Cool Engineering Tools For Windows!

Well, most of these are already known to most of you. but i would like to summarize so that you can refer to these when ever you are rebuilding your system! All these tools are FREE!!

OpenOffice: A truly respectable software that gives you all the essential and some premium features of MS Word (called Writer), MS Powerpoint (called Impress), MS Excel (called Calc), MS Visio (called Draw), MS Access (called Base) and an equation editor called Math. You can save these documents in most of the formats including MS office formats (Basically supports existing MS document formats!). PDF writing is built into this software suite.

Gvim: A very powerful text editor (second to only Emacs but much easier!) and supports syntax highlighting. Its available on windows now. You can also try SciTE.

WinMerge: A powerful, yet easy text comparing and merging tool. Very useful for code revision checks.

7Zip: one word for this archive manager. Awe... wait for it... some!!!

Gimp: The most powerful image editing tool across all platforms and it is free.

IrfanView: Image viewer. Simple and fast! Supports some very cool features like hex view of the image, image transcoding, basic image edits and resizing.

ImgBurn: Simply a too awesome Disk creater. not once did it fail on me!

VLC: An all in one media player supporting almost all the codecs. Also supports streaming video and video capture. Media Player Classic is another media player which has all this features but i prefer VLC! :)

VirtualDub + AviSynth: A powerful video editing tool. You can write your own scripts for the filters or you can use the already developed ones by other users.

Video Edit Master: Video cut and join software. Fast and easy to use.

Audacity: Sound recording and editing. Used only a couple of times but liked it!

WordWeb: A free dictionary which will improve your vocabulary above and beyond.

SuperCopier2: If you have a lot of big files to move around, this is the tool that makes your job much easier. It supports copy pause and resume. Also has improved speeds for over the network transfers.

Foxit PDF reader: Really, leave Adobe and experience this fast PDF reader! Though both are free, this is faster too...

Octave: This is a MATLAB substitute. Supports almost all the functions of MATLAB and is free.

Icarus verilog + GTKwave: Verilog simulator and waveform viewer. This is the best free simulator there is!

Netbeans IDE: A cross platform IDE that supports most of the major languages. Ajax, C/C++, Databases, Debugger, Desktop, Editor, Groovy, GUI Builder, JavaEE, JavaFX, JavaME, JavaSE, JavaScript, Mobile, PHP, Profiler, Python, Refactor, REST, RichClient Platform, Ruby, SOA, SOAP, UML, Web, WSDL, XML are the languages supported by Netbeans IDE.

Perforce server and client: A modern CVS system for your code. The free server supports 2 users and 5 client spaces. You have to purchase license if you want to add more. Client software is free.

Magic and PSpice: VLSI backend tools. Very good for learning purposes. Since there are no free synthesizers for ASIC, you can not actually implement anything complex with this. For synthesis, the standard libraries are required which are specific for each process (eg. 90nm). So IMO, it will not be available for free. Prove me wrong!

If you know of any free tool that i can put up here, please do leave a comment.