Against the spirit of making money online, none of these sites are affiliate sites and I do not make any money from promoting them to you.
I just want to give you a better start than I had. I've spent years finding these tools and services!
Get Abobe Flash Player / Adobe Acrobat and Reader / Adobe Shockwave Player / Adobe Air.
http://www.adobe.com/
Quicktime Player.
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/
Record audio from speakers, even works recording skype calls in web conference and webinars!
http://www.nch.com.au/wavepad/ WavePad record and playback, audio editor.
Put audio on your blog posts. (you have to carefully check punctuation, but it works great once you get the hang of it).
http://www.odiogo.com/
Screen capture! Record your on-screen audio and visual activities to make videos, how to's and teach in's.
http://camstudio.org/
Put your spoken word - audio on your website! Web Audio Plus.
http://download.cnet.com/Web-Audio-Plus/3000-2168_4-10448014.html
Double Agent is an Open Source alternative to Microsoft™ Agent that allows Agent applications to work on Windows 7.
It's available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. You will need this for applications like the talking alarm clocks etc.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/doubleagent/
I've used many anti-virus and spy-ware checker free versions for many years. The best free one is AVG's 9.0
http://free.avg.com/ww-en/download?prd=afg
Talking alarm clock. You need to keep yourself on-time, without a boss to schedule your time, you need to be your own task-master.
http://www.cinnamonsoftware.com/alarm_clock.htm
And the Double Agent for the clock.
http://www.cinnamonsoftware.com/double_agent.htm
I use TimeTrek for my time management, either to keep track of how long I'm spending on a project.
You can also use it to log time on tasks when being paid for your time.
http://www.gieson.com/Library/projects/utilities/timetrek/index.html
Know your computer- useful searches on Bing.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=how+to+find+32+bit+or+64+bit+version+on+my+computer&src=IE-SearchBox&FORM=IE8SRC
If you are designing websites and blogs, you will need to see how they look in the most popular browsers.
Install EI8 / FireFox / Opera / Safari / Google Chrome.
http://www.browserchoice.eu/BrowserChoice/browserchoice_en.htm
Some of my flash players, I don't know why I have so many, but the best is Adobe Media Player
Adobe Media Player. (you need Adobe Air to run this).
http://www.adobe.com/products/mediaplayer/
Some of the rest.
http://download.cnet.com/windows/media-players/?tag=bc
http://www.finalmediaplayer.com/index2.html
http://download.cnet.com/SWF-amp-FLV-Player/3000-2139_4-170532.html?part=dl-SWFFLVPla&subj=dl&tag=button
EncryptOnClick File Encryption / PatchOnClick and DeleteOnClick (self-explanatory).
Look further down the 2brightsparks page for the Yellow buttons.
http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html#freeware
DVD encoders I use and Players - especially the XP codec Pack was very useful.
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Search/dvd_decoder.html
http://en.softonic.com/s/free-dvd-decoder-mpeg-2
WinRAR is a 32-bit/64-bit Windows version of RAR Archiver, the powerful archiver and archive manager.
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Utilities/Compression_and_Zip_File_Utilities/WinRAR.html
I hope that that was a useful list for you!
AndyGold.
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