The Best Free Software - Comments Page 1

The open cd located at http://www.theopencd.org/ has a number of great freeware programs on it including open office and gaim.

Of course, easily the very best free download is Linux, because having downloaded that there are quite literally thousands of good, safe downloads available for it, and dozens of websites that will tell you which are the best (Although I have this bad habit of downloading every version of every application I'm looking for so I can try them all for myself... and some of them do crash the machine... but I won't mention that)!

There is a lot of great free software out there. Some of my favorites:

+ XNView.com - graphics viewer, etc like IrfanView.
+ WindowsSizer - to see your work in a specific size window
+ Pixie - for selecting a screen colour.
+ 2x Explorer and Servant Salamander - great file browsers.
+ ATNotes - for little screen postit note reminders.
+ CapsUnlock - if you hit your Capslock too much.
+ Properties Plus can change file properties
+ Startup Inspector, PWGen - for really tough passwords.
+ Crazy Browser - adds tabbed browsing to IE.
+ Karens power tools
+ Evernote - a great tool for compiling bits of text from documents, web sites, etc and compiling for research. The paid version will OCR from scans too.

Don't forget to browse Microsofts Downloads section. Lots of good freeware there like the powertoys and Anti-Spyware. Also, SourceForge.net is a great resource for Open Source freeware. Its a bit geeky and you have to look for the Windows version but some great tools there.

Here are a couple of other sites I like:

http://www.shellcity.net/
http://win.softpedia.com/

I find http://www.portablefreeware.com very useful since software that is free _and_ portable is often high quality stuff. Cheerio.

www.donationcoder.com has a nice range of quality freeware / donationware software ... well worth a look

Great software that is free and tiny ... literally ... 99% of their software fits on a floppy be it viewers, editors browsers ... all less than 1.44 mb in size. Must see... www.tinyapps.org

Another good source is Freeware Home:

http://www.freewarehome.com/

Also

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best_46_free_utilities.htm

I'd also suggest the GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program, http://www.gimp.org/) as an intermediate-level alternative to Photoshop. I would guess that it would leave something to be desired for advanced PS users, but it's fairly powerful in and of itself and the Windows version has gotten much more user friendly since Gimp 2 in my opinion.

The best and most full-featured free email program I know about is Pegasus Mail, found at http://www.pmail.com/ I have used it for the last 4 or 5 years and followed its progression and development. It has an active and very knowledgeable user community that provides prompt and accurate responses to most requests for help (assuming adequate problem descriptions!). Right now it is free and even has a PDF user manual written in clear and simple explanations of features available. It even has integrated a Spamhalter Bayesian Spam Filter into PMail. It certainly merits a careful look-see by those considering a new email program.