No, Windows won't ever compete with Linux on price. However, even though Microsoft isn't giving away their RTM operating systems for free, they do offer a lot of great software and services at no charge. Here are my six favorites -- feel free to share yours with us in the comments!

1. Windows Live Writer - If you don't blog, Live Writer probably isn't that useful to you. If you do, though, it's hard to find a Windows application that can compete with WLW. It's got loads of great features including plugin support so I can add things like Twitter integration.

2. SysInternals - There are so many useful apps under the SysInternals umbrella - Autoruns, Process Explorer, Desktops, RegMon - the list goes on and on. There's also live.sysinternals.com to provide easy access to them all when I forget my usb flash drive. Awesome.

This weekend I finished setting up a fresh triple-boot install on my MSI laptop. With my operating systems ready to go, the time had come to start reinstalling applications. While it wasn't a conscious decision, I noticed that the majority of my apps were Open Source - so I decided to keep the ball rolling.

Even if you haven't just gone through a reformat, these are great applications and well worth installing. If you have, then hopefully this list will provide you with a solid base of programs to get you started with your fresh, new Windows install!

Web Browsers: Chromium, Firefox
They excel at different things, so I install both browsers by default. Chromium is great for all-purpose surfing, while I use Firefox and my favorite extensions to tackle my daily web-based work.

Office: OpenOffice.Org, Sumatra, PDFCreator
For lightweight PDF reading and creation from any Windows app, Sumatra and PDFCreator are solid options. OpenOffice.Org, well, it's the name to beat in open source suites.

SysInternals and Nirsoft make a lot of really, really useful applications, but they're all standalone. Keeping them organized for easy access can get to be a bit of a pain, and that's when Windows System Control Center comes to the rescue.

WSCC is a free, portable application designed to centralize and simplify access to these utilities. Think of it as the Swiss Army shell for your "knife blades."

Launch the program and enter the location for your apps. Relative paths are supported, so don't forget to adjust the directories accordingly if you plan on running it from your flash drive. On my drive, I created a WSCC folder in the root placed the other applications in two subfolders (NS and SI). I find it helpful to check the "hide missing items" box since I don't use every app WSCC supports.

The group buttons on the left side of the main program window make finding specific utilties fast and easy. At the top of the window, there's a search box - which is also a great help in quickly locating an app.

Keep in mind, the download is only the WSCC - you'll need to fetch the actual programs from Nirsoft and SysInternals yourself. Save some time, and grab the SI apps in a single file and Nir's from the Web Panel.

It's free for both private and commercial us, and should be a welcome addition to any Window's admin's flash drive.

[ via Freeware Files ]

Reading and writing to a Mac formatted drive from Windows couldn't be any easier than selecting the samba file sharing option in Leopard. This works great if you have 2 physical computers but what if you only have a Mac running Boot Camp? Since Leopard isn't running getting to that document on the Mac partition from Windows would be difficult unless you installed MacDrive.

Once installed, Windows Explorer is able to mount the Mac drives right along side your standard Windows formatted drives. You are free to access them like any other drive.

If you're worried that you may accidentally delete files off your Mac partition just tick the option to mount the drives in "read only" mode, thus preventing any accidents. MacDrive's options can be access by double clicking it's icon in the system tray. But once you have tailored it to your work flow you'll rarely have a need to access the options.

In our testing we found no noticeable performance drops while accessing standard office documents and music files. And even if there were any drops in performance, the benefit of being able to access files created on the Mac partition from within Windows more than makes up for it.

So if you have your Mac set to dual boot you may want to consider MacDrive in order to swap your documents back and forth.

Have you ever created a bunch of CDs to give out to friends and family only to receive some back because they didn't work? Of course they worked since the other ones you sent out were fine. It must be them! But you wouldn't want to start a family feud over a burnt CD so you graciously make another copy. The next time you decide to burn stuff you should double check your work with FileCheckMD5.

So how will FileCheckMD5 help you out? Well part of this is understanding what MD5 is. In the most basic of terms MD5 insures that the copy you made is the same as the source. Often MD5 are used to double check software downloads on the Internet.

Brandon Staggs, creator of FileCheckMD5, developed an application that can recursively scan all the files and folders in your project and create a MD5 file that you can burn onto your CDs. That way, before you start sending out those disc you can double check if all the data made it intact. You can even burn the application along with your files to have the receiver check the integrity of the disc on their end.

Sure you could always just verify that your CDs were burned correctly using the built in checker that came with your burning software but asking your friends to check to make sure the MD5 hash matches sounds much more technical.

If you're anything like us, your music collection is probably a mislabeled mess that you don't have the time to clean up. Getting the job done using TuneUp, which we took a look at a couple of months ago, is probably as painless as it's going to get. The application is available to the public starting today. It's easy to use, efficient, and has a great UI. There were a few kinks here and there the first time we used it. It crashed every time we tried to save the track information for a few songs, although strangely enough, it always happened with tracks we wouldn't admit to owning.

Drag up to 50 or 60 songs from your iTunes library into TuneUp and it automatically starts looking up the track information using Gracenote. You can either save the information for each song individually, or save them all in one go. TuneUp is extremely accurate, but we would definitely advise you to scan through the results as some of the more obscure singers aren't in Gracenote's database. The drawback we highlighted last time hasn't been solved. Even if two tracks appear on the same album, but also on other albums, TuneUp won't necessarily group them together. On the other hand, we were impressed with its ability to differentiate between studio and live tracks.

TuneUp will also dig up the missing cover artwork for your collection in minutes, provide links to videos on YouTube and album recommendations from Amazon depending on what you're listening to, and concert notifications from StubHub depending on what's in your library. TuneUp, despite being in its early beta stages, is already so good, it's worth the hassle of having to use a bloated program like iTunes. The free version of TuneUp limits you to fixing 500 tracks and finding 50 album covers, and an unlimited version of the program is available for an $11.95 annual subscription or a one-time payment of $19.95.

So why not Activity Monitor? Well, if you're just going to use it as a display in the dock, it's using way more system resources than you need. Its Dock readout also isn't as customizable as the one in CPU History, which lets you set the update interval, the width of the bars in the CPU graph, and the size of the icon in the Dock. The latest version also shows separate graphs for multi-core processors. It doesn't really do much, but CPU History gets its very specific job done with minimal hassle.

[via Daring Fireball]

Contrary to marketing hype, Macs do crash and when they do you'll need to do some basic troubleshooting to determine the reason why.

If it appears to be a hardware problem, one thing you may want to remember is, well, Rember.

Rember is a front end GUI for Memtest and while you can certainly run Memtest in Terminal, Rember's GUI version makes it much easier to use.

The interface is broken up into 3 main parts:

• How much memory you want tested
• The number of times you want to run the test
• Preferences

Once you decided on the amount of ram and the number of loops let Rember do the rest. Once completed, review the logs to determine if your RAM is the reason why your Mac is crashing.

Keep in mind that Rember is a GUI app that runs on top of your OS so some of your RAM will be in use and will not be available for testing. Think of it has a small trade off for not having to deal with the Memtest switches.

Knowing the status of your hard drive is a great way to prepare for problems that may potentially arise. And thank to CrystalDiskInfo obtaining this information from your hard drive couldn't be any easier.

CrystalDisk will gather data from your hard drive and will let you know its current temperature, the number of power cycles and even the number of hours the drive has been on. All this information comes in handy when trying to determine the root of a system crash or data failure, especially when you're dealing with an older drive in a crowded system case where cooling may not be optimal.

In our testing, the program was very easy to use and recognized our drive right away. Fortunately for us, we had no issues but if we did, we had no doubt that CrystalDisk would alert us to the problem so that appropriate steps could be taken.

CrystalDisk is a free application available for Windows and is a bit of a must have tool in diagnosing hard drive errors.

You've just downloaded that must have program only to realize that Windows has no idea what to do with it. After an hour of Google searching, forum posting, and being called n00b, you finally figure it out.

If only there was a guide that showed you how to get all those needed programs. We at Download Squad feel your pain and have put together a list of 10 free programs that will take care of those pesky "Windows cannot open this file" messages once and for all.

Note: See a blatant omission or oversight? Please add it to the comments. With your help, we hope to re-post a more complete list the future.

1. K-Lite codec pack
   
   File Types: DivX, XviD, AVI, Mpeg 1-4, AC3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, FLV, OGG, VOB, and tons you've never heard of.
   
   Description: Why there are 85,000,000 different audio and video types we have no idea. What we do know is trying to install codecs one at a time generally ends in a reformat.
   
   Thankfully, the good people from K-Lite (Koors Lite?) have bundled all the software and codecs you need into one executable. Cheers!
   
   
   
2. Real Alternative and QuickTime Alternative
   
   File Types: RM, RA, RAM, RPM, RMVB, RPX, SMI, SMIL, RT, RP, MOV, QT, 3GP
   
   Description: Before the days of Youtube, the Real Player and QuickTime were kings of Internet multimedia. Sure you had to deal with popups, reminders, updates, and bloatware, but that 1" video was so worth it.
   
   Fortunately, the Real and Quicktime Alternatives removed the real in Real Player and restored the quick to QuickTime. Enjoy your 1" video!
   

TuneUP is an an application designed to help keep your iTunes library more organized. While a library of only iTunes Store music will be tidy indeed, if you have acquired music from many different sources, the ID3 tags might be a bit confusing.

TuneUP works by comparing the unique sound print of each song to a database, and if new information is available, TuneUP will fix the metadata and rename your songs. It's sort of like having a genius put your books on your shelf for you. Not only does it help with naming, but the software also is able to download album art automatically with a few clicks.

While the design of this software is superb and visually appealing, it doesn't quite deliver in the area of organization. It does indeed make more coherent ID3 tags for songs, but we had hoped that it would properly shelve everything into one album each, rather than the usual album fragments, (with track 1 and 4 in one album, 2 and 8 in another, etc). Hopefully this will be refined in the final release.

TuneUP is in private beta, but we've got 100 invites to give away. Just click the link after the jump.

That popular Unix and Linux text editor known as Vi is now the proud brother of an online clone that should run in most javascript enabled browsers. It's called jsvi, and now you can write your own programs and HTML code from anywhere!

Such remote locations include but are not limited to:

• your local library
• the internet cafe down the street from work
• your aunt's house
• those weird McDonald's locations with internet computers inside
• the boss' laptop
• Russia

On a more serious note, the Vi simulator works with nearly all the traditional keys and substitution commands, and you can copy/paste from the clipboard. It also includes a built-in spell checker for those long-night moments when you've stared a word for too long and can no longer remember how to spell it. Does that happen to other people, or is it just us?

Xslimmer is a program for the Mac that reduces the space claimed by Universal Binary applications and their language localizations on your hard disk. The programs remain fully functional, and you reclaim some coveted hard drive space. It's a win-win. Now you're beginning to see why we call this program "phat" (pun certainly intended and hopefully understood).

So how does Xslimmer work? By removing the variations of a program's code that does not apply to the architecture of your machine. When a Universal Binary application is created, it contains several versions of the code: a version intended to run on PowerPC machines (like G4 or G5 Macs), another one meant for the more recent Intel machines. This ensures universal platform support, but it bloats the application size. Xslimmer will remove the pieces of code that will never be run on your machine. Voila! More hard drive space, same programs.

As far as compression utilities go, most distinctly fall into either very good or or very bad. ZipGenius, however, manages to somehow make it into the middle. It comes in two flavors: the suite and standard edition. Since the suite is filled with extras like a file-cutter and FTP add-on, we're going to focus on the core compression utility that comes with the standard edition.

First, let's start with the good. It does what it says it does. It supports up to 20 formats for decompression, including 7z, and can compress in about as many formats as most of its competitors. Its graphical interface is very "XP" in every sense of the word - which is nice if you like that look. Fortunately if you don't, there are skins available. The utility is straight-forward, easy to use, and best of all, free.

The bad: during the installation there is an irritating pop-up prompt after the license agreement that verifies that you are responsible for all damages as a result of using this program. Quite a turn-off. The fact that it even has skin support might seem like excess, considering that a compression utility is not something you spend a lot of time looking at unless you like compressing and decompressing stuff all day.

The worst part, however, is that there is nothing that really sets ZipGenius apart from its other competitors. 7-Zip and ALZip do almost everything as good or better than ZipGenius. But, that is not to say that ZipGenius isn't a fully fledged compression utility. In fact, if the other utilities weren't available, this might even be a good choice.

Overall, ZipGenius is okay. If you like a user-friendly interface and enjoy skinning your compression utility, ZipGenius might be for you. But if you're looking for pure function and power, the alternatives might prove more rewarding.

Wouldn't it be nice if our operating systems made New Year's resolutions? If that were the case, more than a few of them would make the resolution to "be more stable."

Xtra Windows Stability is one piece of software that claims to help the stability of the Windows OS. By forcing important subsystems of Windows into separate processes (Desktop, Explorer, and Internet Explorer), you have a higher chance of recovering the system if one of those subsystems fail.

If you haven't heard of the program before, and that makes you suspicious, settle yourself in the fact that Shell Extension City (one of the top sites for freeware on the net) put Xtra Windows Stability 17th on their list of top 25 programs, tips, and tweaks for 2007.

[Via gHacks.net]