If you prefer media player looks over performance (that is, you are inclined to love a player by its design over its speed and capabilities), you might not like Media Player Classic as much as you do with other media players. Commercial media players usually reign the graphical user interface (GUI) department and unfortunately, Media Player Classic was not developed for it.

Media Player Classic’s design was aimed to mimic the simplicity of the old Windows Media Player 6.4. However, it boasts a set of additional features that is hard to find in an in-built media player: a native DVD-support with real-time zoom, support for AVI subtitles, QuickTime and RealVideo support (requires QuickTime and/or Real Player), and built-in MPEG2/SVCD/DVD codec.

What captivated me most of Media Player Classic is its speed. Even now that I’m already using Windows Vista, and there are lots of modern players, they are still unable to knock out Media Player Classic’s leadership in speed. The program is very fast and movie files are loaded almost instantly when you hit the play button.

I therefore encourage you to try Media Player Classic now. It’s the best for me. You’ll see what I mean when you start experiencing its playback performance and you will strongly like it.

Click here to download Media Player Classic.

To tell you: WinDirStat is not new, but probably this could be the first time you heard about this program. WinDirStat basically will solve your hard disk mysteries by letting you see your hard disk’s contents in a “bird-eye” view. If ever wondered where your space has gone off or if you want to know which file is eating your space away, this program will help you identify it. Yes, no more hard disk mysteries, bar none.

The first screen you’ll encounter is the hard disk selection (shown in a list above). You will see multiple entries if you have more than one hard disk drives. In my case I only have one, and there is less than three gigabytes remaining space on my 80 GB laptop hard disk drive. This is where the mystery kicks in: how come my hard disk is almost full? I will let WinDirStat solve this for me.

While the program is analyzing my hard disk, a cute Pacman-looking image runs back and forth (it replaces the typical progress bar I expected to see). After the analysis, you would see a colorful graphics chart representing the size of files in your hard disk. Big squares mean big file sizes and small ones are usually simple word documents or link library files in your operating system. Clicking specifically on a square will let you know the filename and file size – thus, revealing the truth of the hard disk mystery. Nice, isn’t it?

Now, WinDirStat can be downloaded for only 630 kilobytes – yes, just like that. It’s free but useful utility. It runs on all Windows systems (it works OK on Windows Vista). You can visit WinDirStat’s official website here.

Click here to download WinDirStat.

Try this program and drop a comment after you see for yourself how great it is. Two thumbs up!

The open source program that awed me is called Paint.NET, a raster graphics editing program for Windows, developed under .NET Framework using C# and C++ languages. When I saw the program running on my screen for the first time, I doubted if the program is really free – and it really is.

Paint.NET program has a familiar user interface. The toolbox looks similar to that of Photoshop. The whole program looks actually like a downsized Adobe Photoshop version. It supports layers as well, transparency, blending, plug-in and has dozens of in-built image effects to choose from. The program is amazingly fast and lightweight. Paint.NET can be downloaded here for only 1.6 MB disk space.

I love Paint.NET because of the following things:

• Better than Paint – if you are still using Microsoft Paint until now, you’re still in the cave. Paint.NET provides many image and photo editing functionalities that Microsoft would never put on their paint.
• Frequent Updates – I love the creators of this program. They keep on upgrading this free application and adding new features. Probably better than being stuck in the simplicity of Microsoft Paint. lol
• Less than Photoshop, But Free – Professionally, I use Photoshop for my graphics editing needs. However, I got the benefits because I paid for them. With Paint.NET, you’ll get dozens of Photoshop effects and filters without stripping out your wallet.

You will appreciate for yourself when you try running this great program. Paint.NET opened my eyes that I would never ever underestimate the power of open source applications because they could contend, in a way, far better than the ones created by commercial companies.