it or use it stand-alone is very good imho as you can stick it on a USB key and off it goes on any 'Doze PC.
 
Bob007

Bob007

Prince Among Men
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
585
Err a few I of the things I use on a regular basis.

Spybot SnD Anti-Spyware. Clear out all that clutter you pick up around the www.

AD Aware SE (free edition) Alternative and for me, used as well ass Spybot SnS above. Alone they great, togeather they are brillant.

and Guru3d for ya graphics drivers old and new. First stop shop when am doing a system rebuild.

Dunno how deep you going with this, I got loads of 1 job stuff I can add but i'd have to go through my bookmarks, stuff like AFT Cleaner which is an often used and very important little program i carry around.
 
Kryten

Kryten

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Great post & list, Cheers Jonty. I'd hand over some rep but I've given you far too much already, according to the system ;)

Nothing really to add, nice and comprehensive :D
 
JingleBells

JingleBells

FH is my second home
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Mar 25, 2004
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I find the following useful:
CCleaner - Great for fixing old registry entries & removing temporary files.
Process Explorer along with WhoLockMe are very handy when windows says files are locked, just right click the file to see where it's locked and close the file handle in Process Explorer. Infact, most of the SysInternals software are pretty good, AutoRuns for instance, tells you exactly what software/scripts will run on startup.
 
Kryten

Kryten

Old Cow.
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Dec 22, 2003
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Oh, I do have something to add, my apologies:

Super, video conversion, any format to any other format. Great for mobile/PSP style conversions. And free.

SUPER © .

Scroll down to near bottom, select "Start downloading Super now"
Next page, click Download and Use half way down.
Download link right at bottom.
Long winded, but worth it for decent freeware conversion software.
 
Bob007

Bob007

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Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
585
Blender 3d arty type thing, go on play, you'll love it :)

Filezilla FTP software, client and server(doze server only) . very sweet and very free.

Clonezilla cloneing software, Very good free/open source replacement for norton/symantec pay for jobies.

Virtual Box Like virtual PC, java based so runs on many OS's. sweet to have the same package for it regardless of operatingsystem.
 
Yaka

Yaka

Part of the furniture
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Google SketchUp
Google Earth
FreewareGeeks :: Download UltimateDefrag Freeware Edition 1.72 : UltimateDefrag is the ultimate defragger and File Placement Optimizer.

XBMC // most stable ver is the mac one, tux and win32 vers are good as well

zsIRC - IRC for Pocket PC
PCSX2.net - News
XChat: Multiplatform Chat Program
Irssi - The client of the future
XnView
IrfanView - Official Homepage - one of the most popular viewers worldwide
RivaTuner
The Official ImgBurn Website
http://www.3r1c.eu/mkv2vob/mkv2vob.exe
blender.org - Home
Terragen™
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/downloads.html
Inkscape. Draw Freely.
foobar2000
.:: NOTEPAD++ ::.
CPUID
DScaler - TV & Video Deinterlacer
GSpot Codec Information Appliance
QuickPar for Windows
HandBrake
Elephants Dream
Big Buck Bunny last are free movies made with blender:p
TVersity Home
MozBackup - Backup tool for Firefox and Thunderbird

http://www.dd-wrt.com
Tomato Firmware | polarcloud.com
Total Commander - home total commander
SpeedFan - Access temperature sensor in your computer
 
TdC

TdC

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Dec 20, 2003
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30,925
Bob007 said:
Virtual Box Like virtual PC, java based so runs on many OS's. sweet to have the same package for it regardless of operatingsystem.
Click to expand...

on a whim I downloaded this and installed the latest OpenBSD and FreeBSD images in two virtual machines. the only thing I found picky was how to get the networking, err, working in my Vista Ultimate 64b. Because of Vista's shitness, I had to disable UAC and make my regular user an admin so I could configure the network bridge needed to get the networking of the VM's to work without going insane with rage.

There is a trick to getting all elements of the bridge to work properly, ie VM's see the interweb and eachother and the host system. If you guys want, I can do a condensed writeup for FH based around Vista.

Some of the unix hosts networking config seem pretty damn hard though if one were not used to such a thing o0
 
Kryten

Kryten

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Going to keep this topic running with updates on important popular driver updates for nVidia Forceware, ATI Catalyst, Sound Blaster etc.
I'll concentrate on Vista drivers unless requested otherwise, mostly as most XP drivers are mature enough as they stand.

So,
Nvidia, for the Geforce 8/9 series cards v 175.19 :
Vx64 GeForce Release 175
Vx86 GeForce Release 175

Creative Labs update X-Fi drivers for Vista restoring Dolby and DTS functions:
Creative Worldwide Support

AMD Catalyst:
AMD GAME Drivers & Tools
 
Bob007

Bob007

Prince Among Men
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
585
XXClone

I'm putting this here after i used it to overcome a problem i had. I had to split a software raid 0 (2 sata drives stripped) but needed to back up the system to a useable state and restore it to 1 of the sata drives from the old raid array.

After trying to find a cloner that saw the raid array as a single disc and not 2 discs, I came accross this and tried it. It installs and clones the system from within windows. So all the software for running the array is running at the time. Its fast, did about 40 gig clone in 45 mins with system up and running. 2 clones later, here i am. Deffo something I'd recommend.
 
Kryten

Kryten

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Ewww, music background sites, one of the banes of my life!
 
soze

soze

I am a FH squatter
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Jan 22, 2004
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ImgBurn Great CD burning app useful for creating ISO's from disks and writing ISO to disk. Has an ok File/Folder to disk use as well.

CutePDF Free PDF creator and a nice small size.

OldVersion.com Found this site useful before when the latest version gives you trouble.
 
M

Mazling

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Jan 11, 2004
Messages
1,419
Moitah.net

This site has a few useful apps - the most useful of which I think is FLVextract! A free app to extract audio and video from flash videos ... :)
 
Kryten

Kryten

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For the Firefox users, look up the Fire.FM extension, in browser music player, enter your favourite artists and it trawls radio stations etc for other similar music you'll like. So far it's found 0 out of 30 odd tracks that I don't like :)


And nnngh, Firefox's spell checker doesn't even recognise Firefox as a word...
 
MYstIC G

MYstIC G

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That's what "Add to dictionary" is for Kryt
 
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