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One of the best Windows media players available, Winamp 5 provides a full featured library to organize, search and browse your collection, as well as create customized playlists. Media Importing periodically checks for new media and automatically adds it into your library. To hear something new, you can access thousands of Internet radio stations and dozens of video streams, all free to the public. Winamp 5 offers a skinnable interface, color themes and plug-ins. Unfortunately, B4S playlists, QuickTime, Real media and purchased music can't be played through Winamp 5 — but developers promise to add Windows Media 9 support soon.

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Azureus is a Java BitTorrent client that works well for both newbies and advanced users. You may find it superior to other BitTorrent clients because of its powerful enhancements and features, including multiple torrent downloads; customizable interface; advanced seeding rules; adjustable disk cache; distributed hash table for decentralized torrent; all-in-one port connectivity; automated scanning, sharing and downloading; priority settings for saving and XML support. Lastly, a wizard lets you install a variety of useful plug-ins, including upload and download scheduling and speed adjustment, automatic downloading with RSS Feed Scanner, status mailer for completed downloads, optional torrent information and remote control.

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Want to create a PDF file but lack the expensive, proprietary software necessary? No problem — simply download PDFCreator. This GNU General Public License (GPL) application lets you create PDFs easily from nearly any application. Even better, the PDFCreator printer driver allows you to print directly from Microsoft Word or another Windows application. The Dates input fields enable a precise measure of version control. The interface is easy to use, making PDFCreator suitable for beginners and advanced users alike. PDFCreator offers multilingual support, important for international users and translators. The PDFCreator application is available in both English and German.

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Everyone — even hardcore Linux fans — needs a break sometimes. Enter Tux Racer: imagine yourself as a sleek Linux penguin sliding down a steep snow-covered mountain. The objective is to collect as many herrings as possible. This is more fun that it sounds, given different weather options, such as fog at night and high winds. You'll be impressed by Tux Racer's unique 3D courses and realistic physics. Tux Racer is easy to grasp but challenging, making it suitable for all ages — which is good, because what kid wouldn't want to try out being a penguin for a while?

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If you’re serious about graphics modeling and animation — or just want to explore them without spending a fortune on software — then you need to take a look at Blender. This open-source program is packed full of features that will impress even graphic-lovin’ tech-gurus. The heart and soul of this application deals with 3D rendering — including meshes, textures, vectors, curves, and metaballs. If animation is more your thing, you can take advantage of the "IPO" system which allows you to work with motion tweening and traditional key frame methods. You can export files to TGA, JPG, PNG, and several other popular graphics file formats. At less than 10MB, Blender is a little graphics modeling program with a big heart.

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If you’ve ever wanted to publish your videos to the web but weren't sure how to get started, Broadcast Machine is the program for you. The application is free, open source and simple to use. Broadcast Machine combines BitTorrent with RSS, including everything you need to start publishing fullscreen video online. The application helps with server seeding, setting up a channel, and tagging your videos. The secret to this program is channels: you can create you very own channel or station that users can subscribe to — similar to a DVR. The program is free for viewers and developers so you can publish your content for the entire world to see. Now all you have to do is come up with something good to say.

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Although an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, most antivirus solutions focus on cures: cleaning up your system after an infection has already done damage. By comparison, Spyware Blaster focuses on prevention by taking a snapshot of your computer and then efficiently blocking spyware, adware, dialers, hijackers and other unwanted programs from being installed. It also blocks annoying Flash animations and unwanted DLLs. Other benefits include easy-to-understand user guides, regular upgrades to keep up with current threats, and the ability to function unobtrusively in the background. Let Spyware Blaster be your ounce of prevention — for free.

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Most plain text editors don't offer the features that programmers and script coders need — and general-purpose document editors like Microsoft Word create too much feature overhead and complications for this purpose. If you're looking for a solution, check out Notepad++. Like a plain text editor, it's simple, easy to use and fast — but it's designed specifically for editing source code. Notepad++ supports common programming languages and syntaxes running under the Microsoft Windows environment, including C/++/#, Java, XML, HTML, PHP, Javascript, ASCII, ASP, SQL, CSS, Perl and others. Its WYSIWYG interface allows you to define your own syntax-highlighting and -folding keywords, comment keywords and operators — as well as drag and drop elements and print your source code in color. Other features include automatic notification for open documents, zooming, multiple language support, bookmarking, brace and indent highlighting. Overall, Notepad++ is a favorite tool among programmers and script coders.

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Pegasus Mail is a popular email client that runs on both DOS and Microsoft Windows platforms, including in a Novell NetWare environment. Like the best email clients, its features include multiple users (for everyone in the family), mail filtering, content control, a full-formatting message editor, inline image attachments, mail merge and multiple address books with nicknames and full user details. Pegasus Mail supports standard email protocols, such as IMAP, POP3 and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) for security. Language versions include English, French, Dutch and German.

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Like Microsoft Word, AbiWord allows you to create documents with a variety of text formats and features, including tables, bullets, lists, images, footnotes and endnotes, styles and mail merge, as well as internationalized support for non-English, non-Roman character languages. AbiWord supports all industry standard document types, including Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, Rich Text Format, HTML web pages and OpenOffice.org, and can run on Windows, Linux, QNX, FreeBSD and Solaris platforms. The AbiWord program is small and requires few resources to run, but its extensible plug-in architecture can enable additional functionality such as document and image importers, a thesaurus and a text summarizer.

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