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.

Freelang is extremely useful, simple, lightweight, easy to use and excellent little tool that can help you immensely if you are trying to learn a foreign language. It can be used as a dictionary and also allows you to create your own practice lists; at the time of this writing Freelang offers no less than 247 language wordlists.

Miro is a cross-platform, open source software that provides you with a free high definition media player and video podcast manager. It allows you to search for video files on the most popular movie sharing sites, organize your local media files into libraries, subscribe to audio and video feeds, build playlists, and get access to legal torrents.

Virtual CloneDrive allows you to create up to eight virtual drives, which you can use just as your physical CD or DVD drives. This gives the option to open, browse and use compressed image files “on the fly,” without having to decompress them to your hard drive first. The supported image file formats are ISO, BIN, and CCD and they can reside on the hard drive or a network drive. The speed of this free application is quite impressive and Virtual CloneDrive is also extremely easy to use.

Winamp is by far one of the most popular media players, downloaded by millions of users Worldwide. It can playback all popular media file types, comes with built-in equalizer, the sound quality is good, can be expanded with the help of the countless plug-ins and allows you to easily save and organize your playlists. The latest release comes with portable device sync support, more language packs, support for classic and modern skins, iTunes library import and other exciting features.

If you want to find any files or emails on your hard drive, search the Web, add an extra level of security to your computer and get a number of free gadgets such as Calendar, Google Docs, Youtube and Gmail, News, Weather, then you would love Google Desktop. It brings you a lot of useful little applications, it is extremely easy to use, surprisingly lightweight and not to mention free.