PhotoFiltre is a freeware application that can be used to retouch an image. This has amazing features that can be used to develop great touch-ups for your photo in no time. This has a big list of filters which can be used to add special effects to an image. This application is light on the system, it is easy and intuitive to use and is completely free of cost. This has a very simple user interface where all the standard filters and tools are available on the toolbars. You can have the touch-up you want in just a few clicks.

Some of the cool functions that are packaged with this application are:
Filters: You can use this to control the brightness, contrast, saturation, tint and other such attributes of the image.
Vectorial selections: This allows you to select a region on the photos with any shape. This region can be manipulated while the result is anti-aliased by vectorial calculations.
PhotoMasque module: This lets you add amazing effects to your photos by the use of making.
Automization module: This lets you make general changes to the images attributes like its size, framing, conversion, etc.

This is a great application to intuitively modify and retouch photos.

Website: Photofiltre – Free Image Retouching Program

This is a useful little tool that displays detailed information about your hard drive usage. This displays intuitive information about the available free space in the disk, how is the disk used, and who is using the used disk space. A simple use of this tool is to clear data on your pen drive. You can use this software to find information about the way the space on your pen drive is used so that you can delete the required information to make space on it. Similarly, when you have junk data on your hard drive, you can easily check if the amount of data needs to be cleaned using this tool.

This is a free ware. You can download this without paying any money. Unlike most software that gives you information about disk usage, this has a very good and useful display. Why would you want to go for a paid tool that you rarely use when you can download DriveSpacio.

Website: Drivespacio – Information About Your Harddrives

Peer to Peer technology is booming now with the ever increasing number of torrents. OneSwarm is a peer-to-peer tool that can be used to share files while you protect your own identity. Most existing peer-to-peer application like BitComet, uTorrent and Gnutella display your IP to everyone when you are sharing files. This can be sometimes malicious as other can know exactly how you are using your system by systematically monitoring your IP. OneSwarm on the other hand, keeps your IP completely hidden. With this you have protected access to your system. You can only share files with your friends and others you intentionally want to allow access. Due to its nature of data sharing, this has been called a Friend-to-Friend data sharing.

The main advantages of this are – It uses address rewriting to protect your privacy; it has a user friendly web interface; it is an open source. Meaning you can share files with your friends while you stay protected and use this service for free.

Website: Oneswarm – Anonymous File-Sharing

If you have played games like Unreal Tournament, Doom or Quake, then you know what this game is all about. This is a 3D death match game. This can be installed and run on PC, Mac and Linux. This is an open source game where you can view the source code, compile it, and create your own custom maps.

The best part of this game is the unrestricted speed. This has fast action, weapons, and multiplayer support. During game play you have options to play death match, capture the flag, domination and several other options. In the single player mode there are over 20 levels to play. This runs on OpenGL technology based on the Quake game engine. This has advanced game options like particle support, lighting, shadowing and advanced menu system.

The requirements for this game are: 400 MB of hard drive space on Windows 2000/XP/Vista (32-bit or 64-bit) or Mac OS X (PPC or x86) or Linux Kernel with glibc. If you have a good graphic support in your system, this game will be a blast.

Website: Nexuiz – A Game Similar To Unreal Tournament But Free

Muziic is a music player that streams songs directly from YouTube. In the recent years, the music scene in YouTube has grown pretty big. It has a huge collection of songs in normal audio and in high definition audio. Muziic is a desktop application that takes advantage of this by providing live streaming audio from the YouTube videos.

This application also has two other options: The Encoder in this allow you to re-encode the MP3 in the file with the album artwork. The Uploader in this is another feature that allows you to directly upload audio to YouTube which gets converted to a video with high quality audio.

Website: Muziic – Music Player That Stream Songs From Youtube

As the internet users increase every second, people who use blog increase. The number of blogs increase. Among the bloggers are some serious bloggers who are more intent on the content of the blog. For these people, BlogDesk has been created to make blogging easy to write. This also speeds up the entire process of blogging by providing quick access buttons. This also has useful features like spelling check to make the blogging process more productive.

This is a freeware that has been optimized for common blog systems like WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Serendipity and ExpressionEngine. Using this software is so easy that it can be used by anyone. Using this will make things very easy for you especially when you want to post blogs on the fly. This not only makes life easy for the blogger, but this also makes it easy for blog readers as they will be reading better optimized content.

Website: Blogdesk – Post To All Your Blogs Directly From Windows

OperTor is a software bundle that combines the goodness of the Opera browser, Tor and Polipo. This is designed to let you surf the web anonymously. This uses a browser similar to Opera and it allows you to surf the web without letting anyone know your true identity. This is secure enough not even leave any memory traces on your drives. To make the best use of this, you can extract the OperaTor file onto a thumb drive and run the application from it when you are connected to a PC. No files are stored on the PC you connected to when you are browsing.

It should be noted that OperTor supports only HTTP and HTTPS to make your browsing anonymous. But if you are allowing the usage of other Opera features like Java, javascript, integrated emails and so on, you will be losing your anonymity over the web. OperaTor is a freeware application and can be installed without any problems with the license.

Website: Operator – Surf The Web Anonymously

Even wondered if there was a way to record the song you were listening on the internet? If you did, you can do that with PCWin Speaker Record for free! This is a freeware application that can be used to record every sound emitted from your speakers. You can use this to record anything and save it in MP3 or WAV file formats. With this application it will be great to record live from podcasts, live radio stations or CDs and DVDs when they play.

This is a simple light weight application. All you need to do is install the program and use the Start recording button to start recording an audio track. Once you are done you Stop recording the audio track. Your audio track can now be saved for you to share it with your friends, say over a pod cast. This application records at a CD quality of 128 kbps.

Website: Pcwin Speaker Record – Records Everything You Hear From Your Speakers

If you have used a windows system, you know you need to be protected by an anti-virus program at all time. These systems are constantly attacked by viruses and malicious programs. One of the best programs you could use to prevent these viruses and malicious programs is Avira AntiVir Professional.

This is a simple, light weight easy to use antivirus program that gives you 100% protection against viruses. This is available for both Windows and UNIX. If you use Avira AntiVir, you will have all the things you expect out of anti-virus software. It performs regular scans, actively checks for viruses, quarantine, block, delete, and so on. The user interface with Avira AntiVir is very simple and easy to follow. To top it all, this is a freeware.

You should be careful when you are installing this on a commercial system. This application is designed for home-users for personal use only. According to the license provided, this is not intended for commercial or business use.

Website: Avira Antivir Personal – Free Antivirus Software

This is a small utility that you can install to view a list of all the Codec drivers and direct show filters that are installed on your system. This provides detailed information on each of the codec that is installed. This gives the name, type of the codec, the status of the codec (whether it is disabled or not), information about when the codec was installed/modified, a description of the codec, the company name, location of the codec and several other details.

This is a very helpful utility that lets you control all the installed codecs. You can easily enable or disable them individually. With the wide number of available video formats, you will have to have a number of codecs installed on your system. But having all of them running at the same time may slow down your system considerably. Thats when InstalledCodec is very helpful. This software is free for download and usage.

Website: Installedcodec – Displays A List Of All Codec Drivers And Directshow Filters Installed