I have been endeavouring to use free or open source software where ever I can and have found some really good free alternatives to commercial software that I thought I should share with the world.

Here is a list of some of my favourite freeware:

• KeyNote - great knowledgebase/notepad tool, I have replaced M$ OneNote with this tool.
  
  
• FreeMind - a free mind mapping tool.
  
  
• Keepass - a password safe, a derivative of Bruce Scheiner's original Password Safe.
  
  
• Crimson Editor - Awesome text editor with source code syntax highlighting.
  
  
• All of the utilities on the System Internals and NirSoft sites, these system utilities do double time as security utils in my pentesting toolkit.
  
  
• 7-zip - great replacement for products like WinZip with better compression.
  
  
• Total Commander - if you remember Nortons Commander then you'll love this tool. This is not freeware but shareware, I liked it so much I bought a copy. Once you get acquainted with this software you won't go back to Windows Explorer.
  
  
• Picasa - Google owned lightweight picture and photo organiser. This has a limited number of photo touch up functions such as red-eye removal.
  
  
• FireFox - tabbed browsing is the only way to browse the web. Favourite addins are FoxForecast (weather), ProxySwitcher and Googlebar. This is one of the best things for home users to install... no more popups or drive-by installs of spyware.
  
  
• UltraVNC - Replace VNC and PCAnywhere with this VNC derivative that supports file transfers and snappy performance thanks to an included screen driver.

If you have some favourite free tools please mail me and I will post them on the site.