Chuck The Geek.com

Free your computer with free software

February 21st, 2006 by Chuck Sharp

We all know about firefox and thunderbird. They seem to be the kings of free software. And we use them too (if you don’t, give them a try). After all, why not use free software, especially since it can provide the same features and often much more than their commercial counterparts? The great news is that there are thousands of terrific free programs and software packages out there, if you look around a little.

Here’s a rather short list of great free software that might be lesser known. I have used all of these and think the world of them. Try them, and you’ll probably think twice before spending another dollar on software.

ZipGenius
Dump Winzip! ZipGenius is free, yet it offers the same functionality (I think it’s better, actually). If you don’t like ZipGenius, try 7-zip, Zip Central, or IZArc.

KeyNote
Very impressive outliner, tabbed information manager. All I can say is look at the screenshots and play with it. Unfortunately, it appears that development has stopped on this product, but it’s still a fine program.

Picasa
I’ve mentioned this program in a prior post, but I have to plug it again. Try Picasa, you’ll love it! If you own a digital camera, or even if you just have a bunch of digital pictures, Picasa can help you do more.

The GIMP
Just to clear this up, GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. If you’ve ever used Photoshop or ever wanted to, and just can’t because of the price tag, try this. It’s about as close as you can get to the power of Photoshop. It’s stunning. Beware, this one can cause productivity at work to, umm, stall.

irfanView
This is a great image viewer program. Not only does it have support for a zillion graphic formats, but it has many, many image conversion and editing features.

CDex
Windows Media player rips CDs to WMA files. iTunes rips CDs into Apple’s AAC format. If you want portable, play-anywhere MP3s from your CD collection, get CDex. It’s interface is simple (this means it’s not very pretty), but it works very well, and just iTunes or Media Player, it will look up the CD information from the Internet and figure out the song titles and other data automatically most of the time. Read the documentation with this one. I use this every time I buy a new CD.

Audacity
This is like the GIMP, but for audio. You can record, edit, re-sample, convert, slice, dice, and splice your audio. It’s come in handy.

Trillian
If you do instant messaging, or want to, use Trillian. It will hook up to MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, and other IM services. It’s feature rich, and once you try it you’ll never look at any other instant messaging software the same again. If you want open source software that’s very cool, you can try out Gaim.

Filezilla
This is a terrific FTP and Secure FTP client. If you FTP at all, give this a shot. Alternatively, you can try WinSCP if you just do SFTP (not regular FTP). They’re both good.

Opera
This web browser can go head-to-head with Firefox and, depending on who you talk to, comes out ahead in some areas and behind in others. If you’re like most Firefox users, and don’t do anything super Firefox-fancy, Opera probably has all the features you like in Firefox. As of version 8, they’ve removed the ad banner that plagued prior versions. It’s a zippy browser, and sometimes it feels more stable than Firefox. Um, you never heard me say that…

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Entry Filed under: PC Basics, Review