Free Alternatives for Commercial Applications

Instead of going out and paying for some bloated pieces of software, why not shoot for a freeware or open source alternative?

Archive Making / Extracting Utilities (Replace WinRAR, WinZIP, etc.)

• 7-Zip (7-Zip features a nice command line archive utility as well.)
• PeaZip

Disc Burning Utilities

• CDBurnerXP (Recommended for Windows XP)
• Burn Aware (Recommended for Windows Vista)

ISO Utilities

• LC ISO Creator (Make a burnable/mountable ISO from any CD or DVD.)
• Folder2ISO (Make a burnable/mountable ISO from any directory.)

Networking & File Transfer

• PuTTy (Telnet / SSH Client)
• WinSCP (Excellent FTP client, supports Secure Shell and Secure Copy as well.)

Document Creating & Editing

• Foxit PDF Reader (Don’t EVER use Adobe Acrobat, ever again.)
• OpenOffice (Nice alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite.)

System Tools

• AVG Free (Anti Virus Software)
• Spybot Search & Destroy (Spyware Cleaner)
• Star Destroyer (Password Retrieval)
• Windows XP Key Ninja (Windows XP Product Key Retrieval)
• Pismo File Mount (Mount ISO’s and folders to virtual drives.)

Hope you found something you can use out of that list, cheers!