Free Instant Messaging Softwares and Applications

Meebo.com
www.meebo.com
Web This polished Web app aggregates your AOL, Gmail, ICQ, Jabber, Windows, and Yahoo! buddy lists into a single, Web-based instant-messaging and chat-room experience. Meebo is building in extras, such as games you can play with IM buddies, as well as video and audio chat you'd find with your regular IM client software.

Pidgin
www.pidgin.im
Windows | Linux Open source tackles instant messaging in this client, which supports more IM networks than you've ever heard of.

Trillian
www.ceruleanstudios.com
WindowsAccess all your IM accounts (AIM, ICQ, Windows Messenger, Yahoo!, and more) from a single interface that also logs all your conversations, if you desire.

Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2270811,00.asp

Test-drive Vista from your current PC, free

A blog post at Tech Republic provides links to two ways to try Windows Vista for free. The simplest is to try a business version online at the Windows Vista Test Drive site. This runs in a browser window, after you install the (ActiveX) Virtual Server VRMC Advanced Control. Of course, it doesn't tell you anything about Vista's performance.

The better but more cumbersome alternative is to install Vista in a "virtual PC" on your hard drive, where it won't affect the rest of the stuff you do. As Greg Shultz points out: "Microsoft has created a 30-day evaluation VHD (Virtual Hard Drive) containing Windows Vista Enterprise Edition that you can download and load into either Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Virtual Server."

The drawbacks are disk space and time:

Besides a Microsoft Virtual product, both of which are free as well, you'll need to have at least 10 GB of free hard disk space and at least 2 GB of RAM. You also have to have a very fast Internet connection or a bit of time on your hands as the Vista Enterprise VHD is comprised of three very large files -- two 700MB files and one 160MB file.

The sizes make it easy to burn them to CD.

Once you've done the download, you have to do a real Vista installation, which generally takes half an hour.

The test drives are aimed at business users rather than home users, but anyone can have a go.

Source: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/category/windows/

Free Software Programs for Windows

Audio Editing: Audacity - it can record, remove noise from audio and also mix multiple sound track. With little effort, you can use Audacity to record live streaming music from Internet radio stations.

Video Editing: Windows Movie Maker from Microsoft is a good choice. It has all the basic video editing tools plus a good collection of transitions and video effects. For advanced usage, get the powerful VirtualDub - it has a number of filters (like video rotation), can create videos from image sequences, split videos or even extract sound from video tracks.

Instant Messenger: If your friends are spread across different services like Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN and others, get Pidgin and connect to all popular IM services using a single software. Pidgin provides a tabbed interface so the desktop won’t look cluttered even if you are simultaneously chatting with multiple buddies.

Computer Security: Your computer needs a firewall program like ZoneAlarm or Comodo Pro to stop spyware programs from connecting to websites secretly and for blocking any Internet intruders. For removing viruses from infected systems, AVG Antivirus and Avast are very reliable and unlike other commercial software, they are not heavy on system resources.

Multimedia Players: You may already have Windows Media Player and iTunes on your computer but they are not capable of playing all audio and video formats. For this reason, use VLC Media Player that is light-weight and supports almost everything including DVDs and Flash Videos that you have downloaded from YouTube. Another option is GOM player.

Digital Photography: Taking photos with your digital camera is just half the job . For organizing your vast picture collection, get Google Picasa or Windows Live Photo Gallery. With Picasa, you can create Screensavers and Picture Collages while Live Gallery has a wonderful photo stitching feature for making panoramas. Both let you transfer pictures from the desktop to Flickr. For advanced photo editing, use Paint.NET or GIMP.

Windows Enhancements: If you like using keyboard more than the mouse, get Launchy - it helps you start your favorite programs (and documents) without touching the Windows Start Menu. TweakUI is another desktop enhancement to help you control the appearance of Windows, change the location of default folders and so much more.

Spring Cleaning: WinDirStat gives you a visual overview of files and folders that are consuming the bulk of space on your hard drive so you know where to hit the delete key when the drive is full. CCleaner with automatically find and remove all the unnecessary temp files from your computer reclaiming valuable hard drive space. It also clears all the junk from Windows registry so your system runs faster. MyUninstaller will help you remove software that do show up in Windows Add Remove control panel.

Desktop Email: If you like checking and replying to your web email from the desktop, Windows Live Mail and ThunderBird are worth considering. They let you check multiple e-mail accounts in one place, apply filters to incoming email, add another layer of protection from junk email, built-in RSS reader and best of all, you can work offline.

DVD Tools: For creating backup copies of your DVD video disks onto the hard drive, use DVD Shrink. For extracting movie scenes and MP3 music from DVDs, HandBrake is a good choice. It can also be used to export your DVDs into portable players like the iPod.

Other Worthy Mentions: HTTrack helps you create a mirror copy of any website on the hard drive for offline reading. Orbit Downloader lets you save streaming music and videos from almost every website. Copernic Desktop is an excellent software for finding emails, documents, photos and other multimedia files on your computer. Microsoft SyncToy provides a visual interface for synchronizing file folders between computers and external drives.

Source: http://www.labnol.org/software/download/essential-free-software-programs-for-windows/1994/