Good software

These are good free (or sponsored) programs out there that I have gotten a lot of mileage out of.  More extensive reviews of each can be found on the main page.

• Net Vampire -  A download scheduler.  Even if you have a fast connection, a drag-and-drop URL collector saves a lot of time when pulling down large sets of files each from their own link.

• HTTrack -  Downloads entire sites to be available off-line.  This is useful if you need an entire site as a back-up, reference, or template.  Good insurance if a site goes down.

• Natural Voice Reader -  Great text-to-speech reader.  Will read directly from a web page, document, etc.  It could use a little more work (alternatively, you could pay for the extras), but it does the job.

• ReadPlease -  Similar to the above.  There are less bells and whistles, but there are also fewer quirks.

• Panicware Pop-up stopper -  Kills pop-ups in both Explorer and Netscape.  Has a little tray icon that you can toggle if it happens to block something you want.

• Ad-Aware -  If you are ever infected with spyware, this will clean your system.

• Zone Alarm -  This is an excellent (and free!) firewall package that probably has saved me from countless viruses.  I wish I would have had it before the Blaster and/or Welchia32 worms did a number on my hard drive.

• Irfanview -  Terrific freeware gfx viewer.  Allows cropping, batch conversions/resizes/resamples, etc.  No frills but lots of function.  I used it for all the images on my eBay listings and many of the ones on this site.