Audio

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds.  It is cross-platform and used widely to create podcasts.

CDex is a CD/Ripper music encoder. CDex can extract the data directly (digital) from an Audio CD, which is generally called a CD Ripper or a CDDA utility. The resulting audio file can be a plain WAV file (useful for making compilation audio CDs) or the ripped audio data can be compressed using an audio encoder. Many encoders are supported.

DSpeech is a TTS (Text To Speech) program with functionality of ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) integrated. It is able to to read aloud the written text and choose the sentences to be pronounced based upon the vocal answers of the user.  DSpeech does not install itself, is very light, starts in a second and doesn't write anything to the registry.

winLAME is an encoder for several audio formats.   It lets you set up the encoding process with an easy-to-use wizard-style user interface.

Virtual Metronome is a simple and effective virtual metronome.

VLC media player 0.8.6a is a free cross-platform media player.  It supports a large number of multimedia formats, without the need for additional codecs. 

Education

Periodic Table list all the elements of the periodic table along with detailed information on each element, image of its natural state, biography of its discoverer, glossary, as well as the ability to view the state of the element at any temperature.

Games

Anagramarama - The aim is to find as many words as possible in the time available. Get the longest word and you'll advance to the next level.

Minionsoft - Lots of remakes of old ARCADE games. Asteroids, AticAtac, Atomino, Defender, Frogger, Galaxian, Missile Command, Moon Patrol, Pacman, Repton, Scramble, Space Invaders,  StarWars, Uridium.  Additional Game - Gamemaker Page.

pouetChess is an innovating and open-source chess game. 

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection - This is a collection of 25 one-player puzzle games.

Sudoku Portable is the entertaining and addictive Sudoku puzzle game packaged as a portable app, so you can play on the go.

Graphic Editing

FastStone Capture 5.2 Freeware (Last Update: 2007-01-16)
A powerful, flexible and intuitive screen-capture utility. It allows you to capture anything on the screen including windows, objects, full screen, rectangle / freehand-selected regions and scrolling windows/web pages.

FastStone Image Viewer 2.9 Freeware (Last Update: 2007-01-18)
An image browser, converter and editor that supports all major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA. It has a nice array of features such as image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping, color adjustments, musical slideshow and much more.

FastStone MaxView 2.0 Freeware (Last Update: 2006-12-08)
A tiny, very fast and innovative image viewer that supports all major graphic formats. Its intuitive layout and commands allow everyone, from beginners to professionals, to view and manipulate images quickly and efficiently.

FastStone Photo Resizer 2.4 Freeware (Last Update: 2007-01-08)
An image converter / resizer intended to enable users especially digital camera owners to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermark to images in a quick and easy BATCH mode.

Google SketchUp is a powerful yet easy-to-learn 3D software tool that combines a simple, yet robust tool-set with an intelligent drawing system that streamlines and simplifies 3D design. From simple to complex, from conceptual to realistic, Google SketchUp helps you see your vision before you build it.

IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative freeware (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer. Tutorial - Instructional Endeavors
Download Installer For All Tutorials (9.11 MB)
Download Tutorial In HTML Help Format (8.73 MB)

PaintStar is a versatile digital image processing software suitable for such tasks as retouching of photographs, composing and authoring images, image morphing, screen capture, and displaying image thumbnail in Windows Explorer context menu. It supports alpha, layer, path ,and the most common editing techniques. PaintStar has many of the tools and filters you would expect to find in commercial offerings, and some interesting extras as well.

PhotoFiltre is a complete image retouching program. It is simple and intuitive to use. The toolbar, giving you access to the standard filters with just a few clicks, gives PhotoFiltre a robust look.

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

Tux Paint is a free, award-winning drawing program for children ages 3 to 12. It combines an easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who guides children as they use the program.

XnView - A software to view and convert graphic files, really simple to use.  Support of more than 400 graphics formats.  XnView is provided as Freeware for private non-commercial, educational use and non-profit organizations.

Internet

Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client. It is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Sametime, and Zephyr networks.  Gaim users can log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AOL Instant Messenger, talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger, and sitting in an IRC channel all at the same time.

Miranda IM is a smaller, faster, easier instant messenger with support for multiple protocols. Miranda IM is designed to be resource efficient and easy to use while still providing many features including support for AIM, Jabber, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo, and more. Supplemented by hundreds of plug-ins and other content, Miranda IM is very flexible and provides many avenues for customization.

Mozilla Firefox - Portable Edition is the popular Mozilla Firefox web browser so you can take your bookmarks, extensions and saved passwords with you.  Note: It is also packaged with a PortableApps.com Launcher,

RSSOwl Portable is the lightweight RSSOwl news/RSS aggregator packaged with a Cube Games Launcher (similar to a PortableApps.com launcher) as a portable app, so you can work with news feeds from an iPod, USB flash drive, portable hard drive, CD or any other portable media. It has all the same great features as RSSOwl including OPML support, bookmarks, blogrolls and more. Plus, it leaves no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, so you can take your news aggregator wherever you go.

Skype in a portable format is a little piece of software that lets you make free calls to anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world. And even though the calls are free, they are really excellent quality. If you and your friends, family or business contacts are using webcams, you can also make free video calls. You can even call landlines and mobile phones at really cheap per minute rates. This link is to a German download site that has the best portable version.  The software is in English. 

Thunderbird delivers safe, fast, and easy email, with intelligent spam filters, quick message search, and customizable views. Brought to you by Mozilla.

Additional Portable Software Websites

• SnapFiles
  Handy programs to put on a USB stick
• The Portable Freeware Collection 
• FreeSMUG - Free Open Source Software
  Mac User Group
• Free Portable Software (for USB thumbdrive)  
• Nedwolf
• ThinDownload - Thinstalled Open Source/Freeware

Multimedia

CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)

Slide Show Movie Maker can create an .avi vide slideshow from a series of .bmp or .jpg images. Save using any of your systems installed .avi codecs. Build your slideshow from selected pictures or entire directories. Has built in previewer for effects.  Work can be saved as projects, so they can be modified.

Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.

Organizers

ATnotes is a freeware program which creates notes on the desktop. It sits in the taskbar and takes very few resource. The notes are fully customizable : font, text size, color or transparency can be changed. You can set alarm for each note, which will bring the note to front, and flash it with a sound. When a note is minimized, only the first line is displayed, reducing the desktop space used

Citrus Alarm Clock is an easy to use and free software alarm clock.  Fade in alarm audio for relaxed reminders.

GanttProject is a free and easy to use Gantt chart based project scheduling and management tool.

Sunbird lets you manage your schedule easily, and store it where you want to. Mozilla-style ease-of-use for your calendar.

To Do List is a rare form of task management tool, one that allows you to repeatedly sub-divide your tasks into more manageable pieces.

Utilities

7-Zip is a file archiver with high compression ratio.

ClamWin is a Free Antivirus for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP and 2003.

ConvertAll is a unit conversion program in which units can be combined with multiplication and division operators and can be squared, cubed, etc. The interface is graphical, allowing the units to be selected from lists and the conversions to be made in both directions. Download

CyberShredder is a quick, safe and handy utility that lets you erase confidential files from your computer permanently. CyberShredder overwrites the space occupied from a file with random data and erases the file, so an unerase utility will never be able to recover it.

DeepBurner will be able to solve most of your burning needs: be it burning of Data/Audio/Video CDs, all types of DVDs, composing photo albums and even burning backups. Every operation starts with a simple wizard, thus virtually everyone can use DeepBurner.

DSynchronize is a stand-alone utility that let you periodically synchronize two or more folders on Hard Disk, Floppy Disk, LAN, USB Key, CD-DVD (with packet writing software) and FTP server.  It is also possible to specify the time and the day to schedule the synchronization to run, and to create some additional "filters" for other factors.  Real-Time sync is also supported.

GraphCalc  combines all the features of a professional mathematics calculator with the simplicity of an easy to learn windows interface. It provides user-friendly help and tutorials.

KeePass is a free/open-source password manager or safe which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key-disk. So you only have to remember one single master password or insert the key-disk to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish). 

InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration.

Restoration is an easy to use tool to undelete files that were deleted. The program is small and standalone, it does not require installation. Restoration works with FAT and NTFS as well as digital cameras cards.

Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier recovers files from disks with physical damage. Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method most types of files can be made useable even if some parts were not recoverable in the end.

Website Development

ColorPic - Versatile Color PickerColor
Grab palettes of up to 16 colors at once and use four advanced color mixers to select a spectrum of possibilities. Palette Creation is a Breeze With ColorPic - Freeware

FileZilla is a fast FTP and SFTP client for Windows with a lot of features. 

HTTrack is a freeware and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a complete website to a local directory. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. 

NVU/KompoZer - A complete Web Authoring System to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. NVU (which stands for "new view") makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.

PMeter is a simple to use dektop ruler allowing to switch between 3 user configurations easily. PMeter also includes a color picker in case you need to know or work with the color of any pixel visible on your screen.

Word Processing

AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks.

eTextReader enables you to read the plain text files provided by Project Gutenberg in a book-like manner. You can change the font type and size, choose a text and background color, set bookmarks, adjust margins, find words or phrases and more. The program can open the text files directly from the Project Gutenberg zip file, and also import RTF and HTML files. Other features include text editing, table of contents creation and more. Standalone program, no installation required.

EditPad Lite is a general-purpose text editor, designed to be small and compact, yet offer all the functionality you expect from a basic text editor. 

Foxit Reader 2.0 is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 1.5 M download size), breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set.

Free PDF Compressor compresses PDF files and reduce the actual size of PDF documents.  With this freeware, you are able to set the compression level to generate PDF files of smallest size.

MemPad is a notebook with an index tree. The program handles plain text pages, offering standard editing functions including cut, copy, paste, undo, date/time insert, drag&drop. Web links as well as network and local file links are supported.

OpenOffice.org Portable is compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute. It is the complete OpenOffice.org office suite -- including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database -- packaged as a portable app, so you can take all your documents and everything you need to work with them wherever you go.

Sumatra PDF Portable is the lightweight Sumatra PDF packaged as a portable app, so you can view PDF files on the go.

TheSage's English Dictionary and Thesaurus is a comprehensive and easy-to-use language reference system.  TheSage's English Dictionary and Thesaurus is a professional software package that integrates a complete dictionary and multifaceted thesaurus of the English language into a single and powerful language reference system.