BB Flashback Express is a free screen recording program that can capture your PC’s screen, sound, and webcam video and supports capturing graphics/animations, including 3D graphics. It offers a high degree of control over your video (output resolution, quality, file size, recording modes, mouse autoscroll, and cursor highlighting effects). Saves resulting files as either FLV’s, AVI’s or SWF’s, and offers the ability to easily upload videos to YouTube or embed them inside a webpage.

This article presents three handy free programs designed to remove installed applications from your system: Appremover, PC Decrapifier, and Revo Uninstraller. All three are portable (or, in the case of Revo, have a portable version available).

PSPad is a text editor with syntax highlighting that supports many languages and file types. It is feature rich, allows you to define your own syntax highlighting for unsupported languages, is highly configurable, and nearly all options are close to hand.

[Editor’s note: this review was written by Freewaregenius contributor Carbonize. Check out his tech blog here].

MindRaider is a multi-platform, free note-taking program that combines a tree-like hierarchical organization alongside a "free form" structure based on tagging your notes. It supports many notes formats (rich text, HTML, TWiki, plain text, and even sketches). But what is truly unique about this program is a visual component whereby your notes structure is either displayed in a "mind mapping" style relationship diagram, or otherwise within a "tag cloud" representation. It also allows you to embed links within notes to other entities.

RIOT is a free program which can best be described as an "image size reduction" toolkit. It allows you to reduce the size of your image(s) while previewing a side-by-side before and after. It also delivers a number of handy image tweaking, conversion, and editing tools.

PDF to Word Free is a free web service that offers high-quality conversions of PDF files to DOC or RTF formats that can be used in Microsoft word or other Rich Text Editors. It lets you upload PDF files through a web interface and will then send the converted file via email as an attachment.

Impressive is a free multi-platform app that can display any PDF file or folder containing image files (JPEG, PNG, TIFF and BMP) as a slideshow presentation. It can be used to present PDFs or images as full-screen PowerPoint-style presentations or it can function as a full-screen reader. “Impressive” also offers a combination of sophisticated slide transition effects and a number of practical presentation tools, including spotlight effects, box highlighting, zooming in, and an overview screen that displays slides as thumbnails and allows for quick navigation.

A reader sent an email to ask about a list of “ten must-have” free programs that I would recommend that everyone immediately download and install on their computers, and this is one I have come up with. These 10 are to be the first installment (part 1), with additional “must have” freeware program lists to be amended to this one. Check this list out, download and install – these programs are solid gold.

Easeus Partition Manager Home Edition is a free disk partitioning utility that offers a powerful range of functions such as resizing drive partitions, formatting partitions, copying partitions/drives, creating new partitions, deleting partitions, hiding partitions, changing drive letters, setting active partitions, and a handful other functions.