Some suggested software that does a great job.

Hello, I've been lurking on these forums for a while, and decided to finally register and add a few of my thoughts on software here. There are some excellent threads on good software around this part of the forum, but as always I have some favorites of my own.

Here's my list of useful (free) things; It's not a COMPLETE list, see the stickies for that.. Some of the things I'll list here are alternatives to suggested software in other threads, I'll try to give a brief comment on why I prefer one over another.

NKProds nCleaner - While ccleaner does a good job, it has messed things up for me a number of times. nCleaner hasn't caused any problems at all for me (yet). It does a wonderful job of cleaning up (both disk and registry), and also includes some basic tweaking. The UI is a huge improvement over the really unintuitive ccleaner, and is definetely a better choice for inexperienced users (I recommend it for everyone though, regardless of level of expertise).

PeaZip - It looks better than 7-zip, unpacks TONS of formats and has a native x64 binary... Nothing else to say.

HotSwap! - Safely remove eSATA drives (and other stuff if you choose).... Yes, it needs to be done.

Serious Samurize - Widgets on steroids, there's nothing more customizable. It's not made to be simple though, so expect to fiddle about ALOT if you want something unique.

There goes... Just my few cents.

FWIW, 7Zip also has native 64bit binaries as well....

But I do like Pea, almost as much as I still love me WinRAR....

Thanks mike-cow, nice list.

I think I still prefer WinRAR to PeaZip, but it is definitely better than most unzippers.

WinRAR is great, it just has an (arguably) annoying thing about it, it's not free...

And while I'm at it; Here's another little tidbit I seem to have forgotten:

Startup Delayer - Make nonessential software wait before they launch at startup. It cut a good 30 seconds off my boot time, so it's DEFINETELY useful.

And I forgot my all time favorite audioplayer...

Foobar2000 - It supports Windows Audio Session API exclusive mode output support through WASAPI plugin (Vista SP1 only!) for unparallelled soundquality. Imho there's nothing that sounds better, and with the right tweaks it can even look better.

Haha, WinRAR doesn't do a very good job at keeping free users out though. After the trial time runs out it still works.

That Startup Delayer looks handy.... I'm gonna give that a try.