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MUST-HAVE FREEWARE

THE LINUX LIVECD

SMYTHE FAMILY PHOTOS

MP3 PLAYER

ESSENTIAL LINKS:

Superior virus protection

Kills malware dead

Like MSOffice, but much less evil

Burn CDs and DVDs, burns and converts ISOs

Handles .RARs with ease

Must-Have Freeware

Let's face it, software can get expensive. A lot of the time, though, there are free alternatives that work just as well as the established commercial standard. To make this list, software has to be truly free (although they may ask for donation). This also means no XX-day trials.

Software package must not install a 3rd party spyware/malware app to pay for distribution. Winamp is the established standard for MP3 software, but it also installs some lame MP3 software and sticks a link to it on your Desktop - so it no longer makes the cut. Alcohol released a free version of their popular VirtualCD software, but if you want to use it you'll have to stick a crappy toolbar in your IE browser. Sorry, not good enough.

Long story short, you can rest assured these 5 applications will be malware free, no strings attatched.


AVAST! ANTIVIRUS

A full featured anti-viral package. Avast! client will add itself to your startup menu, and will check for virus database updates automatically when you log onto the web. Unlike the Norton or McAfee equivalent (which require a yearly fee to use) the good folks at Avast! will email a fresh, 12-month key as often as needed for no charge.

I personally use Avast! on all 5 of my personal computers and both of my work machines. So far it's caught every threat I've enountered and taken care of them, even one that the corporate Symantec client we use at work missed. Not just virii, but also less obvious Trojans and the nastier malware attacks.

Finally, the feature I like the most is the additional Avast! screensaver that is installed with the software. Walk away from your PC and let the screensaver go, Avast! will use that time to pick a hard drive and scan it front to back. Sweet.


SPYBOT: SEARCH AND DESTROY



Security threats come in varying degrees, and there is plenty of malicious software (malware) out there to slow your system to a crawl. The problem is that anti-virus software isn't designed to counter this threat. Some people like ad-aware, but I've always used Spybot and I've never been disappointed with the results.

Graphical User Interface is easy to navigate and spells out in clear language everything that it does, while it's doing it. I'm not sure what the immunize function does, as I've yet to see any resident program that it may spawned to monitor my system in real-time. What it's really great at is tracking down every suspicious cookie, every trojan, backdoor and bit of malicious activity, every annoying search re-direct and useless browser bar... and boots them into a trashcan.

OPENOFFICE.ORG

Microsoft Office is expensive, and for your money you don't really get anything fun to play with. For home users composing letters and creating spreadsheets for taxes or budgets; for students writing papers... OpenOffice does it all and does it for free. The spellcheck and thesaurus features are there, as well as any other features you're likely to use on a given day. The software package actually reads and writes in the propietary Office formats.

I'm not going to dive into the subtle nuances of the User Interface of Office vs. OpenOffice. The very thought of doing so is making me want to fall asleep as I'm writing this. The bottom line is: if you're already knee-deep into Word and Excel during your 9-5 gig, you're not going to want to worry about this software unless you have to run Linux for some reason. For the rest of the casual windows users (or if you need to work from home and you don't want to shell out another hundred bones) it's all you'll ever need.

CDBURNER XP PRO

XP's built-in burning functionality is great most days, but it lacks in a few key areas:
  • No reading/writing or converting ISO files (disc image)
  • Will write an audio disc from MP3, but ripping music from a CD is .WMA format only
  • Will not write to DVD format.
CDBurnerXP fills in all of these basic needs, it does it for free, and it does it without any hassles. I've uninstalled Nero after finding this software, 'nuff said.


EXTRACTNOW

First things first: I actually got this screenshot from the official Extractnow website, and yes - that is an M.C. Hammer song someone is decompressing.

With the exception of the .7zip format, Extractnow has unzipped everything I've tossed at it. The simple drag-and-drop interface is awesome. That's really all I have to say, decompressing .RAR files isn't glamorous, people.






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Thanks for coming here instead of looking at pornography.