TiM International - Recommended applications

	Commercialware	Freeware alternative
ANTI-SPYWARE		Windows Defender Freeware, but requires a genuine operating system license. Windows Defender is software that helps protect your computer against pop-ups, slow performance, and security threats caused by spyware and other unwanted software by detecting and removing known spyware from your computer. Windows Defender features Real-Time Protection, a monitoring system that recommends actions against spyware when it's detected, minimizes interruptions, and helps you stay productive.
ANTI-VIRUS	Try avoiding those Internet Security superbundles unless you want your software to absorb all your system resources. The more you pay, the more nag screens you will get.	Panda Cloud Anti-Virus (Free Edition) Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro Edition includes completely hands-off operation with its automatic and transparent program and engine upgrades every time a new version is released, advanced anti-malware protection thanks to behavioral analysis, no nagging advertising screens and multilingual 24x7 technical support. Avast Anti-Virus (Free Edition) Avast is based on the comprehensive ALWIL Sowtware a.s. scanning technology available since 1988. Featuring fast incremental updates and advanced multi-layer real-time protection of all infection vectors. It safeguards against virtually all kinds of malware. AVG Free Award-winning antivirus and antispyware trusted by 80 million users. Real-time safe internet surfing and searching, protection against viruses and spyware. AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition is only available for single computer use for home and non commercial use.
ARCHIVING	WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. PowerArchiver Use PowerArchiver to manage all your compressed archives. It's versatile, powerful, and easy to use. This full-featured ZIP program provides the power you need to do anything you can imagine with archive files. Powerful shell integration features include on-the-fly ZIP file creation, email support, and more. It can even extract CD/DVD images such as BIN, IMG, ISO, and NRG. Encrypt archives using one of five secure algorithms.	TUGZip TUGZip is a powerful award-winning freeware archiving utility for Windows® that provides support for a wide range of compressed, encoded and disc-image files, as well as very powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. 7-Zip 7-Zip is an open source file archiver with a compression ratio higher than most other formats. Even though the primary support is for 7z archives with self-extracting capability, it can also pack/unpack many other archive formats. It looks like a Windows 95 application but the functionality is very satisfying.
AUDIO EDITING	Adobe Audition The original Cool Edit application by Syntrillium, now under Adobe's ownership.	Free Audio Editor Edit audio files visually; Record audio from a microphone or any other available input device; Apply various effects; Burn audio CDs from MP3, WMA, WAV, and OGG; All in one program, simple and intuitive - FAE (free audio editor). Audacity Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. You can even install support for VST plugins.
AUDIO TOOLS		MediaMonkey Free media jukebox & music manager for serious music collectors. It has a CD Ripper supporting Freedb, mp3 player (plays CDs, WMA and OGG files), ... I used it to shrink my mp3 library converting all .vqf, .ape, .flac, .ogg, and superquality mp3s to regular 192kbps mp3s.
AUDIO PLAYER	Windows Media Player Windows built-in application	Winamp An audio player that also comes with video support these days. WinAmp used to be a liteweight player but is growing heavier and heavier every year.
BACKUP	SyncBack SE SyncBackSE has established itself as world-class in the field of backup and synchronization software.	FBackup FBackup is a free backup software for both personal and commercial use. It protects your important data by backing it up automatically to any USB/Firewire device, local or network location. The backed up data can be either compressed (using standard zip compression) or an exact copy of the original files. SyncBack "SyncBack" is Freeware. This program is free for personal, educational, charity, government, and commercial use and has been available since 2003.
BIT TORRENT CLIENT	Why pay?	µTorrent Tiny download client that uses very low resources. It has all the features present in other BitTorrent clients including bandwidth prioritization, scheduling, RSS auto-downloading, Protocol Encryption, and Mainline DHT. Additionally. BitTorrent The author of the BitTorrent protocol has joined forces with the creator of µTorrent. BitTorrent version 6 will therefore be, well let's simply put it; µTorrent but just renamed.
BROWSER	Why pay?	Mozilla Firefox The Internet's most popular open source browser. Microsoft Internet Explorer Free but requires a genuine license of Windows. Opera Beautifully engineerd. Apple Safari Simple and fast rendering. Google Chrome Combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.
CD BURNING	Nero Burning ROM This heavy weight CD/DVD burning suite has up till today's date become a superbundle of features for editing and burning data, audio or video. It can even turn your PC into a HTPC.	CD Burner XP CDBurnerXP is a free liteweight application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs. Everyone, even companies, can use it for free. It does not include adware or similar malicious components. BurnAware Free BurnAware is ideal for users with basic disc burning needs as backup, creating data, audio, video discs and burning disc images. Free, easy to set up and maintain, it enables you to save your files to disc quickly, provides more flexible interface to help you complete your burning tasks much faster.
DEFRAGMENTATION	PerfectDisk Professional PerfectDisk Professional is the most thorough and comprehensive disk defragmentation solution for small- and medium-size businesses, with unparalleled speed and thoroughness. PerfectDisk’s patented SMARTPlacement™ optimization is paired with its exclusive single-pass defragmentation and Space Restoration Technology™ to maximize PC and laptop performance. All controlled and automated according to your organization’s unique requirements through AutoPilot Scheduling™ or StealthPatrol™ unattended background processing.	Ultra Defrag UltraDefrag is a powerful Open Source Defragmentation tool for Windows Platform. It is very fast, because the defragmenting is done via the kernel-mode driver. There are three interface available : Graphical, Console and Native. Defraggler (Not multilingual) It differs from other defrag tools on the market, by enabling you to quickly and simply defrag the files you want to, without having to process the whole drive. Simply run it, select the file and defragment in seconds. Windows defragmentation tool Windows built-in application.
DISC IMAGE MOUNTING	Why pay?	MagicDisc (Not multilingual) From the makers of MagicISO comes a tiny freeware tool for mounting images. Daemon Tools Lite This free edition let's you mount CD/DVD images as a virtual CD/DVD volume instead of burning them on disc.The virtual device can be accessed through a regular drive letter in Windows File Explorer. If you are not careful, a lot of sponsorware will slip through the installation.
DISC IMAGE EDITING	PowerISO PowerISO is a powerful CD/DVD image file processing tool, which allows you to open, extract, create, edit, compress, encrypt, split and convert ISO files, and mount these files with internal virtual drive. It can process almost all CD-ROM image files including ISO and BIN. MagicISO MagicISO is a powerful CD/DVD image file creating/editing/extracting tool. It can open/create/edit/extract CD/DVD image files, and it can convert bin to iso and back. as well as make ISO file from DVD/CD-ROM or hard disk, and handle bootable information at meanwhile.
DOWNLOAD MANAGER	Why pay?	Free Download Manager Probably one of the worst names for an application, which is being more descriptive than a solid trademark. But however an amazing, truly awesome software. It has everything. You can grab Flash videos, download files via HTTP or FTP, BitTorrent support, multiple languages, up to 600% download acceleration, and even upload methods for file sharing.
DVD RIPPER	Daniusoft - / Plato - / ImToo - / Xilisoft DVD Ripper Same software, different looks. Put DVD movies on iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, PSP, Zune, mobile phone, etc. Encodes to MPEG, WMV, DivX, MP4, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, RM, MOV, XviD, 3GP, MP3, WMA, WAV, RA, M4A, AAC, AC3, OGG, and more video/audio formats.	Freez DVD Ripper Freez DVD Ripper is a DVD ripping tool to rip your favorite DVD movies to popular DivX/Xvid AVI files, H.264 MP4 files, and even iPod MP4 video files with fast DVD ripping speed and excellent quality.
E-MAIL CLIENT	Why pay?	Mozilla Thunderbird Basic e-mail client which gives you almost unlimited functionality with all the add-ons available.
FIREWALL	Windows Firewall for Windows XP SP2 Windows built-in application. Windows Firewall for Windows Vista Windows built-in application.	Practically if you are behind a router, you don't need a software firewall. But it's not impossible to combine a hardware firewall with a software one. Installing two software firewalls though on your computer may cause instability.
FTP CLIENT	FlashFXP A file transfer software that also supports FXP transfers (site-to-site).	FileZilla Client FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable open source cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive interface.
FTP DAEMON	Microsoft IIS Windows built-in application. Free but requires a genuine operating system license.	zFTPServer Suite An amazing high speed FTP server. It is low on resources, has SSL/TLS suport, and advanced features for passive mode transfers. The virtual filesystem let's you do all kind of neat tricks, for example merging several physical folders into one virtual folder. FileZilla Server A full featured FTP server with support for secure SSL/TLS connections, IP security, anti-FXP options, per-user speed limits, user groups and MODE-Z compression. It provides a plain, but easy to use interface that can be installed as Windows service. FileZilla Server is open source software and does not provide any documentation, however if you are familiar with FTP server operations, it should not be needed.
HTML EDITOR (WYSIWYG)	Adobe Dreamweaver Previously Macromedia Dreamweaver, today aquired by Adobe. A web development WYSIWYG editor which now includes CSS tools, Ajax components for building dynamic user interfaces, and intelligent integration with other Adobe software.	KompoZer KompoZer is a complete Web Authoring System that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing capabilities found in Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe DreamWeaver and other high end programs. Mozilla Suite: Mozilla Composer Web-browser, advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editing made simple -- all your Internet needs in one application.
ICON EDITOR		IcoFX IcoFX is an award winning freeware icon editor. It is an all-in-one solution for icon creation, extraction and editing. It is designed to work with Windows XP and Windows Vista icons supporting transparency.
IMAGE EDITORS	Adobe Photoshop Create powerful images with the professional standard.	GIMP GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems and in many languages.
IMAGE VIEWER	ACDSee	IrfanView This magnificent file viewer can display about every image format invented. There are extra plugins that even let you view other formats such as audio and video.
MEDIA CENTER	Windows XP/Vista Media Center Windows built-in application in Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate.	XBMC Simply WOW! Media Portal MediaPortal is an Open Source application ideal for turning your PC / TV into a very advanced Media Center. MediaPortal allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch and store your videos and DVDs, view, schedule and record live TV as a digital video recorder and much much more.
OFFICE SUITE	Microsoft Office 2007 Save time, organize your workload, manage information, stay connected, and collaborate better with colleagues, family, and friends with the world's biggest Office suite.	OpenOffice.org A multilingual office suite based on the java platform.
PDF PRINTER	Adobe PDF Print Engine Comes as a tool from some Adobe applications.	doPDF doPDF is a free PDF converter for both personal and commercial use. Using doPDF you can create PDF files by selecting the "Print" command from virtually any application. With one click you can convert your Microsoft Excel, Word or PowerPoint documents or your emails and favorite web sites to PDF files.
PDF VIEWER	Why pay?	Foxit Reader Foxit Reader is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size, breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set. Compatible with PDF Standard 1.7. Adobe Reader Very heavyweight, but provides very good functionality and always trustworthy.
REMOTE CONTROL	TeamViewer Windows Remote Desktop A Windows built-in application. For corporations also known as Terminal Services. Fast and secure.	TightVNC (Not multilingual) TightVNC is a free remote control software package derived from the popular VNC software. With TightVNC, you can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer.
TEXT EDITOR	Notepad Windows built-in application	Notepad++ An excellent source code editor that displays code in multiple colors for easier editing. The simpliest way to code PHP & HTML.
TIME TRACKER	AllNetic Working Time Tracker The application to track how much time you spend on different projects and tasks. Thanks to precise time tracking and accounting you can quickly and precisely calculate time spent on different tasks. You can bill your clients on time based on real reports. You can plan your working day better and be more effective in managing your time as you see, where your time is gone. And of course, you get more free time by organizing it more efficiently.
VIDEO CONVERTER	Xilisoft Video Converter Incredibly easy to use for both novices and pros, Xilisoft video converter brings you all the capabilities to make polished productions: convert video of all popular formats like AVI, MPEG, WMV, DivX, MP4, H.264/AVC, AVCHD, MKV, RM, MOV, XviD, 3GP, etc., transform between MP3, WMA, WAV, RA, M4A, AAC, AC3, OGG audios, and create fascinating video from photos. So luxurious optimized profiles provided to convert video in this video converter make your movies and music taken easily on PSP, PS3, iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, Xbox or other digital devices.	HandBrake (Not multilingual) HandBrake is an open-source, GPL licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder.
VIDEO PLAYER	Windows Media Player Windows built-in application	GOM Player (Not multilingual) GOM Player includes many codecs (XviD, DivX, FLV1, AC3, OGG, MP4, H263 and more) so you won't need to install separate codecs for most videos. GOM Player's patented technology enables users to view files with broken index or that are still being downloaded. Screen capture allows you to take a screenshot of your video directly from GOM Player. VLC Media Player A free cross-platform media player that supports numerous of media formats without needing to install additional codecs. Even though it's got a cheap look, there are skins available to make it look very elegant. Media Player Classic + FFDShow Codec This multimedia DirectShow player looks like the old Windows Media Player 6.4, but has a lot more features like switching audio streams in an MP4 file. By installing FFDShow Codec you can open numerous of video formats.