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.

Q-Dir is a free file management / explorer replacement program with a light footprint and a nice set of features. It integrates very well with Windows’ desktop environment and employs an innovative interface that makes it very easy to work with multiple file panes. Can be run portably from USB.

Photology is a free image management program designed to navigate large image libraries and find images without the need for tagging or for organizing by folder structure. Instead, Photology scans all images and applies a number of innovative filters such as faces, color, location, time of day, exposure, etc. to find results.

“Everything” is a free, lightning fast file and folder name search program that offers right-click context menu integration. It works with NTFS filesystem hard drives only because it does not scan your hard drive but rather uses the Master File Table of the NTFS volume to build its database.

Automen is a free GUI for Mencoder that can perform video conversions across multiple formats and encoders. It supports XviD (for AVI encoding), FLV, X264 (MP4 for Ipod/PSP/PS3), WMV, MPEG4, MPEG2, and Huffyuv and is designed to be simple and straightforward for quick video conversion.

Mp3splt-gtk is a free multi-platform tool that can split large MP3 or OGG files without re-encoding. It offers a number of different ways to do this, including autodetecting silences, using a a local CDDB or CUE file, and downloading album and track length info from freedb.org . Other options include splitting by fixed time segments and unwrapping Albumwrap or MP3wrap files.

3RVX is a free program that offers volume control through hotkey and/or middle mouse wheel combinations. It also visually represents the volume levels and volume changes on-screen and in the program’s system tray icon.

DK Finder is a desktop search program that employs a sophisticated indexing algorithm to deliver lightning fast search results. It is primarily designed to find files on your system but can also search for keywords contained within files. The program can also perform a number of excellent file-related operations on search results that go beyond moving and copying to include group-operations, advanced filtering, and exporting results as a collection of shortcuts.

Desktop Media is a free program that can display shortcuts on the desktop to USB drives, CDs/DVDs and other media when you plug them in, and automatically removes these shortcuts when you unplug. It can also alternately create so-called “hard links” to your media instead of shortcuts.