Speccy is a free tool that will inspect your computer configuration and give you information about the CPU, the hard drive, the optical drives, the RAM, the graphic card and other components of your hardware, as well as the installed operating system. This is very useful if you need to update your drivers, find out if you can add more RAM or replace any of your RAM chips and see if your computer meets the minimum requirements for running certain program or a game; advanced users or computer technicians can get other useful information such as CPU temperature, bus speed, BIOS brand and version, DRAM Frequency, etc.

Free studio is software pack that allows you to work with media files and convert from one video and audio file format to another; you can use some of the included applications to also burn DVDs and music CDs, download YouTube videos, extract the sound from YouTube videos in mp3 format, watch and listen to video and audio files on portable devices such as iPhone, iPod, PSP, Blackeberry and perform other many operations. The pack has more than 20 different tools and applications, which are designed to make working with different media files much easier.

If you are looking for a feature-rich, yet free RSS feed aggregator and news reader, then Awasu is just the tool for you – RSS feeds are offered by most of the leading online news, technology, sports and business web sites and blogs. Reading, searching, adding, synchronizing and archiving feeds, managing podcasts, and using channel plug-ins – these are some of the features offered by the Awasu Personal Edition and they are most likely more than enough for the average and the advanced news reader alike.

Mikogo is a cross-platform program that is extremely easy to use, simple, fast, and reliable and can help you run webinars, show presentations or offer remote support. Even for the everyday users this little tool is extremely helpful – if allows them to share their screens or send files, documents and songs to their friends, even if some of them are working on a Mac while others are running Windows. Mikogo is also speedy and very flexible – it allows for up to 10 people to participate in each session, the presenters can be changed on the fly, each session participant can choose which application running on his or her computer are visible to the others and which are not, and transmission can be paused at any time as well. Mikogo uses 256-Bit AES encryption, which makes the sessions extremely secure.

If you are looking for a way to speed-up your computer without adding any new hardware, removing the unwanted fonts should be one of the few steps that you may want to try – each installed program might add new fonts to your system and inevitably slowing it down. Finding and removing these fonts one by one is a tedious task and this is where FontFrenzy comes into the picture – it will show you all the fonts, currently installed on your machine, and help you safely remove and backup the ones that have been installed after your original Windows installation – this results in faster boot-up and better general performance of your computer.

WinSCP allows you safely transfer files to a remote computer; it uses SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) and SCP (Secure Copy) protocols and supports some of the most widely-used encryption algorithms such as Blowfish, AES, DES and 3DES as well as private keys. WinSCP also lets you perform all the file operations that you might ever need such as renaming, moving and copying files, changing file and folder properties, editing text files with the built-in text editor, and performing numerous additional operations locally or on the remote server. WinSCP also supports PuTTY and has been translated to several languages.

Peer-to-peer programs have made file sharing a breeze and right now one of the biggest and most robust one of them is eMule. It uses two networks – eDonkey and Kad, and doesn’t have one single centralized server, but connects to thousands of clients nodes, which makes eMule reliable and fast. It comes with reward system, which encourages uploading, handles well corrupted downloads and transmits the files in compressed format, which further increases its file-sharing speed. Since eMule is an open source project it comes in quite a few different flavors, called mods – this allows many developers to contribute to the improvement of the program and incorporate great features into the different mods.

Free, fast and simple image viewer and editor – this is what IrfanView is and what makes it one of the best and most widely used image applications out there. It has been around for years and each successive version continues to extend the program’s functionality, while keeping it compact and speedy; the latest release supports close to 60 image file formats, including BMP, JPEG, GIF, ICO, JLS and WBZ/WBC/WB1, offers region capture, command line options, batch renaming and resizing, thumbnail options, color profiles, file search, drag and drop, and has Multilanguage support; if you need even more features more than 50 plug-ins can be downloaded from the author’s website separately or in a single ZIP or EXE file.

If you want to install some of the best free Windows applications in a matter of minutes, then Ninite is all you need. It is an online “batch installer,” which allows the end user to get his or her hands on the latest versions of the most popular browsers, messengers, image editors, office tools, file sharing and other utilities. The process is quite simple and straightforward – you don’t need to register, create an account, or go through any other hoops – point, click, install and you are done. If you are thinking of upgrading to Windows 7 or just reformatted you hard drive, then Ninite can come in handy and save you a lot of time – with close to 60 applications in more than 10 categories, it will help you populate your computer with the latest freeware and shareware programs.

When it comes to media players that are feature-rich, easy to use, and conflict-free, KMPlayer is without a doubt one of the best. If all you want is to enjoy watching movies or listen to your audio files, you will most likely never have to change any of the default settings – simply run the player, open your files and enjoy. However, the more advanced users will find anything that they need as well – KMPlayer supports plugins, internal and external filters, various subtitles (including text to speech for reading subtitles), and most of the media file formats such as VCD, DVD, AVI, MKV, Ogg Theora, OGM, 3GP, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, RealMedia, and QuickTime amongst others.