Priceless Ten

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

The free edition of AvancePaint is "a complete paint program designed with a unique intuitive user interface that makes AvancePaint easy to learn and use. It’s powerful enough to suit the advanced user and yet simple enough to please the beginner. Open unlimited number photo's or pictures and unleash your artistic talents as you will discover the advanced and powerful but easy to use graphical options! A complete set of more then 20 photo-realistic filters and more then 40 textures are included. Uses only 3Mb of harddisk space" (OS: Windows 95/98/98se/Me/2k/3k/NT/XP and Vista)

Chateau is a "simple 3D drawing system that demonstrates suggestive interface. You can make 3D models such as houses and buildings without explicit buttons and menus" (OS: "It runs on Windows platforms (DirectX 3- is required)")

Efficient Diary is "a completely free while still beautiful, easy-to-use and powerful electronic diary software package. With its unique and powerful flash full-text search technique, you can simply enter a word in the diary to quickly find the corresponding entries! The product has a strong edit function similar to that of Microsoft Word. You can insert various items such as tables, pictures, emotions, URLs or even attachments. You can set the background color, background picture of each diary entry separately so your diary can be rich and colorful" (OS: Windows 98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/2003/Vista)

With Foto-Mosaik-Edda, you can "create mosaic-pictures, which are composed of many small pictures (tiles), from your own photos. The single pictures will be analysed and copied into one or more databases. You can use your holiday photos, pictures of the last family celebration or even take over whole picture-CDs into the database" If you have a lot of cover art images or other promotional pics you might be able to do something interesting with this (OS: Win 9x/ME/NT/2K/XP/2K3)

Get some free sound effects (WAV and MP3) for use in your video, film, audio and multimedia productions. If you're looking for free music, also check out Open Music Archive.

Instant Writing Resources Toolbar is "a free toolbar providing instant access to free writing resources and writing links. Developed by Rowdy Rhodes its primary use is to provide access to the massive writing resource site Freelance Writing Organization - Int´l. which was established in 1999. The Tool Bar Includes Thousands of Resources, Freelance Writing Jobs, Job Search, Global Sponsors, RSS Feeds, Online Text Formatter and Character Counter, Dictionary, How-To-Write Library, Encyclopedia, Chat, Software, Writing Courses, over 55 Online Games and Gadgets, a Writers Radio Station by Writers for Writers, Forums, a Writers Store with Over 50,000+ Writing Products from Four Separate Suppliers, Writers Site News Archives, Windows Tray Alerts Announcing New Resources and Jobs, POP3 Email Notifier for All Your Email Accounts and a Help Desk" Sounds like it does everything but go to the post office for you. Note: looks like registration is required to access the database, but the developer's site says it's free. (OS: Win 2000/XP/Vista)

LocalWeblog is "a program that allows you to run your own private web based notebook simply in one folder . . . lets you to save your notes, organize them by categories and supports text-search among notes. Each note can contain picture, audio or video information and WebLog will play it (by means of embedded plaer). LocalWebLog goes with a numbers of asp.net-Themes and can look differently , it also has some funny scripts that you can run" (OS: Win 98/ME/2000/XP)

This one should be called Way of the Cheetah trainingware -- Momentum Writer is "the ultimate tool for distraction-free writing. Like a mechanical typewriter, users are prevented from editing previously written text. There are no specific formatting options, no scrolling, deleting, or revisions. Momentum Writer doesn’t even allow you to use the backspace key. Momentum Writer forces you to write, to move forward, to add new words. It halts the temptation to linger, revise, and correct" (OS: Win 98/ME/2000/XP)

Speak-a-Message replaces written text with your voice: Just record and send . . . provides a rich communication experience that enables you to create and email your own audio messages and to listen to audio messages in your inbox . . . can also be used to add audio comments to text documents or to add your voice comments to presentations." Features: "Excellent audio compression: A 4-minute voice message requires only about 500kB; Recorded audio messages can also be played back on common media players; Enter author and title for an audio message; Messages can be marked as private (playback should occur in private or with headphones); Sends audio messages via your email client; Integrates into the menu of MS Outlook; Voice notes, voice comments and recordings of talks can be added to: MS PowerPoint presentations, MS Word documents" (OS: Win 2000/XP)

With WPanaorama, you "can display panoramic pictures by letting them scroll horizontally or vertically on the screen. You can use this software to view the gorgeous 360° swiss panorama included with the program, the 714 panoramas available on the developer´s site or your own pictures in .jpg or .bmp format" (OS: Win 9x/ME/NT/2K/XP/2K3)