Toolkit
This batch of applications are all in some way related to gaming, whether they be to find other opponents online, take screenshots or movies of your favourite games, emulators, and the like.
Type: Demo Viewer
Website: https://www.udpsoft.com/eye2/
Description: The most comprehensive - and therefore best - game browser around. It shows you who's playing the games you have installed online, and you can double-click to launch the game
and automatically join.
Type: Demo Viewer
Website: https://www.clan-it.net/demofreak
Description: This neat little tool enables you to view Half Life and Counter-Strike .dem, or demo, files. Point your browser at any clan sight, and you'll be able to download demos of their big games.
DemoFreak Readme: Read Me!
Type: DOS Emulation
Website: https://dosbox.sourceforge.net/
Description: Dosbox is a DOS emulator that enables you to play DOS games that just won't run on today's "sophisticated" operating systems. It can handle just about any DOS game you throw at it, and features excellent audio support. Relive the golden days of gaming!
Type: Screen/Video Capture
Website: https://www.fraps.com/
Description: An excellent screen-capture, bench-marking and video-capture utility, specifically designed for games. Now you can record demos that anyone can watch, whether they have the game or not. This free version is limited to 640x480 resolution videos - click the weblink to see about registering to get a fully functioning version.
Type: Screen Capturer
Website: https://www.irfanview.com/
Description: This brilliant freeware image viewer does basically everything a gamer or other non-artist could want: super-easy and totally customisable browsing of images, timed or keypress screenshots, a whole range of basic image altering options like resizing and blur filters, batch-processing for all of these, and batch renaming on top of that.
Type: Adventure Game Emulator
Website: https://www.scummvm.org/SS
Description: ScummVM is a 'virtual machine' for several classic graphical point-and-click adventure games. It is designed to run: Adventure Soft's Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2; Revolution's Beneath A Steel Sky,
Broken Sword 1 and Broken Sword 2; Flight of the Amazon Queen; and games based on LucasArts' SCUMM is used for many games, including Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max and more.
Type: Demo Browser
Website: https://www.planetquake3.net/seismovision/index.php
Description: This versatile demo viewer enables you to watch demo files of 21 different first-person shooters including Unreal Tournament, all the Quakes and anything based on the original Half-Life engine. Have a hunt around on the net there are loads about.
Type: P2P Telephony
Website: https://www.skype.com/
Description: Yeah, using forums and chat rooms to discuss tactics with your clan mates is a decent idea, but you'd be better off just calling them. Alternatively, you may take this seriously as an option to paying telephone companies. Voice-over-IP is nothing new, but we love Skype because it combines the functionality of both a voice-comms system and messenger-style interface. Plus, it offers crystal-clear audio, and piggybacks on peer-to-peer networks, ensuring stable, high-bandwidth communication.
Type: Messenger App
Website: https://www.trillian.cc/
Description: If you've been into Internet messaging for a while, chances are you have more than one messenger application. Trillian acts as a sort of 'universal remote' allowing you to connect to five messenger services at once with one handy app. It'll let you chat to your new gaming budies no matter which lame client they have! This chat suite combines Microsoft and AOL's chat services with every other one you care to mention - IRC, ICQ, the lot. So whatever your friends use, you can talk to them all through the same program.
Type: Messenger App
Website: https://www.xfire.com/
Description: Pronounced 'cross-fire', this is an instant messaging network for gamers. The idea is simple and brilliant - if your friend's in a game, you just double-click their name and you'll join in. It's also used in
many other ways to organise and find online games, and has rapidly become regarded as an essential for online gamers.
Toolkit
Chances are you're online. Chances are, someone will try and either access your computer remotely, send you a virus, or something else heinous that involves an Internet connection. These are the tools to stop it becoming a problem.
Type: Anti-Spyware
Website: https://www.lavasoftusa.com/
Description: Suspect that your hard drive may be full of spyware, malware, data miners and other nasties? Even if you don't suspect them, they're probably there. Run this free utility regularly to stop browsing becoming a security risk.
Note: This free edition of Ad-Aware requires you to activate each search for spyware. You'll need to look at purchasing a full product for totally automated protection.
Type: Anti-Popup
Website: https://www.spywareinfo.com/~merjin/
Description: CoolWebSearch browser hijackers are malicious scripts that reset your homepage to useless search engines, break google functionality and perform many other invasive activities that hobble your PC and open the floodgates to further virus and malware infection. CWShredder is an invaluable tool for busting such evil browser hijackers.
Type: Anti-Spyware
Website: https://www.safer-networking.org/
Description: This free application is not only makes removing malware dead easy, it's also quite robust and comes with loads of settings and handy extras. Little things like having a tab to select to prevent IE6's start page from being changed by a hijacker can help nail your problem perfectly. Spybot Search and Destroy scans your PC for malicious spyware scripts, then purges them from your system and registry. It can also immunize your PC against further infection. Just make sure you update it regularly, and you'll find it an invaluable tool.
Toolkit
System running like a dog? File sharing not fast enough for you? Simply want to keep your graphics drivers up to date? You've come to the right place...
Type: Benchmark Tool
Website: N/A
Description: Uses whichever of the compatible games you have installed to benchmark your system. Games such as Far Cry and X2 have in-built benchmarking systems, and this program knows them
all, runs them all without you have to work out how, then tells you the results. Much more useful than a benchmarking tool that rates your system on its own tests rather than real games.
Type: Uninstaller App
Website: https://www.smartuninstaller.com/
Description: Annoyed with things leaving traces of themselves on your system? Easy Uninstaller surgically removes everything, and enables you to perform multiple uninstalls, features a user-friendly interface and claims to run 5-10 times faster than the native windows version.
Type: Hardware Monitor
Website: N/A
Description: How's your motherboard? You don't know, do you? This handy utility lets you see the temperature your CPU is running at, averting dangerous overheating and - by extension - aiding and abetting overclocking.
Toolkit
With so many different formats that images, movies and sound files come in these days, you need a comprehensive range of Media applications to be able to utilise them all. Here's all you need to cover the basics and help you access more media.
Type: Video Codec
Website: https://www.divx.com/
Description: The latest version of the DivX Video software tools. Be sure to install this if you having trouble running any of our Movies.
Type: Video Codec
Website: https://www.ligos.com/indeo.htm
Description: You'll need this codec to watch the hilarious Prince Of Persia 2 movie this month.
Type: Media Player
Website: https://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli
Description: This brilliant open source media player can play basically anything you throw at it, and features a simple, no-nonsense interface that you can customise fully to get rid of any bits you don't use. You can also set it to start movies full-screen automatically, space or clicking pauses, and the mousewheel changes volume. Perfect.
Type: Media Player
Website: https://www.winamp.com/
Description: The world's most skinned application, WinAmp has been arguably the most colourful media player around. With all the usual playlist options and custom settings, WinAmp is tailored for those that tinker. The only real downside to this popular player is that there's no MP3 ripping or CD burning options in the free version you have here.
Type: Compression Utility
Website: https://www.rarlab.com/
Description: Even though WinZip is often seen as the standard, WinRAR is our zipper/unzipper of choice. Apart from having a great interface and lots of handy features like 'Extract here' as a context menu option, it supports many more types of archive - essential for serious downloaders.
Toolkit
The best applications for the World Wide Web!
Type: Torrent Client
Website: https://bittornado.com/
Description: This is an alternative way of using .torrent files - Bram Cohen's BitTorrent technology - to download files. The latest BitTorrent hides all your options from view, whereas BitTornado lets you control download and upload rates, and also pause and resume.
Type: Web browser
Website: https://www.mozilla.org/
Description: Firefox - formerly known as Firebird - is just about the most straight forward next-generation browser around. 'Next-generation' means it features tabbed browsing (if you don't use that now, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it), automatic pop-up blocking and ad-banner suppression, and an advanced download manager to handle all your file transfers.
Type: Email & Newsgroup client
Website: https://www.mozilla.org/
Description: A fast, easy to use mail & news client that has all the sorts of features we've come to expect. Spell-checking, intelligent spam filters and ongoing improvements through updates and extensions make this
a more than viable alternative - especially if you like having an excessively macho name for your geek post. Kiss Outlook Express with all of its haXXor backdoors goodbye, and use Mozilla Thunderbird as your e-mail client. With intelligent spam-filters, government-grade security features and a built-in spellchecker, it's a feature rich package. Thank heavens for the open-source community, at any rate.