This program, suggested by a few YouTube let’s play series I watch, has thus far been the best of the bunch.  It does both real-time video capture and benchmarking.  If needed, you can set it up to show information like frames per second (FPS) if needed. You can also save the statistics out to use them for your own reviews.

Here is a little more about the screen capturing and video capturing from the creators:

Screen Capture Software – Take a screenshot with the press of a key!  There’s no need to paste into a paint program every time you want a new shot.  Your screen captures are automatically named and time stamped.

Realtime Video Capture Software – Have you ever wanted to record video while playing your favorite game?  Come join the Machinima revolution!  Throw away the VCR, forget about using a DV cam, game recording has never been this easy!  Fraps can capture audio and video up to 2560×1600 with custom frame rates from 1 to 120 frames per second!

Fraps only cost $37.00 and by purchasing it, you get all future updates for free, can record longer videos and more. To learn more about Fraps be sure to check out their official website.

Here is a little more about the program from the developers:

GridMove is a program that aims at making windows management easier. It helps you with this task by defining a visual grid on your desktop, to which you can easily snap windows. This program comes bundled with some predefined grid templates, that can be easily swaped, but also has ways of creating custom grids or sharing grids made by others.

GridMove really helps keep your desktop organized.  After playing with it a few days, I have found just about the perfect setup for myself and I can tell my workflow has increased a lot.  Some of the additional features include:

• 3 different interaction methods to suit everyone’s likes
• Several pre-made grid templates that can be easily swapped
• Ability to set windows on top and maximize them vertically or horizontally
• Full keyboard support, which can organize windows with one hotkey press
• MultiMonitor Support
• Customizable hotkeys
• Customizable interface
• Possibility to create dynamic custom grids

Want to give it a shot? Go download it for free (for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7) from the official GridMove website.

The interface of this music player is very familiar if you have used iTunes or anything similar to that in the last few years.  You have your tracks listed in the main window, different folders and collections in the far left pane and you can also use it to listen to internet radio too.  Internet radio providers Last.fm, SomaFM, Magnatune, Icecast and Jamendo are all supported.

Clemintine has a lot of great features, here are a few worth mentioning:

• Create smart playlists and dynamic playlists.
• Tabbed playlists, import and export M3U, XSPF, PLS and ASX.
• CUE sheet support.
• Visualisations from projectM.
• Lyrics and artist biographies and photos.
• Transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC or AAC.
• Edit tags on MP3 and OGG files, organise your music.
• Fetch missing tags from MusicBrainz.
• Download missing album cover art from Last.fm.
• Cross-platform – works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Native desktop notifications on Linux (libnotify) and Mac OS X (Growl).
• Remote control using a Wii Remote, MPRIS or the command-line.
• Copy music to your iPod, iPhone, MTP or mass-storage USB player.
• Queue manager.

If you are looking for a new way to listen to your music and your current music organizing program is giving you the blues, be sure to give the Clementine Music Player a download. It has a familiar interface and is really easy to use.

You can add any kind of file and save it into your Dropbox folder.  So say, Bill add a series of Word documents in his Dropbox folder and then shares that folder with me, I can then pull the documents out and edit them, view them and even add them back to the Dropbox to send back to him.  It is hard for me to hold back my urge to describe the service as some sort of odd time space worm hole – but to me, that might be the best way to describe it.

If you sign up for the free version of Dropbox, you get 2GB of disk space to save and send your stuff.  While that might not make it the perfect backup option – it does come in handy with collaborating on files with others. Check out Dropbox and let me know if you have found any other handy uses for it.

Here is a little more about the program from the developers:

The software allows various background colors, with optional gradient effect, to be set for the desktop notes. You can also customize the font of each note and set it to be semi-transparent so it will not fully cover up your desktop background or icons. To fully protect your privacy, the software encrypts the login password with the irreversible SHA algorithm and also encrypts data files.

You can also style Efficient Sticky Notes to match your wallpaper or desktop, search through past notes you have taken, and recover notes that you may have accidently deleted by mistake too.

Want to try the program out for yourself? Head on over to Efficient Software and give it a download!

The oddly named advanced audio player for Windows, Foobar2000 has a low memory footprint and gets the job done.  Some of the features include:

• Supported audio formats: MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND… and more with additional components.
• Gapless playback.
• Full unicode support.
• Easily customizable user interface layout.
• Advanced tagging capabilities.
• Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats using the Converter component.
• Full ReplayGain support.
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
• Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.

The audio player interface can be customized to suit your needs.  This is a feature I really liked.  I just wanted an interface that would show me the standard controls and a playlist.  Kind of like the old Winamp player used to years ago.  I just dragged in the album I wanted to listen to, and I was done.  Foobar2000 keeps it simple, and I like that.

You can download it for yourself to see if you like it from foobar2000.org.

Now, you might say, "Why do I need to change the colors of my folders?".  Well, by color coding your folders or folders inside of folders, you can more easily find the things you are looking for and create a more organized desktop environment.

Here is a little more about using Rainbow Folders from the developer:

When you’re exploring a directory which contains lots of subdirectories in Windows Explorer you can easily commit a mistake, e.g. by clicking the folder’s icon which has a similar name to the one you really wanted to go to. With the folders marked with the colors of your choosing, you won´t make any mistake and after some time you’ll be clicking the right folders by impulse.

This has to be one of my favorite desktop downloads, because I really love to organize things.  I hope you get some good use out of it too.  You can pick it up over at aionel.net.

Grab your own open source vector graphics editor, for free!  With capabilities similar to Illustrator, Xara X, CorelDraw you can create some really amazing graphics with just a little practice.  If you are wanting to create some original icons, art or anything else for you website layout, this is the program to use.

Before I get too far down the rabbit whole, let me explain real quick what vector graphics are.  It is a resolution-independent image.  No matter how big you make it, the image still looks relatively the same. In contrast, something like a bitmap (bmp) image is locked down to a specific resolution and can not be blown up or made smaller without distorting the original image a lot.

Inkscape will run on Windows, Linux and Mac – so nobody has an excuse not to try this great program out. You really should try Inkscape out for free.  I would recommend you go download it, and then head right over to the tutorials to see what kind of amazing things you can create. I am really amazed by how in depth this free program is.

Ninite bundles the best free and open source programs for you, and lets you install them all at once.  The only work you need to do is to select the software you want to install, then download the package.  There is no extra bundled in deals, no crapware to uninstall and no mess.  Some of the programs included are:

• FileZilla
• 7-Zip
• Launchy
• CCleaner
• Steam
• Dropbox
• Firefox
• Open Office
• Paint.net

and the list goes on and on.  All the programs on the page are categorized by type too, so you have all your web browsers, your messaging clients, your media players and more. 

Want to give it a shot? Head over to Ninite.com and create your own software bundle today.

Flickr is a great way to share your photos online, but using the browser tools might seem a little cumbersome to some people out there. If you want to upload photos directly from your PC to Flickr with only a few clicks in between, then you need the Flickr Uploadr.

With this free program, you simply right click on any image you wish to upload to Flickr, choose “Send to Flickr” and you get the window that is pictured above.  You can also drag and drop files into the Flickr Uploadr too.  From there tag your photos, write descriptions, give them titles and more.  When you are done, upload and all your images you picked will be up and online on your Flickr profile.

The Flickr Uploadr supports both Mac and Windows, so go download it and start adding new pictures to your own Flickr profile.  You don’t have an excuse now to put it off any longer!