Calendar/Scheduling

1. Lightning/Sunbird
In addition to Thunderbird and Firefox, Mozilla also makes a calendar application. If you use Thunderbird for e-mail, Lightning adds calendar functionality similar to Outlook. If you don’t use Thunderbird, the Sunbird stand-alone calendar gives you most of the same functionality, except that it doesn’t integrate with e-mail meeting requests.

2. Rachota
If your New Year’s resolution is to make better use of your time, Rachota can help. It makes it easy to track the amount of time you spend on each project, and it can create html reports so that you can see where all your time went.

3. Tea Timer
Tea Timer lets you use your PC as an egg/tea timer and alarm clock. Set alerts to remind yourself to attend a meeting, eat lunch, etc. You can also run up to six timers at once, alerting you when your tea is steeped, your food is ready, or whatever.

Browsers

4. Firefox
Tabbed browsing, search suggestions, and a host of other features make this open source browser a perennial award-winner. It's also really easy to customize with thousands of add-ons.

5. K-Meleon
K-Meleon uses the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox and also integrates the popular tabbed browsing feature. However, it’s the only browser that lets you use your Internet Explorer favorites and Opera Hotlist along with Firefox or Navigator bookmarks. K-Meleon also utilizes mouse gestures, is easy to skin and customize, and loads really fast.

Content Management

6. Joomla
Joomla claims to be “one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet.” It’s also incredibly easy to use, making it possible for novices to get started adding content to Web sites, intranets, and extranets.

7. Drupal
Designed with scalability in mind, Drupal can handle content for everything from small personal blogs to large community-driven Web sites. Key features include role-based permissions, personalization, searching, templates, version control, as well as a unique “collaborative book” feature.

8. XOOPS
Short for eXtensible Object Oriented Portal System, XOOPS began as a portal development tool and morphed into a full content management system. It’s driven by a MySQL database and includes personalization, user management, and support for multiple languages.

Databases

9. Firebird
This relational database management system (RDBMS) takes up very little disk space and is very easy to use—even if you’re not a DBA. But don’t let the small install size fool you; Firebird is a fully-featured database that can handle millions of records with hundreds of concurrent connections.

10. PostgreSGL
PostgreSQL is an enterprise-class database that prides itself on standards compliance, including conforming with the ANSI-SQL 92/99 standards. Key features include Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point-in-time recovery, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and much more.

Developer Tools

11. phpMyAdmin
This PHP tool that makes it easier to administer MySQL databases over the Web. It can create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute SQL statements, manage keys on fields, manage privileges, and export data.

12. Dev-C++
This C++ integrated development environment (IDE) includes support for GCC-based compilers, integrated debugging (using GDB), support for multiple languages, code completion, and a customizable syntax highlighting editor. Linux-lovers can use it with Cygwin to get that Linux look and feel.

13. XAMPP
If you’ve struggled through setting up an Apache server with MySQL, PHP and Perl, XAMPP can make the process much, much easier; you simply download and extract one file, and you’re ready to go. The Windows version comes with a smorgasbord of apps, including Apache, MySQL, PHP & PEAR, Perl, ProFTPD, phpMyAdmin, OpenSSL, GD, Freetype2, libjpeg, libpng, gdbm, zlib, expat, Sablotron, libxml, Ming, Webalizer, pdf class, ncurses, mod_perl, FreeTDS, gettext, mcrypt, mhash, eAccelerator, SQLite, and IMAP C-Client.

14. Notepad++
This WYSIWYG text editor offers several upgrades over Notepad that makes it easier to write code. Specifically, it features user-defined syntax highlighting, syntax folding, auto-completion, search and replace, drag and drop, multiple documents, and more.

15. jEdit
This java-based text editor provides auto-indent and syntax highlighting for more than 130 programming languages. It’s highly customizable and has a long list of plug-ins that make it even better.

16. Little Wizard
If you’re the kind of parent who believes children are never too young to learn how to code, check out this development environment for the grade-school crowd. Using only the mouse, Little Wizard users learn about programming concepts like variables, expressions, loops, conditions, and logical blocks.

17. Windows Leaks Detector
This no-frills app can attach to any running Windows process and detect memory leaks. It groups leaks together by call stack for easier debugging.