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A tip of the hat to PC Magazine for many of these tips
 Audio
Audacity
audacity.sourceforge.net
A powerful audio editing/recording software package that doesn't require much training, it handles many file types, including OGG, MP3, AIFF, AU, and WAV (but not WMA or AAC). Features include 32-bit/96-KHz recording and editing (up to 16 channels), independent speed and pitch control, noise removal, a spectrogram mode, built-in effects.
Media Monkey
www.mediamonkey.com
This is a popular, robust digital music player for organizing, ripping, burning, converting, and playing your tunes. It also also has smart tagging, Auto DJ, and a Party Mode that lets you make requests without modifying the library. The free standard version gives you most features but limits MP3 encoding and slows the burn rate. The Gold version is $19.95.
Graphics
Free Photos
 If you’ve ever tried to design a website or blog, you’ve probably felt the need to add images to your creation. It can be easy to see the Internet as a free-for-all, but images belong to the people who created them. Staying legal means you’ll have to either create your own images or buy them from stock sites. Fortunately, there are a number of sources for free images, and we’ve collected them here. So read on for 100 sources where you can find free stock images: and don’t worry — they’re all legal! Click to check it out!
GIMP
www.gimp.org
As PC Magazine says, "It's not Photoshop, but GIMP is an amazingly powerful and efficient open-source bitmap-editing package that can look just as confusing as Photoshop if you open all its floating toolbars and sidebars." You'll need to get used to its nonstandard menus. If you make your living from graphics or photo editing, you'll probably go commercial, but GIMP gets the job done free.
 Picasa 2.0
picasa.google.com
This is a photo-management tool from Google that creates a library of the images on your computer (or on a particular drive), sorted by date. From Picasa you can edit images with a decent set of editing tools, send photos via Gmail, burn them to CD, or upload them to blogs, photo printing sites, or Picasa's own Web albums.
Fun & Games
 BZFlag
www.bzflag.org
This multiplayer 3D tank battle is one of the most popular open-source game projects, with more than a million downloads. Drive your tank around and destroy your opponents, or pick up an opponent's flag and bring it back to your base.
Freeciv
www.freeciv.org
In this multiplayer strategy game, you can become the leader of your own civilization and strive to attain greatness. Win by either conquering all opposing civilizations or by using scientific knowledge to build a spaceship to send to Alpha Centauri before your rivals can do so.
 Google Earth 4 Beta
earth.google.com
This virtual globe helps you plan trips (map driving routes, find restaurants, lodgings, and so on) or just have fun as an armchair explorer. Includes content from Google Earth's user community, National Geographic, the UN Atlas of Our Changing Environment, the National Park Service, the Travel Channel, and more. You can also create your own overlays. The downside: It's a resource hog, and without a good graphics processor, it may crash or freeze your system.
Productivity
OpenOffice.org
www.openoffice.org
 Looking for an alternative to Microsoft Office -- try this one. It's not as fullfeatured as the Microsoft suite, but does include a very capable word processor and spreadsheet that are compatible with MS Office files. There's also a presentation app, a diagramming tool, and a database.
WordPress
www.wordpress.org
So, you're ready to launch your blog? WordPress is among the most powerful of the many free personal blogging tools around. You can host WordPress on your own server or get a free blog at wordpress.com. Unlike most other free hosted blogs, you can have multiple contributors, customize the looks, and get the word out via RSS
Utilities
Clipomatic
www.mlin.net
Clipomatic is said by many to be the most compact and usable of dozens of clipboard extenders. It stores text that you copy to the Windows clipboard for pasting into any application. You can also store boilerplate text such as names and phone numbers. But avoid it if you use version 7 of Acrobat or Adobe Reader, because it blocks them from saving to the clipboard.
Google Desktop
desktop.google.com
Google Desktop includes a huge collection of widgets for displaying weather, news, file searches, Gmail, translation services, and more. Google's hard drive index searches only standard file formats.
 Yahoo! Desktop Search
desktop.yahoo.com
If you want to index everything on your system, get Yahoo! Desktop Search. It does a brilliant job of sorting, characterizing, and helping you to find all your files and e-mail.
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