Freeware -- Why Pay More?

You don't always get what you pay for, or have to pay for what you get. Here's a list of free programs that will keep your computer happy, and add convenience to your experience.

We'll start with several programs that protect your computer from malware, spyware, tracking software, and malicious attacks. But we round that out with an office suite and some graphics software for the digital photographer. Also provided is a few links to sites that index and review freeware programs, and a nice collection of free clipart.

Kill Those Nasty Bugs

AVG Anti-Virus : Free for personal use, AVG is a full featured program that gives you the option of configuring your protection if you care to do that. Updates are frequent and install automatically. Custom settings and configurations are possible though most users will find the default setting acceptable.

AVG Anti-Spyware : A combination of freeware and shareware, in that AVG allows you to install and use the full featured program for 30 days before it reverts to the freebie. This is a nice touch in that you get to see what you'd be paying for, and yet if you don't use the additional features, or don't feel they are necessary, then you can continue to use the program.

After running Adware and Spybot (below) I ran AVG-AS for the first time and it found dozens of tracking cookies that the other programs did not. The freeware version does not however provide a shield to prevent installation of malware, etc., so if you don't upgrade you may want to add SpyBot to your protection scheme.

SpyBot Search and Destroy: A mature spyware program that not only cleans your system of spyware but provides immunization against those bugs and bad guys. You can run it in simple or expert mode which allows you to configure your protection. You can lock your home page, for instance, and even save and restore the spyware it removes in case it disables a program that you decide to keep.

Ad-Aware SE : One of the original spyware programs, and still quite good for spotting bugs. Can be run in combination with other programs, like SpyBot for more complete protection.

Spyware Blaster : Focused on the Active X controls that can manipulate your browser, SB inoculates your browser so that malicious web sites can not invade your system. This should not be confused with AVG-AS, SpyBot or Adaware. Run Blaster in addition to one or more of the others.

SpamExperts: : The Home edition is for personal use, and it's simple enough. After an install it sends an email through your ISP, and provides some basic information and a link to their site. There's an interactive process where you can evaluate what program considers spam, and correct that if you wish.

The program resides in your taskbar near the clock, and the user interface is self explanatory. Though they estimate two weeks for the software to learn your preferences, it immediately identified spam targeting my Inbox.

Tip: After launching SpamExperts, go to Settings and on the General Settings tab check the box for Launch SpamExperts at Login. A web based email account (on Yahoo for instance) is always the safest, but if you've been targeted by the spammers and don't want to change your email address, SpamExperts has a solution that works.

Final Recommendation

As a computer and network technician I've been asked more times than I can count to find out what's wrong with a system. Many people automatically assume they have a virus. I've not found that to be the case. Most often when your computer starts hanging or slowing down it's because your registry is conflicted, or you have programs running in the background that are consuming the system resources.

My first advice has always been to moderate your browsing. No porn sites, freebie sites (not to be confused with freeware), and stay off the chat channels. But some people can't resist. If that's you then load up on some good software, and either buy a full featured program or run at least two of the above programs once a week. Don't forget to check for updates to the programs or turn on the auto update function.

Web Browsing

FireFox: : A healthy alternative to Internet Explorer. Firefox offers tabbed browsing which makes it easy to monitor several sites at once. Right click on a page and you can open it in IE, or search the web for a highlighted phrase, drag and drop text selections to search engines like Google or Dictionary.com.

FireFox won my heart by offering an extension called AdBlock. With this plugin you can eliminate ads selectively with a mouse click, or download a file listing the most common offenders to bandwidth.

Firefox can also be configured to delete cookies and files when you close the program. It has a built in download manager, and a password and forms manager that are both configurable.

Office Suites

Open Office: : A complete office suite that should appeal to individual business people, students and users who don't care to spend several hundred dollars on Microsoft Office.

Writer is a word processor that resembles Word Perfect in the GUI, but also offers features like the ability to save to multiple formats. In my experience the results vary, but you can always save to the doc format for Word.

The drawing program allows you to create slides which can then be used in the presentation program, and the database offers both business and personal formats. The suite also comes with a spreadsheet and a module titled Math that seems fairly intuitive.

A bargain at twice the price, Open Office version 2 is reasonably stable and well-featured suite that deserves a serious look, even if your interest is only word processing.

Images

Picasa 2 : Google's entry for browsing photos and image files also offers web space to display and share your photos or artistic creations. Once installed it will catalog every image on your hard drive, and provide an Explorer type interface to view them.

For casual users it provides some basic tools for editing images, and the cool thing is that any action can be reversed even after the changes have been saved.

Irfanview : A first rate image conversion tool that allows you to save in all standard formats and rename by your own convention. You can resize images quickly, and there's some basic editing tools as well. IV also plays movies, audio files, and makes a multi-media slideshow easy to assemble. A standard among serious photographers for several years.

JAlbum : This is a feature rich program for developing contact sheets, slideshows, and photo albums that can be displayed with a web browser. Place your prize photos in a folder, resize them to 800x600 (a nice size for viewing) and run JAlbum. The interface is fairly intuitive, and you can redo your project if you don't like the result.

JAlbum will make thumbnails of your images and display on a web page inside your new folder. You have several options, or skins, for the web pages, and since the code is written in Cascading Styles you also modify a skin to your satisfaction.

You can also upload the page and files to a server on the web, or burn a CD/DVD and send it to your friends or family. You may need to update your Java Virtual Machine, but that's also for free, from Sun Microsystems.

Utility Programs

Yankee Clipper III : If you're doing a lot of cut and paste, or just want to save the information that you copy to the clipboard then you'll love Yankee Clipper.

Capable of storing 200 text items, 200 web site URLs, 20 bitmaps and 20 metafiles in its standard History Mode, YC also offers users the option of permanently storing all formats in Boilerplate Mode.

WinZip : The most popular compression utility for Windows users, WinZip provides a mature interface, a wizard for the timid, and rock stable performance.

Good start pages for freeware

For 10 years No Nags means the software is free and there's no splash screens promoting you to buy the program. Programs are rated on a reliable 6 duck scale.

FreewareFiles is another site that provides user reviews of the software with a 5 star rating based on those reviews.

If you're looking for clip art to spice up a web page or a presentation, you'll find over 13,000 images to choose from at WP Clip Art. You can even download the entire image database which self installs into a folder arrangement. Since the images are in a png format (portable network graphics) you can significantly enlarge the image without degradation.

So before you lay out your cash, or your credit card, for software that may be only marginally better, if that, you might want to try a freeware program that does the same thing. After all, it never hurts to shop around.