One of the things that will probably keep me running TFG HQ on Windows until I’m so rich that someone else will be making those decisions is the proliferation of free software that’s out there for it. Here are two recent ones that I’ve been using a lot as part of the day job at the tiny startup:

FastStone Image Viewer: just what it says, and one hell of a lot more. Includes resizing, cropping, converting, red-eye stuff, text-addition, and screen capture (now I can dump SnagIt). Fast as heck. Disable the automatic full-screen setting if you’re like me and don’t like full-screen apps.

Paint.NET: the poor man’s Photoshop. Modeled a little bit after Microsoft’s Paint, but with more stuff thrown in. More than enough for me to manage 99% of my graphics requirements.

Skype: nothing nobody knows about, but it’s awesome for those looooooooooong conference calls. It seems that they’re going to a paid model, but you tell me: $15 for unlimited calling to any phone, anywhere — or monthly bills from Ma Bell, plus a decent speakerphone, plus another headphone/mic combo? Plus (and this is my bugaboo about a phone line), another damn voicemail to check? Nope – call me on the Batphone, man.

ISO Recorder: one-click ISO recording. No matter how far I get from my geek roots, it seems that I’m still burning ISO images for one reason or another. This quarter it was Ubuntu to try to set up a pure Internet machine that didn’t require a single red cent of software (startup, remember?). If you’ve got even the smallest bit of geek in ye, you’ll be fooling with Linux, and ISOs are the best bet for a good clean start.

HTML-Kit: probably overkill, but I like having an HTML editor with a fair portion of built-in stuff. I don’t use even 10% of the features, but it’s nice to have them around, and the footprint is small.

Notepad++: still the best text-editor out there. I simply love it.

OK, then…have fun.