Free Color picker for Windows XP/Vista

Colorpic is the best free color picker I've used. It allows you to capture a colour from anywhere on the screen and easily copy the RGB or HEX values for use in Photoshop or web-design.

Free website link checker

One way to gain favour with search engines is to minimise the amount of dead links on your website. You can check them using the W3C Validator Link Checker.

If you want to check your pages offline or on your own computer before sending a page live, use the Firefox Link Checker addon which will highlight all links on a page, colouring them green for valid and red for broken links.

Free task scheduler for Windows XP

AutoRun is a full-featured, open source task scheduler for Windows XP/Vista. It can easily automate the tasks you need to frequently run and can autostart with Windows.

Best Freeware DVD decoder for Windows XP/Mac and Linux

The best DVD decoder in my opinion is VLC media player which is a freeware multi-format player. Used alongside an install of the Combined Community Codec Pack you should be able to open most, if not all codecs and formats found on the web.

If you would like to convert DVD to a movie file on your computer then try the one click DVD ripper (link goes to review and download from Lifehacker.)

How to find out your computer specs

System Information for Windows is an information gathering tool which will output various software, hardware and network information about your a computer to a CSV, HTML, TXT or XML file.

Free e-mail checker with webmail support

POPPeeper is a freeware e-mail checker with support for both POP accounts and many online web-mail services including Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail.

View media information from video and audio files

MediaInfo will analyse many audio and video formats to give you media information such as codec, bit-rate as well as author/artist information.

Optimize your HTML and CSS files

HTML Tidy is a well known HTML cleaner which can reduce the size of HTML pages, decrease page load times and remove erroneous code. There is also a specific CSS Tidy which will compress and clean your CSS files. To further reduce file size, you can also use a HTML compressor to optimise your code.

Free screenshot program

Greenshot is a full-featured open source screenshot capture utility.

Edit startup programs on Windows to speed up computer

Autoruns is a Microsoft-supported freeware utility that allows you to view and edit the programs that start up with Windows or on boot. This is a better way than msconfig to speed up your computer. This works well in conjunction with CCleaner as a routine system cleanup.

Test your site in different versions of Internet Explorer

IETester is a free web-browser tester that has Internet Explorer 8, 7, 6 and 5.5 built in for Windows.

Freeware open source encryption utility

Truecrypt is a free on-the-fly encryption system for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

How to skin Facebook on your browser

You can now finally customise your Facebook page using Stylish addon for Firefox. Simply install the addon by clicking here, then visit UserStyles.org to browse the available skins. It is a one click process to install a new skin and they are easy switched. I am currently a fan of the Vista Ultimate Skin Beta.

Freeware file recovery

Recuva is freeware utility designed to rescue files that you have accidentally deleted.

Clean your temp files and cache

CCleaner is a great freeware system cleaner that will clean your registry, remove unnecessary files as well as clear your cache and web history. Also try Defraggler, a freeware defragmenter by the same company.

Free web server with ASP support

Baby Web server is a freeware Microsoft IIS alternative with native ASP support.

Free HTML editor / notepad replacement

HTML Beauty++ is one of the best free notepad replacements for HTML editing that I have found. Supports code colouring and browser integration.

Burn any movie format to DVD

DVD Flick is a free, open source DVD authoring program that will convert many video formats easily. There is a guide to using it here: Lifehacker DVD Shrink guide.

Aviary - free online design suite

Aviary is a free online design suite with the following tools:
- Phoenix: an image editor (similar to Adobe Photoshop / Gimp)
- Raven: a vector editor (useful for logos / and clothing design)
- Toucan: a color editor
- Peacock: an effects editor

Universal file format video converter

MediaCoder is an open source (freeware) video and audio converter. I find I have had success using it with video conversion where Super(C) will not work.