Some marvelous freeware

Diddlbiker works in a non-IT environment, and that means that the goodies-bag is as good as empty. Don't get me wrong, my employer does not skimp on what they do provide - Windows XP, latest version of Microsoft Office, decent virus scanner, etc.

It's just that for any of those handy-dandy extra tools that, as a geek, you have uses for, but unfortunately, none of the suits do. It is tempting to install local copies of whatever you've bought at home, but most EULA's don't provide in that.

So, I set forth on the task of finding out what is actually free. Oh, did I mention that it has to be good as well? It is surprising what you'll find once you start looking...

Editor:
Notepad++ - this text editor is good, and I mean really good. It has even replaced my payware Textpad editor at home - since Notepad++ is sooo much better! Some features: multi-document support with tabs, column selection, syntax highlighting, executing scripts/preview in browser, code folding, find & replace with regular expressions, and still a 'lightweight' look & feel.

Zip:
Izarc. Windows XP has standard zip functionality, but I think that it is a little bit too transparent. The de facto standard is of course WinZip, but that has it's limitations - especially with spanning (that might have changed over the years but they lost me when spanning still needed to be done through 3.5" disks and everybody else in the industry had a better solution). For years I used Powerarchiver, and I still think it is a very, very good product. But Izarc is almost as good, and completely free!

Picture Viewer:
Picasa. ACDSee is great, but not for free, and the latest versions started to turn into bloatware. Irfanview is really good, but doesn't allow you to view the contents of an entire folder at once. Picasa is, if you're willing to accept that it is from evil Google, a very nice product to use.

PDF Creation:
Go2PDF. Creating PDF's used to involve expensive software (Adobe Distiller), or complicated setups with GhostScript and all kinds of reroutings. Go2Pdf is simple to use, and offers a full feature set.

If you know of any other great freeware, please let me know!