FREEBIES: The way to go
Most people think that Computer software
is always expensive
and thus resort to piracy or they buy the software but the world of software is
vast and there are a lot of kind hearted people out there who use something
called Open Source Code to make their software. Not only is it free, some of
them have the GNU license which enables users to make corrections and
improvements to the software. You can get almost any type of application that
you use for free. This saves money, if you want to buy, and effort, if you want
to follow that path of piracy. It’s a world of free downloads. I’ll give the
most commonly used applications here.
Music Players: A lot are available. You can download Winamp
5 for playing songs. Windows Media Player, which comes free with Windows
Operating systems, is good, but Microsoft doesn’t allow newer versions of the
player to be installed without having a genuine copy of windows.
URL : www.winamp.com
Media Players: Apart from Windows Media Player, you can
download VLC player, which supports a massive number of video formats, or the K
Lite mega codec pack, which is just as powerful. Both are excellent players and
you can install any of them and forget about installing any other Media player.
VLC Player: www.videolan.org
K Lite Mega Codec Pack: http://www.free-codecs.com/download/k_lite_Mega_Codec_Pack.htm
Web Browsers: Most people use Internet Explorer, which comes
with Windows, not knowing that there are free and better web browsers out
there. You can use Mozilla Firefox. An absolute beauty of a browser that you
can depend upon any time, any place.
Then there’s Apple Safari, which was recently released by
Apple to be compatible with Windows, and is claimed to be the fastest browser
on earth. But it’s still in the beta stage and contains some bugs.
Firefox: www.mozilla.com
Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari/
Dictionary: Wordweb is a great one. It contains a huge
number of word definitions, and is simple and easy to use.
http://wordweb.info/
Emulators: Daemon Tools is a great emulator for using CD
image files. It supports a wide variety of formats. A great choice if you’re a
PC gamer.
http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/download.php
Office applications: If you want something other than MS
Office, which is not freeware, you can opt for Open Office. Completely free and
easily rivals MS Office in performance.
http://download.openoffice.org/index.html
PDF and other readers: Adobe Acrobat reader is the way to go
for PDF files. You can get read lit files with MS reader. Other format readers
can be searched and downloaded for free.
Adobe Acrobat Reader: www.adobe.com/reader
MS Reader: www.microsoft.com/reader
Windows Maintenance:
IOBit Advanced Windows care is a wonderful tool to help you maintain
your copy of windows and keep it free of trouble. It catches spyware and
immunizes the PC against them, optimizes startup and fixes registry errors etc.
http://www.iobit.com/
Antivirus: You can AVG antivirus, or Avast Antivirus. Both
are good and free. Avast also has a boot time scan function.
AVG Free: www.grisoft.com
Avast: www.avast.com
Anti spyware: You can use Lavasoft Ad aware Free. It is
quite good and has a real fast scan speed. Spybot is also a good choice.
Lavasoft Ad Aware: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/products/ad_aware_free.php
Spybot: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html
Firewall: Since the Windows Firewall does not check outbound
connections you can use Comodo Free Firewall.
http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/download_firewall.html
Compression software:
7 Zip is open source and a good choice:
http://www.7-zip.org/
Operating Systems: It’s true; you can get an OS absolutely
free. It’s called Ubuntu, but you have to get a bit of practice to get the hang
of this one.
http://www.ubuntu.com/
That’s about it. I’ll make another review if I can think of
anymore.
You can visit www.download.com
for lots of free softwares.