Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9.0b
Web Platform
Its small size, low memory footprint, and numerous features make this the media player of choice, but you must add the proper codecs to perfect this freeware.
Maintaining proper disk hygiene is like going to the dentist: You do it because you have to, but it's rarely easy and almost never pleasant. PerfectDisk is a friendly alternative that picks up where Windows' Disk Defragmenter leaves off, adding powerful features, an attractive interface, and a top-notch help file with clear instructions and definitions. 
Previously known as MSN Messenger, Windows Live Messenger is Microsoft's answer to instant messaging. While largely the same as its predecessor, Windows Live Messenger is unique for allowing you to share folders and files locally with fellow users. It also serves up the usual animated emoticons, winks, and buzzes, along with multiplayer gaming, free PC-to-PC calling, mobile phone messaging, and video chatting. Plus it adds VoIP capabilities that let you call telephones around the world for a fee. Its one major omission, though, is it lacks the capability to receive inbound calls from landlines or cell phones, a service that competitor Yahoo Messenger with Voice offers.
The program lets you open and edit images, as well as multiple media formats. You can cut and crop images, apply batch conversions, add, sharpen, or blur effects, create panoramas, and change color modes easily. The program continues to add support for an array of file formats and has plug-in support for most image, video, and sound formats, including MP3, AVI, audio CD, and WMA. The interface is far from fancy but should be easy enough for most users to figure out. An IrfanView Thumbnails shortcut on the desktop offers an Explorer-like file tree that quickly displays all images in a particular folder. The latest version includes a basic drawing palette made accessible by hitting F12. It contains simple Erase, Draw, Fill, Rotate, Draw an Arrow, and Color Picker commands, perfect for grabbing screenshots and highlighting image specifics. 
While we love the idea of free TV (who doesn't?), it never seems to be quite what we hoped. FreeZ Online TV is no exception. The channel selection is unimpressive and user guidance is nonexistent.
This powerful application offers extensive utilities to improve your system's performance and protect your privacy. Glary Utilities' well-organized interface allows users to easily choose from several tools. It cleans unwanted junk files and removes invalid and broken shortcuts, freeing up valuable disk space.
VLC Media Player is a long-time open-source favorite, and the latest version is also the first to be out of beta development. It's not the only option for free video playback, but it's one of the best, and the feature updates in version 1 make it well worth the upgrade. 
There are plenty of solid compression utilities to choose from, but this shareware powerhouse offers the features and ease of use that place it at the top of the compression category. WinRAR is easy to use, lightweight, and flexible. 
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is a surprisingly effective freeware antimalware tool. It's a relatively speedy malware remover, with the quick scan taking about 8 minutes even with other high-resource programs running. The heuristics engine proved on multiple computers during empirical testing that it was capable of determining the difference between false positives and dangerous apps. 
This simple freeware application works pretty well, given how basic the interface is. It has two main features: to download FLV files from YouTube, and to convert them to most major formats. If there's a YouTube URL in your clipboard, it will automatically paste it for you when you click on the dialog box. From there, just hit OK and the downloading will commence. One more left-click is all it takes to load the file in the converter, which supports iPhone, iPod, PSP, cell phone, AVI, MP3, WMV, and Xvid. Surprisingly, there's also a basic video editor for cropping videos by time stamp. You can also cut out the sound when converting.
