Peter Gabriel’s innovative music site, WE7.com is a music discovery service where you can stream and download music for free with a short audio advert attached, or pay to download without the advert. All downloads are in high quality MP3 format and there’s a wide-range of music available.

When the service was launched, in May 2007, just 30 tracks were available to users. In a short space of time WE7.com has reached over 3 million downloads, over 100,000 subscribers and secured licences for music from some of the world’s leading artists. The site is adding thousands of new tracks each day and will soon have hundreds of thousands of tracks that you can download for free.

StartMenuEx is a useful and very functional replacement for the standard Windows XP Start menu. It’s fully customisable and lets you set up and switch between different Start menus, so you can use them for different situations (work, home, or the internet, for example). It’s a simple but surprisingly effective upgrade.
P.S. This is an actual screenshot from my own Desk Top, showing StartMenuEx in action.

PixMaker Lite is a program that automatically stitches together photos, builds an automatically rotating 360° panorama, Web page, and even a self-extracting executable to send by email… best of all, it’s totally free!

AbiWord is my favorite cross-platform, open-source minimalist word processor. It’s a desktop application but launches and runs so much faster than applications like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice. It’s light, but has most of the commonly used features of the bigger desktop word processors.

Today, I’m republishing a list of my Top 18 free computer applications. I’m using all of these on a regular basis, and all come highly recommended. Most of these are being updated all the time, so even if you already have some of these installed it’s worth re-checking the authors website for the latest version.

Best Free Digital Image Viewer – The FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, user-friendly image browser that supports all major graphic formats. It’s also got good basic image editing facilities, a great slide show and a very good looking interface.

The world’s best media player. – The GOM Media Player offers support for most file formats without the need to obtain a codec. Many of its features are much better than Windows Media Player, including the ability to play broken media files, alter speed, frame capture etc. The control panel is easy to use and lets you customize just about everything.

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Clean your system with CCleaner

CCleaner (formerly Crap Cleaner) is a freeware program that removes unused and temporary files from your system – allowing Windows to run faster, more efficiently and giving you more hard disk space. It’s very fast, normally taking less than a seconds to run. The program also removes traces of your online activity, from Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera. Advanced features include a registry cleaner and removal of temporary files from third party application

Fast PDF reader

Fed up waiting for your PDF files to download with Adobe Reader? There’s a new alternative reader that’s much faster: Sumatra PDF Reader for Windows. Sumatra takes up minimal disk space – it has a 1MB setup file (compared to Adobe Reader’s 27.5 MB). It was designed for portable use, consisting of one single file, making it ideal for running from a portable USB flash drive, but it can also be used as the default reader on your PC for quickly viewing files. One useful feature of Sumatra PDF is that it remembers the last opened page for each PDF file, very helpful when reading e-books.

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