10 Best Free / Open Source Software For Windows

It has been a very long time since I wrote about the 100 free software for windows. While some has been overtook by better software, apparently great software are still great, though with with different version number.

Today, commemorating Firefox 5 years birthday, here is the list of best 10 free or open source software for windows. All these are software that I use most on daily basis:

Internet: Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released exactly 5 years ago, on 9 November 2004. It was released with huge fanfare, and month after month bite away market share from the then only major browser, Microsoft Internet Explorer. Today, Firefox recorded 24.07% of the usage share of web browsers as of October 2009, making it the second most popular browser in terms of current use worldwide after Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It remains one of the best web browser available, with huge collections of add-on functionality.
Multimedia Player: K-Lite Mega Codec Pack
K-Lite Codec Pack, with the included Media Player Classic, is probably the only multimedia player you need to play all your audio and video files. It supports hundreds of different codecs, including Real media and Quicktime media. You can even save some streaming AVI using the “Save As” function.
Image Editor: GIMP
The GNU Image Manipulation Programme is a software graphics editor software, mainly used as an image retouching and editing tool. This software is as powerful as Adobe Photoshop. The main difference tough, lies on the price. While Photoshop cost few hundred bucks, GIMP is free.
Office Suite: OpenOffice.Org
If you still think there is nothing as good as Microsoft Office for your daily office task, you are obviously living in the stone-age. Online office suite such as Google’s Office Productivity Suite has been getting better and better. If you can’t live without an offline solution, grab the OpenOffice.Org. Other then some getting used to it, most likely you won’t miss a thing from Microsoft Office.
FTP Client: FileZilla
FileZilla is a fast and reliable FTP client and server with lots of useful features and an intuitive interface, supporting FTP, SFTP, and FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS). It was actually started as a computer science class project in the second week of January 2001 by Tim Kosse and two classmates.
7-Zip
Forget Winzip, WinRAR or Windows built-in archiver. Throw any compression format, and 7-Zip will handle it. It supports zip, rar, cab, 7z, tar, gz, among others. Moreover, it has a much faster loading, compressing and decompressing time to boot.
PDF Reader: Foxit Reader
Foxit Reader is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small download size, breezing-fast launch speed, accurate rendering and amazingly rich feature set. With Foxit Reader, you no longer have to download a huge PDF reader from another software company, go through a lengthy installation process and wait for an annoying splash window to disappear just to open a PDF document.
Torrent Download: µTorrent
µTorrent is the world’s most popular BitTorrent client. Most of the features present in other BitTorrent clients are present in µTorrent, including bandwidth prioritization, scheduling, RSS auto-downloading and Mainline DHT (compatible with BitComet). Additionally, µTorrent supports the Protocol Encryption joint specification (compatible with Azureus 2.4.0.0 and above, BitComet 0.63 and above) and peer exchange.
Text Editor: Notepad2
Similar to Notepad that comes free with Windows, this Notepad2 follows the principle of small, simple, fast and light-weight text editor with a number of additional functions like syntax highlighting for common language like HTML. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system’s registry.
PDF Writer: PrimoPDF
PrimoPDF easily creates PDFs from any Windows program you can print. Use it like a printer in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint or any other Windows application. Create PDF files faster with the only free PDF creator to support one-click, drag-and-drop PDF creation.