My Top 15 Free Windows Programs for 2008

Inspired by the post at Lifehacker, and, since it's been a while since I've written up a top-list, here is my top 15 list of free Windows programs.

In no particular order:

Firefox 3 - the latest version of Firefox is fast and very secure and remains the best with extensions of all the browsers

AVG Free 8 - anti-virus and anti-spyware, and much improved since it first came out. Easy to use and works better than the big programs that must be purchased.

7zip - decompression and compression of many many compression formats, and free!

Foxit PDF reader - now works directly inside a Firefox tab as well as on its own. Faster and with a much smaller footprint than Adobe Reader. They keep making this better with every version

Crossloop - for remote connections with clients for help/repair - free and very simple to use

Shutdown Guard - for stopping Windows Updates from automatically restarting your computer (XP and Vista)

Winamp - best free media player overall - yes it has playlists and you can use it with your ipod or any other MP3 player. Works better than iTunes and doesn't install other programs behind your back, and you can customize its many settings (file formats to deal with, whether it launches on its own or by your command...)

Quicktime Alternative - streamlined and unobtrusive version of Quicktime

Realplayer Alternative - streamlined and unobtrusive version of Realplayer

Open Office 3 - the best free alternative to MS Office. And it can open .docx files now. You can create a PDF directly from any of the programs in the suite with a click of an icon. Word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program, database, you can make it save things in MS Office format by default if you need to share documents with others have MS Office, and more.

Thunderbird - excellent email program from Mozilla (same group that brings you Firefox). I find this much easier to customize and to backup and move files around when need be than Outlook or Outlook Express.

Picasa - a good, free program from Google for viewing, sorting and editing your photos and more

Superantispyware - A great 2nd program for manually scanning your computer after AVG Free 8 to catch and fix anything that might have been missed. I like this better than Ad Aware and Spybot put together.

CCleaner - great for cleaning up temp files, temp files leftover from crashes, and cleaning up the Registry and more.

Cobain Backup - a free backup program that you can fully customize - scheduling, backing up to various drives including network drives, etc.

Got any favourite free programs I left out? Add them in comments.

Happy New Year!

Asus laptop built-in webcam upside down

I use an Asus laptop. My built-in webcam was working fine until recently. Now it shows upside down. I had recently updated a lot of drivers. So, I rolled back the driver (Control Panel\Device Manager\Imaging devices... and it works properly now.)
I am using Windows Vista.
If you are having a similar problem in Windows XP with a built-in webcam on an Asus laptop, try rolling back the driver.

I found a lot of info relating to this problem on Linux, and the solution there was to re-program something.

Security flaw in Internet Explorer has experts recommending alternative browsers

BBC NEWS | Technology | Serious security flaw found in IE

Switch to Firefox 3 for a safer, faster and more enriched browsing experience.

The flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer could allow criminals to
take control of people's computers and steal their passwords, internet
experts say.

Microsoft urged people to be vigilant while it investigated and prepared an emergency patch to resolve it.

More on the Koobface virus

The Facebook Virus Spreads: No Social Network is Safe - ReadWriteWeb

Play it smart. Keep your anti-virus software up to date. Don't click on fake messages like You look just awesome in this new movie.
And don't install the Flash plug-in from anything but the Adobe Flash site.

For more details, click on the link.

A new Facebook virus to watch out for

Facebook hit by virus - The INQUIRER

Koobface spreads by sending notes to friends of someone whose PC has been
infected.

The messages, with subject headers like, "You look just awesome in this new
movie," direct victims to a third-party site where they are asked to download
what it claims is an update of Adobe's Flash player.

Downloading the software means that users end up with an infected computer,
which then takes users to contaminated sites when they try to use search engines
from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Live.com, according McAfee.