This also gave me a handy reference, when setting up a new workstation in a new office.
All are free, most are open-source, and all are recommended.
- 7zip - 7-zip.org
- Multi-format archiver for Windows -- gui and command-line. As good or better than WinZip, but it's free and open-source
- CCleaner and Defraggler from Piriform - www.piriform.com
- Great system maintenance/cleanup tools -- paid for professional use.
- Cygwin64 - cygwin.com
- bash, x-windows, and tons of other *nix tools for Windows
- The x64 version is much faster than the x86 version - get that one
Filezilla FTP - filezilla-project.org- This was much less useful in a Linux environment than I expected - virtually everything moved over SCP.
- April 2016 Update: Filezilla has had some problems with "optional" add-on "offers" - adware and borderline-malware. Bad enough that SourceForge won't host their software any more. Better to use WinSCP.
- FLux - justgetflux.com/
- Not strictly for SysAdmins, but automatic screen color adjustments are allegedly good for your eyes.
- Google Drive
- Duh
- LastPass lastpass.com
- Handles almost every kind of secure credential you need to remember
- Nmap - nmap.org
- GUI and command line - fantastically useful
- Notepad++ - notepad-plus-plus.org
- Fantastic text editor, tons of plugins, free, open-source, etc.
- Paint.net - getpaint.net
- Free, dot-Net based graphics editor with tons of features
- Not strictly for sysadmins, but still very useful for image manipulation
- Far easier to justify than Photoshop
- PsTools - sysinternals.com
- a great suite of command line tools for Windows from SysInternals, which was purchased by Microsoft in 2006 (the whole SysInternals suite is great)
- PuTTY - www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty
- save yourself some headaches and set your default preferences, like tcp keepalives, username, etc.
- Move your settings around with registry exports/imports
- RVTools - www.robware.net
- Simple, alternative/complement to the VMWare vSphere client - great for finding problems with your VM's and hosts without navigating through a ton of screens
- Tera Term - en.sourceforge.jp/projects/ttssh2/
- Free, open source, terminal emulator - much better at serial operations than PuTTY
- Treesize - jam-software.de/treesize_free
- The paid version is super powerful, the free version is still very good.
- VirtViewer - spice-space.org/download.html
- KVM virtualization console client for Windows - tough to find, very useful
- WinSCP - winscp.net
- Just what it sounds like
- Wireshark - wireshark.org (fka Ethereal)
- Capture and analyze packets - especially useful for desktop visualization and filtering when you've got a complex tcpdump file from somewhere else
- April 2016 Addition: Babun zshell for Windows - https://babun.github.io/
- Slick package of Cygwin (x86) utilities, the Z shell, and a bunch of other interesting applications.
- This is the first non-Cygwin package I've seen that includes Cygwin, and also lets you run Cygwin setup independently, to manage the mix of Cygwin tools.
