Windows Toolkit

Adware is known by many names - spyware, trackware or even Big Brotherware. While producers of adware claim its purpose is to collect information about Internet habits to deliver ads tailored to a surfer's interests, privacy advocates are concerned about the potential misuse of this data. Ad-aware identifies and removes these surreptitiously installed applications. Using updateable "reflists", which are similar to antivirus DAT files, Ad-aware scours your system (including registry and temporary Internet files) and looks for traces of recognised adware modules.

Licence: Free for individual use only. Profit business entities, governmental entities or educational institutions must purchase a valid end user licence in order to use the software.
Online: http://www.lavasoft.de/
Operating system: Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP.
Requires: N/A

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows

The quintessential Adobe Acrobat reader is required to read PDF files. PDF files are a compact method of distributing publishable content in its original form, and you will find them used extensively for publications ranging from technical documents to press releases.

Licence: Freeware.
Online: http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/
Operating system: Windows 98SE/Me/NT/2000/XP.
Requires: N/A

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows

ATI Catalyst Software Suite 4.7 for Windows 98/Me

Catalyst Software Suite includes graphics drivers for all ATI Radeon series cards, and All-In-Wonder variants (see Requirements for a complete list of supported chips). It includes Display Driver, HydraVision, Multimedia Centre and Remote Wonder software packages.

Licence: Freeware.
Online: http://www.ati.com
Operating system: Windows 98/Me.
Requires: Supported ATI chips include: Radeon 9800 series, Radeon 9700 series, Radeon 9600 series, Radeon 9500 series, Radeon 9200 series, Radeon 9100 series, Radeon 9000 series, Radeon 8500 series, Radeon 7500 series, Radeon 7200 series and the Radeon 7000 series. The All-In-Wonder variants based on the above are also supported.

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows

ATI Catalyst Software Suite 4.7 for Windows 2000/XP

Catalyst Software Suite includes graphics drivers for all ATI Radeon series cards and All-In-Wonder variants (see Requirements for a complete list of supported chips). It includes Display Driver, HydraVision, Multimedia Centre and Remote Wonder software packages.

Licence: Freeware.
Online: http://www.ati.com
Operating system: Windows 2000/XP.
Requires: Supported ATI chips include: Radeon 9800 series, Radeon 9700 series, Radeon 9600 series, Radeon 9500 series, Radeon 9200 series, Radeon 9100 series, Radeon 9000 series, Radeon 8500 series, Radeon 7500 series, Radeon 7200 series and the Radeon 7000 series. The All-In-Wonder variants based on the above are also supported.

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows

Core FTP Lite is a free FTP client for personal use with all the features of a professional-level FTP client. It includes SSH/SFTP, SSL/TLS, browser integration, site-to-site transfers, drag-and-drop support, file viewing, file editing, transfer resuming, firewall support, custom commands, URL parsing, and much, much more.

Licence: Free for personal use.
Online: http://www.coreftp.com/
Operating system: Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP.
Requires: Internet connection

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows

DirectX 9.0c

DirectX 9 runtime is necessary for running the majority of game demos and other rich media software. DirectX 9 also provides support for the latest generation of 3D graphics acceleration hardware. The latest version of DirectX offers updated graphics features, faster frame rates and improved support for massive multiplayer games.

Licence: Freeware.
Online: http://www.microsoft.com/directx/
Operating system: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP.
Requires: N/A

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows

DivX 5.2

DivX Video bundles together the DivX Player and DivX codec for video compression and decompression. The DivX codec allows for high-quality video with small file sizes. Consequently, DivX is a popular format for downloading shared files over DSL or cable modems.

Licence: Free for personal use.
Online: http://www.divx.com/
Operating system: Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP.
Requires: Pentium II 450MHz CPU or higher, 64MB RAM, 8MB or higher video card, DirectX 7.0 or later.

Install instructions: N/A

Windows 98/Me				Windows 2000/XP

Gsplit is a file-splitting utility that takes large files and splits them into smaller, more manageable chunks. These pieces can be copied to floppies, network drives, removable media or other hard drives, can be archived incrementally to CDs or other removeable disks, and can be set to self-reassemble (so you don't need a copy of Gsplit to put the pieces back together). GSplit can split files to fill out disks or split them at a specific size boundary, and can also split very large files (bigger than 2GB) as needed. File attributes are not lost in the splitting process, and the program contains very sophisticated error correction to keep the split files from becoming corrupted.

Licence: Free for personal use.
Online: http://www.gdgsoft.com/gsplit/index.aspx
Operating system: Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP.
Requires: N/A

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows

Pegasus Mail is a free, standards-based electronic mail client suitable for use by single or multiple users on single computers or on local area networks. A proven product, it has served millions of users since it was released in 1990. It is extremely feature-rich and powerful, yet remains small and fast.

Licence: Free for personal use.
Online: http://www.pmail.com
Operating system: Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP.
Requires: POP3/SMTP mail servers, Internet connection.

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows

If you don't have Microsoft PowerPoint installed on your computer, you can still view presentations created with PowerPoint 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003 with the PowerPoint 2003 Viewer from Microsoft. PowerPoint users can share their presentations with others that don't have PowerPoint installed by giving them the freely distributable PowerPoint 2003 Viewer. PowerPoint 2003 Viewer users can view and print presentations, but cannot edit them. The PowerPoint 2003 Viewer does not support Information Rights Management (IRM) presentations, running macros, programs, or opening linked or embedded objects.

Licence: Freeware.
Online: http://microsoft.com/downloads
Operating system: Windows 95/Me/NT/2000/XP.
Requires: N/A

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows

The program searches your hard drive for so-called "spybots" or "adbots". These are the programs responsible for displaying advertising in some freeware and may transmit information, including your Internet surfing behaviour to another server. You can choose which ones you want to remove. In most cases the host still runs after removing the spyware/adware, however, some programs may cease to operate without these components. Spybot can also remove your usage tracks, making it more complicated for unknown spyware to transmit useful data. It also contains some routines to find and correct invalid registry entries.

Licence: Freeware. Donations welcome.
Online: http://www.safer-networking.org/
Operating system: Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP.
Requires: 64MB RAM, full functionality on admin account only for Windows NT/2000/XP.

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows

Winamp 5.04 Free

What machine would be complete without a powerful, fast, high-quality MP3 player? With hundreds of skins, plug-ins, visualisation and sound tools, this is far more than an MP3 player - it's your musical interface to the Web.

Licence: Freeware.
Online: http://www.winamp.com/
Operating system: Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000.
Requires: N/A

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows

Windows Installer is not only an installation program; it's also an extensible software management system. Windows Installer manages the installation, addition and deletion of software components, monitors file resiliency and maintains basic disaster recovery by way of rollbacks. Additionally, Windows Installer supports installing and running software from multiple sources, and can be customised by developers that want to install custom applications.

Licence: Freeware.
Online: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cebbacd8-c094-4255-b702-de3bb768148f&displaylang=en
Operating system: Windows 95/98/Me.
Requires: N/A

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows

Windows Installer is not only an installation program; it is also an extensible software management system. Windows Installer manages the installation, addition and deletion of software components, monitors file resiliency and maintains basic disaster recovery by way of rollbacks. Additionally, Windows Installer supports installing and running software from multiple sources, and can be customised by developers that want to install custom applications.

Licence: Freeware.
Online: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4b6140f9-2d36-4977-8fa1-6f8a0f5dca8f&DisplayLang=en
Operating system: Windows NT 4.0/2000.
Requires: N/A

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows

Get more play, your way with Windows Media Player 9 Series. Get fast and flexible playback with the best audio and video quality for Windows and the Web. Includes special new features optimised for Windows XP.

Licence: Freeware.
Online: http://www.microsoft.com
Operating system: Windows 98 SE/Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP.
Requires: 233MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, 100MB free disk space.

Install instructions Please note: Windows Media Player 9 is intended as a major system upgrade and installs Digital Rights Management (DRM) functionality on your hard drive. Standard un-installation procedures will not rid your PC of the player. Please read thoroughly the End User Agreement and Supplemental End User Agreement before proceeding with installation.

ECDC Note: There are known and unresolvable issues with Windows Media Player 9 and some versions of Easy CD Creator software. Please see the roxio.com Web site forums for more information.

Windows				Windows XP

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.

Licence: Shareware.
Online: http://www.rarlabs.com/
Operating system: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP.
Requires: N/A

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows

Xnews (a revamped version of the old NewsXpress program) has long been the best free newsreader on the market, and has remained this way thanks to a breadth of features not available in any other free newsreader. Features include detailed killfile support, regex-based searches, support for multiple servers and user IDs, category grouping for subscribed newsgroups, full handling of all popular binary formats, download queuing and much more.

Licence: Free for personal use.
Online: http://xnews.newsguy.com/
Operating system: Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP.
Requires: NNTP news server, Internet connection.

Install instructions: N/A

		Windows