# The Best Freeware?



## user1007 (Sep 23, 2009)

Danger Mouse, thanks for starting this post. 

I too love the idea of freeware and even more that part of it that is part of major, established, open source development projects. Most everything on this machine but for the operating system and the copy of Microsoft Office I need at rare times (usually use Open Office), and a few specialty pieces of software is free of charge to individuals. Here is one resource for open source/freeware comparisons to popular software titles.

http://www.osalt.com/

Here is a link to Freeware Genius I found with Stumble Upon.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2D6OkJ/freewaregenius.com/sitemap/

What I really would like to find at the moment is a goal setting/tracking program and one that is not WIKI for organizing random notes and thoughts. I need a better screen capture program. I will trade news of a cute, takes no memory or space, pixel grabber I found in return. I know most of the color programs out there. easyRGB is great for things like finding manufacturers paint codes for example. Use a pixel grabber to get the RGB code. Type it in. Pick a paint manufacturer. Out comes the four nearest color chips with names and code numbers. 

Open Office gets better as does Gimp and GimpShop (functions like Photoshop). I got academic pricing on Microsoft Office but still resented paying $80 for it? Isn't it like $500-600 retail?

Just one cautionary note. Before getting excited about any piece of software, commercial, free, stolen or whatever, you had better let your current, updated, fully-configured virus checker sniff at it before installing or you could be sorry. I have never had but a few red flags so far though. Free font files seem to be the worst from experience with the things I download when it comes to bugs.


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## chrisn (Dec 23, 2007)

http://www.techsupportalert.com/:yes:


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## user1007 (Sep 23, 2009)

May kick myself for posting this but do think about carefully loading Adobe AIR and checking out some of the free applications there too. Unfortunately, Adobe has jumped on the bandwagon of trying to force you to load stuff you don't want with every upgrade so go slow and don't just race the mouseclicks when doing so.

"Buy" the way, the quintessential, everything Adobe design suites are like $300-400 for those of us with academic pricing access and like $4-5K for those of you needing it and paying retail for it? Doesn't that piss you off just a little bit? Argument is that all you who pay retail for one copy and than steal and share it. Or you need the pretty boxes the $.40 discs come in.

I don't use or need it so the argument for me is irrelevant I suppose. Like I say, Gimp, Gimpshop and other such open source programs do fine by me.


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## user1007 (Sep 23, 2009)

chrisn said:


> http://www.techsupportalert.com/:yes:


Thanks Chris. Forgot how to get to that link.


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## DangerMouse (Jul 17, 2008)

there USED to be many freeware sites, like nonags.com that did not annoy users. nowadays, you need to be a PAYING 'member' to download from THEIR site, though you can still go to the original owner of the software and "take your chances".....
kinda crappy if ya ask me. 
i used to like happypuppy.com too....
some other sources:
download.com
nonags.com
brothersoft.com


DM


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## user1007 (Sep 23, 2009)

Forgot about this site. There is a lot of freeware and even more shareware you can try before you buy it. I think you can set the search engine to just find freeware. 

http://www.freedownloadscenter.com


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## 80HD (Dec 14, 2009)

*Great thread!!*

Here is a holy-grail site for some things like this:

http://www.oldversion.com/

Not only do they have a lot of things that USED to be free, they have a lot of backleveled versions that may work for older OSs, or be pre-spyware, etc

As far as individual apps go, long ago a guy put me on to the idea of creating a "sysutils" folder: C:\sysutils and then adding that to your system path so you can call programs from scripts, or just manually from the command line without navigating to that directory first.

Some of my favorites:

*Space Monger*, and graphical representation of where all the space on the hard drive you could never fill went. SUPERB for finding that 20GB of trash in some 14-deep directory tree in "Local Settings"

http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/v1x.php

*Net Stumbler*, a great program for wireless networking. You can find, troubleshoot, and monitor wireless networks. It's great when you fire this up and see that 3 of your neighbors put their wireless networks on the same channel as you (even though yours has been at that channel for 6 years)

http://www.netstumbler.com/

*Wireshark* (used to be Ethereal) - this is a network packet sniffing tool that I would assume that anyone that could really find useful already knows about it, but you never can tell! This is great for finding out what is really going on on your network.

http://www.wireshark.org/

*Filezilla* - Need an ftp client or server? This is by far the best one out there for providing FTP and SFTP in a straightforward and easy to use format, and it is free. This is great even to set up on a file server at home for internal-only access for when you need to push or pull large files.

http://filezilla-project.org/
*
VMware Server/VMware Player* - great for learning new OSs, or just running an older OS for certain apps (Like 98SE/2k/XP) 

(Also, if you are a little more into IT and have an extra machine around and want to run several virtual servers, check out *VMware* *ESXi* - very slick!)

http://www.vmware.com/

*Fedora - *Want to do just about everything you do in Windows and light years more - for free? This isn't "shareware" per se, but an open source operating system. There are a billion Linux distributions out there, and people usually point to Ubuntu for beginners, but Fedora is great. You want a program that mimics most any commercial software out there (admittedly, some is not as polished or feature rich, but some are even better) just search for it (yum search "blah blah") find it, download and install it (yum install blah blah). That simple. And did I mention free? Hahaha.

Anyway - KDE4 (The desktop itself, basically) has been pulling off better-than Aero quality eye candy for years with far less hardware requirements. Don't get me wrong, I dual boot to Windows 7, and I make my living off of MS as much as I do Linux - but it's definitely worth checking out if it sounds interesting! I would be more than happy to help out, just give me a yell.

http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora

*7-zip, *blows any other compression software, that I have ever seen, completely out of the water. You want to smash gigabytes into megabytes? Set this guy up for maximum compression, and stand back and let him eat.

http://www.7-zip.org/

*Filemon (Now called Process Monitor I guess),* the most priceless tool in my troubleshooting arsenal - you want to know what your Windows based PC is REALLY doing, real-time, this tool is what you are looking for. It will show you which programs are accessing what, help find permissions issues at the file system level, and show other errors that are happening behind the scenes. If you were ever frustrated when you just wanted to know what in the everliving heckle and jeckle your PC was doing, try this out!
(And don't be intimidated, it's really not too bad!)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx



*VNC* - Want to remotely control a PC on your network? RDP comes with Windows, but in a workstation it will lock the current user out. VNC will allow you to manipulate the screen while they are logged in. (Some A/V and anti-Malware will cry about this, but it is only because the program has been misused by Internet hacker-trash in the past. The program itself is benign, just make sure you specify a decent password!)

http://www.tightvnc.com/
http://www.realvnc.com/
http://www.uvnc.com/

*Putty -* If you ever need to telnet or SSH into another computer or device, this is what I recommend:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

*Free Telephone Conferencing - *If you need to whip up a conference call for whatever reason, some of the decent ones out there (or at least were when I used them!)

http://www.freeconferencecalling.com/
http://www.instantconference.com/

*Remote Support/Desktop Sharing - *If you need to help out Grandma with her computer from 1,000 miles away, or maybe you need help from someone else... Mikogo is a free service that lets you collaborate online as well as share your desktop. It's a great free service, definitely recommended. (Kind of the same concept as VNC above, but over the internet without exposing your internal network)

http://www.mikogo.com/


*SourceForge - *a huge wealth of "better than shareware" products... open source... looking for an alternative to a commercial product, search here!

(A lot of it is Linux, but there is plenty of Windows and multiple platform stuff there too)

http://sourceforge.net/


That's all for now... pea shout :furious:


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