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I use WinSCP (http://winscp.net/) constantly and have had a very good experience with it. It’s free and open source. I only use Secure FTP for security reasons; Filezilla and FireFTP also support SFTP but I like WinSCP the best.

If you have choice use SFTP instead of FTP; FTP is terribly insecure. For SFTP I use and recommend open-source WinSCP. If you want a “seamless” SFTP/Windows Explorer interface I really recommend ExpanDrive which allows you to mount an SFTP site as a Windows drive letter; it’s not free but worth every penny: http://www.expandrive.com/. Of course, if you use Linux you can just treat any FTP/SFTP site as though it were a local drive.

I also use and recommend Downloadhelper.

The most complete free video file format converter is Super (C). The only downside to Super (C) is that they have an incredibly obtuse system that forces you to hunt through three pages (all packed with ads for a competing commercial product) before you actually get to the download link. But it’s worth it; I’ve used it a lot and it’s very good.

Many people are unaware that OpenOffice.org, like many open source projects, has multiple distributions. The primary distribution, OpenOffice.org, is community software heavily supported by Sun, who also sell a supported commercial version called StarOffice.

Another distribution is from IBM; they repurposed the old Lotus Symphony name. Lotus Symphony is free, has the full resources of IBM behind it, and is used internally within the company; unlike other OpenOffice.org distributions it is written entirely in Java running on top of Eclipse.

Novell produces the OpenOffice.org Novell Edition for Windows which is a commercial version like StarOffice, but they also package a free community-supported version of their distribution at Go-OO.org. It’s features not found in the main OpenOffice.org distribution include:

[*]Built-in SVG import filter
[*]Built-in 3D transitions within presentations
[*]Faster start-up
[*]Linear optimization solver that can optimize a cell value based on arbitrary constraints, built into Calc
[*]Improved interoperability with Excel
[*]VBA macro support
[*]Improved EMF rendering
[*]MS-Works import
[*]WordPerfect Graphics import
[*]Lotus Word Pro import
[*]Bundles the most useful OpenOffice.org extensions, like presenter console, pdfimport, and presentation minimizer
[*]A true cross platform application: runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX

Go-OO.org is my distribution of choice and the one I recommend to everybody!

I maintain a freeware list for students in the IT degree program at Illinois Institute of Technology; it’s pretty complete and most of my picks are also in the top three in Gizmo’s list. The list is at http://trygstad.rice.iit.edu/iitapps/.

I’ll have to look at IZArc as I’ve not heard of it before; I use 7zip.

–Ray Trygstad