Free Software
Effective and efficient use of your computer requires having the right software. This page contains many of the best free/open source applications that I use.
Office
OpenOffice http://www.openoffice.org
OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites such as Microsoft Office, and it is free to download, use, and distribute.The Features include:
- WRITER - a powerful word processor equivalent to Microsoft Word
- CALC - a powerful spreadsheet program equivalent to Microsoft Excel
- IMPRESS - a powerful presentation graphics program equivalent to Microsoft PowerPoint
- DRAW - a powerful graphics program equivalent to Microsoft Paint
- BASE - a powerful database program equivalent to Microsoft Access
PDF Creator
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator
PDFCreator easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. Use it like a printer in any Windows application. To convert a document to a PDF, simply click File, Print, and select PDF Creator as the printer and it will save the file as a PDF document to your computer.
Foxit Reader
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
Foxit Reader is a free reader for PDF (Portable Document Format) documents. You can view, type on, and print PDF documents with it. Foxit Reader is small (the download is less than 1MB), so it downloads quickly. It doesn’t need any installation, so you can start to run it as soon as you’ve downloaded it. And It starts up immediately, so you don’t need to wait for an annoying “Welcome” screen to disappear. Foxit Reader is extremely easy to use, just double click it to start and then click open button to open your PDF document. If you want to print, click on “Print” button. If you want to change the page layout for printing, select “Print Setup” from “File” menu.
Eraser
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser
Eraser is an advanced security tool which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns.
Developer/Coding
PSPadhttp://www.pspad.com/en
PSPad editor is freeware programmer editor, useful for people who:
- work with various programming environments
- like highlighted syntax in code
- need a small tool with simple controls and the capabilities of a mighty code editor
- are looking for a tool to work with plain text
- want to save money and still have the functionality of professional products
Nvu
http://www.nvu.com
A complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a “new view”) makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.
TopStyle Lite
http://www.newsgator.com/NGOLProduct.aspx?ProdId=TopStyle&ProdView=lite
TopStyle Lite makes every aspect of CSS creation extremely easy. If you’re an old hand at style sheets you’ll be surprised at the time this package will save you. And if you’re a novice you’ll be grateful for its error reporting aspect.
Graphics/Photo
GIMPhttp://www.gimp.org - http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net
GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. Download page: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html.You will need to download two files and install them in the following order. First, install the “GTK+ 2 Runtime Environment†then “The GIMP†for Windows. You can then install the GIMP Help and/or GIMP Animation Package if you so desire.The GIMP Help package is a downloadable version of the online Help documents available at http://docs.gimp.org/en/. When you select Help or press F1 inside the GIMP program, it will launch the Help document in you web browser. Use the download version if you don’t want to connect the Internet to access the help features. If you choose to use the online documentation instead of installing it, selecting Help or pressing F1 inside the GIMP program will produce an alert box saying that the Help feature is not installed.
Picasa
Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa , it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized.
MultiMedia
Audacity
http://audacity.sourceforge.net
Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:
- Record live audio.
- Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
- Edit Ogg Vorbis , MP3, and WAV sound files.
- Cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together.
- Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
- And more! See the complete list of features.
MediaMonkey
http://www.mediamonkey.com
MediaMonkey allows you to:
- Organize music and edit tags in your audio library with a powerful, intuitive interface
- Automatically lookup and tag Album Art and other metadata
- Manage 50,000+ files in your music collection without bogging down
- Play MP3s and other audio formats, and never again worry about varying volume
- Record CDs into OGG, MP3, FLAC and WMA files
- Convert MP3s, OGG, FLAC and WMA files into other formats with the Audio Converter
- Create playlists and music mixes quickly and easily to suit any occasion
- Synchronize with iPods / MP3 players effortlessly and convert tracks on-the-fly
- Plus much more…
The bundled MP3 encoder is limited to 30 days in the free version, though the free LAME encoder can be installed for unlimited encoding. What does this mean? Well, in order to provide MediaMonkey for free they can’t include a certain file to that allows you to rip/encode CDs to the MP3 format. This is because of licensing issues. You can, however, download a free encoder to enable unlimited ripping/encoding. Here’s how to do it:
First, close the MediaMonkey program if it is open.
Next you will need to download the free file, lame_enc.dll , from http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/pop.php?lame_enc.
Unzip the file and copy it to C:\Program Files\ MediaMonkey , overwriting the existing file.
That’s it. Now you can restart MediaMonkey and rip as many CDs to MP3 as you wish.
iTunes
http://www.apple.com/itunes/overview/
I am not recommending iTunes for features contained within MediaMonkey. However, iTunes has a nice podcast manager feature that is not yet available in MediaMonkey. What is a podcast? Think of a podcast as a radio show. Each show consists of a series of individual episodes that you can listen to how you want — on your PC, using your MP3 player, or with just a web browser. You can easily subscribe to podcasts through the iTunes music store too. Alternately you can use Yahoo’s online podcast manager at http://podcasts.yahoo.com.
VirtualDub
http://www.virtualdub.org
A 100% Free VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility. It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.
VLC Media Player
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
A 100% Free Multimedia DVD Player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX , MP3, OGG, …) as well as VCDs and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. Supports Full Region Free DVD playback with a RPC1 compatible DVD drive.
CDBurnerXP Pro
http://www.cdburnerxp.se
A 100% Free CD/DVD-Writer program. The program can write CD-R, CD-RW DVD+R/RW DVD-R/RW discs. CDBurnerXP Pro Features:
- Write CD-R, CD-RW DVD+R/RW DVD-R/RW discs (as Data, Video and Audio)
- Burn audio-CDs with and without gaps between tracks
- Burn on the fly / Burn-proof
- Supports most IDE, USB, Firewire and SCSI drives
- Rip Audio-CDs to harddrive, obtain track-information (ID3-tags) from Internet
- Burn and create ISO-files
- Convert WAV to MP3 and vice versa
- Create Bootable Discs and more.
Notes - Double-layer DVD is not currently supported. Burning video-DVDs is limited.
Internet
FileZillahttp://filezilla.sourceforge.net
A 100% Free, fast FTP and SFTP Client with lots of useful features and an intuitive interface. Used to send or retrieve files from an FTP server.
Firefox
The award-winning Web browser is better than ever. Browse the Web with confidence - Firefox protects you from viruses, spyware and pop-ups. Enjoy improvements to performance, ease of use and privacy. It’s easy to import your favorites and settings and get started. Download Firefox now and get the most out of the Web.
Gaim
http://gaim.sourceforge.net
A 100% Free multi-protocol Instant Messaging Client. Users can log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AOL Instant Messenger, talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger, and sitting in an IRC channel all at the same time. Gaim supports many features of the various networks, such as file transfer, away messages, typing notification, and adds tabbed conversations. It is compatible with the following protocols:
- AIM
- ICQ
- MSN Messenger
- Yahoo!
- IRC
- Other (Jabber, Gadu-Gadu , SILC, GroupWise Messenger and Zephyr networks)
Thunderbird
http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/
A 100% Free e-mail client. Thunderbird makes e-mailing safer, faster, and easier than ever before with the industry’s best implementations of features such as intelligent spam filters, built-in RSS reader, quick search, and much more.
File Utilities
WinMergehttp://winmerge.sourceforge.net
WinMerge is an Open Source visual text file differencing and merging tool for Win32 platforms. It is highly useful for determing what has changed between project versions, and then merging changes between versions.Features:
- Visual differencing and merging of text files
- Flexible editor with syntax highlighting
- Handles DOS, UNIX and MAC text file formats
- Unicode support
- Difference pane shows current difference in two vertical panes
- Location pane shows map of files compared
- Highlights differences inside lines
- File filters in directory diff
- Moved lines detection in file compare
- Shell Integration
- Rudimentary Visual SourceSafe and Rational ClearCase integration
- Archive file support using 7-zip
- Plugins
- Localizable interface via resource DLL
- HTML-based Manual
Windows Grep
http://www.wingrep.com
Windows Grep is a tool for searching files for text strings that you specify. Although Windows and many other programs have file searching capabilities built-in, none can match the power and versatility of Windows Grep. The program combines the power and flexibility of traditional command line grep utilities available on DOS, UNIX and other platforms with the ease of use of Microsoft Windows. In addition to searching, Windows Grep also performs global replacing in your files, with complete safety. Windows Grep is designed for searching plain-ASCII text files, such as program source, HTML, RTF and batch files, but it can also search binary files such as word processor documents, databases, spreadsheets and executables.
System
Ad-Awarehttp://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/
The free version of this product does a good job in detecting ad-ware and allows for unlimited manual scans.
AVG Antivirus
http://free.grisoft.com
AVG Free for Windows is a free anti-virus protection tool developed by Grisoft for home use. Here are some of the features of AVG Free for Windows:
- Rapid virus database updates for the lifetime of the product
- Easy of use
- No system slow down
- Automatic update functionality
- The AVG Resident Shield, which provides real-time protection as files are opened and programs are run
- The AVG E-mail Scanner, which protects your e-mail
- The AVG On-Demand Scanner, which allows you to perform scheduled and manual tests
- The AVG Virus Vault for safe isolation and handling of infected files
- And most of all … great customer satisfaction!
Spybot Search & Destroy
http://www.spybot.info
If you are an Internet Explorer user be sure to use the Immunize feature of this product. An installation tutorial is available on the web site.
Windows Defender
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx
Windows Defender provides real-time protection against spyware and other potentially unwanted software.
XP Powertoys Microsoft Powertoys for Windows XP are programs that extend the functionality of the operating system.
My favorites include Tweak UI and Image Resizer.
Visit the website: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx Top
That’s it for now. This page will be updated as I discover and use more software. Feel free to send me your suggestions of the software that you use.