QuickTime Alternative - Play QuickTime files (.mov, .qt and other extensions) without having to install the official QuickTime Player.

Real Alternative Play RealMedia files without having to install RealPlayer/RealOne Player. Supports RealAudio (.ra .rpm), RealMedia (.rm .ram .rmvb .rpx .smi .smil), RealText (.rt), ReadPix (.rp).

The folks at DriveSavers are simply amazing. Their service, performance, and communication far surpass the most optimistic expecatations. Based on my experience with them a week or two ago, they will remain my first and last call for data recovery.

Bart's way to create bootable CD-ROMs (for Windows/DOS) is hugely helpful for those looking to make custom, bootable CDs of their favorite DOS or Windows distributions. Bart has made an otherwise obscure process trivially easy, clearly explaining how to include service packs, disable the product key prompt, and much more. His PE Builder (which creates a bootable CD with Windows XP or Server 2003 environment) is back and definitely worth checking out if you work on NTFS volumes. It is particularly well suited as a rescue platform, though perhaps not as robust as Knoppix.

Monitor Tools has an extensive listing of network-related software for IT professionals in the following categories: Alerting, Application Monitoring, Enterprise Management, Network and System Monitoring, Miscellaneous Tools, Network Traffic Analyzing & Performance Monitoring, PC Monitoring, Protocol Analyzers and Packet Capture Tools, Security Monitoring, and Web Monitoring.

"Regex Coach enables you to try out the behaviour of Perl's regular expression operators interactively and in 'real time', i.e. as soon as you make changes somewhere the results are instantly displayed. You can also query the regex engine about selected parts of your regular expression and watch how it parses your input."

If you're still using Telnet or FTP, you need to know about SSH and SCP. The
Freeware SSH and SCP for Windows 9x, NT, ME, 2000 and XP page is a great place to start.

Many thanks to CoAX for pointing out ViceVersa Free a "Windows utility that Compares, Replicates, Synchronizes and Backups your data." It has an installer, but is only a 510k download. It saved me from some tremendous hassle this afternoon while syncing a slew of files and folders.

Thanks to Jeff (again) for finding TDIMon, a freeware port to process viewer which works under 9x and is a mere 95k download.

Ultrafunk's on-again, off-again Popcorn email client is now a hybrid freeware/shareware product. Apparently borrowing the concept from Jem Berkes (creator of JBMail), Popcorn 1.51 allows only one account to be stored in freeware mode. The last true freeware version was 1.50 beta 3, available for download here. (Thanks to Jeff for the update and download link.)

There are two excellent freeware apps for port to process mapping, though they only work under NT/2K (Active Ports works under XP as well):

Active Ports - Monitor all open TCP and UDP ports on the local computer. Active Ports maps ports to the owning application so you can watch which process has opened which port. It also displays a local and remote IP address for each connection and allows you to terminate the owning process. Active Ports can help you to detect trojans and other malicious programs.

Vision - Shows all of the open TCP and UDP ports on a machine, displays the service that is active on each port, and maps the ports to their respective applications. Vision allows users to access a large amount of supplementary information that is useful for determining host status by displaying detailed system information, applications running, as well as processes and ports in use.

Under Windows 9x, the only similar app I've found is shareware ($30/$40, 30 day trial):

Port Explorer - See all the open ports on your system and what programs own them. Also includes a packet sniffer, bandwidth throttling, country detection, and more.