CD/DVD writing

IMGBurn - http://www.imgburn.com/ - From the creator of DVD decrypter, this free disc image utility can create and write a wide range of image file formats and is very useful to have to hand.

CDCheck - http://www.kvipu.com/CDCheck/ - CDCheck is a great disc verification utility and I highly recommend everyone uses it. It is very fast and checking through and CD/DVD media and will report any errors on the disc. If you are writing backups, your music collection or home movies to disc then you want to make sure they burnt correctly and can be used later. After burning a disc just run it thorugh CDCheck for any errors.

SizeMe - http://lars.werner.no/wordpress/?page_id=2 - Have you ever had a directory of files that are too big to fit on a single blank CD or DVD? If so then SizeMe is a free utility that will solve this problem. Using Sizeme you navigate to a directory on your Harddrive and it will automatically work out how to fit all of the files from that directory onto blank media to use the most space on each disc. Once it has done this you can drag and drop these disc layouts directly from SizeMe into Nero or any other burning application to instantly setup each disc to burn.

Other useful utilities

Disk Size Manager - http://www.programurl.com/disk-size-manager.htm - Have you ever wondered what is taking up all the space on your harddrive, but can't easily work it out? Than you need this utility. It gives you a quick run down of the contents of your harddrive so you can see how much space everything is using.

ViceVersa Pro 2 - http://www.tgrmn.com/ - This one isn't actually a free utility but a 30 day free trial is available (and there are ways around it ). If you make backups of large directories of files on your system regularly, for example you backup your MP3 collection or MAME rom set to an external HD) then this application is very useful. It will compare the differences between the two sources and tell you the difference between them, it can also perform backups to the second source and replicate folders or synchronise files. It takes away the need to manually check through files.

Total Commander - http://www.ghisler.com/ - This file manager has been around for a long time and is starting to show its age. It does however have some very useful features such as plugins for direct support of many Amiga file formats, as well as ADF, ADZ, HDF and HDZ formats. But you can also use these plugins with the archive utility ZipZag which I would recommend instead of using this application.

Directory Opus 9 - http://www.gpsoft.com.au/ - The latest Windows version of this famous file manager that started out on the Amiga. Again this isn't free but you can download a free 30 day trial to try it out, and I can guarantee that once you have been using this for a couple of weeks you won't want to go back to just using Windows Explorer to manage and access your files. Don't try to bypass the copy protection and crack this though as they have done a good job on the registration and activation system and any cracks/serial codes you might find online will stop working days after you find them. This is worth buying.