Free Software

Posted on: August 13th, 2008

Software can be very expensive, sometimes more than the computer itself.

However, there’s good news. A great number of software is available free of charge. This inlcude whole office suites, antivirus, photoeditors and much more.

We put together a list here for you to pick and chose the best.

THE BEST FREE SOFTWARE

The Internet is a great source of software. Many of these are free and extremely useful. There are free Antivirus software, a whole office suite that matches up with Microsoft Office, CAD (Computer Aided Design), and more!

So why spend hundreds of dollars on Software when you can get almost anything for free? Of course there are some limitations on these software, like can only be used on home computers, or just doesn’t have as many functions as the commercial version of the software. But even with that they are extremely useful, and many of them doesn’t have any limitations at all.

Now another thing with the freely downloadable software is the question of trust. There are software that is advertised as free and when you download and install them they infect your computer. After that you will be deluded with ads popping up, at best, or your system gets crippled by the malicious code that was in the software. So you need to know what are the reliable sources.

Fortunately there are many. And here’s a list that can be trusted (you can click on the bold text to get to the downloads):

The 101 Fabulous Freebies: This is an article by PCWorld magazine that lists the best 101 (according to them) free software with description on each. VERY useful.

Actually the above covers most of the ones that are really good but there are some not listed there which worth their “weight in gold” (figuratively speaking):

Google Sketchup This is the easiest to use CAD program ever! With this you can easily build your house in 3 Dimension, create a new floorplan, design a furniture you want to make, make a plan for rearranging your room, etc…
Of course it has some learning curve but it is magnitudes easier to use than any other CAD program I’ve seen so far. Also they cost a fortune too. Google sketchup is not for designing a whole house with plumbing, wiring, etc but it’s very useful for simpler tasks.
Photo Filtre This is a tiny but extremely useful image editor. It’s about 1% of the size of Adobe Photoshop but it has all the important things for photo editing: brightness and contrast correction, color filters, retouching tool, etc. It loads in seconds, handles many image formats and it’s very easy to use.
Software Virtualization Solution 2 This is a bit advanced level tool but not hard to use at all. If you want to try out several software without worrying about what clutter they leave on your computer then that’s the tool to use. It separates all the files created and system settings changes made by a software installer. It allows you to activate, deactivate software within second, or get rid of it without the long and ardous ‘uninstall’ process – leaving no clutter behind. It works well with almost all software, exceptions are the antivirus softwares and other software that embed themselves into the Windows system.
This software has a lot more to offer and it would take up several more pages to describe what it can do. It has great documentation and a discussion group where you can find all the information you need.

And that’s not all!

There’s a great wealth of free (and safe) software that you can download and try. Here’s the list of sites that you can browse and find great stuff:

Download.com
SoftPedia.com – It’s got a bit too many ads but the content is good.
Tucows.com

Did you find this information useful?
Please consider donating.

You can leave a comment for the above article. Comments will not show up automatically but will be reviewed and incorporated into the article if they contain useful information.

cforms contact form by delicious:days