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10 Best Free Windows Applications
Top free applications for your Windows PCThese free applications will improve your PC and help you carry out the most common tasks easily. From email to web browsing, from writing letters to managing your photo collection, these are the best applications to use, and they don't cost a penny.
1 Firefox
Mozilla's Firefox is an excellent browser, a good replacement for Internet Explorer with a well thought out user interface and impressive speed. The biggest strength of Firefox though is the support for extensions which add new features to the browser. Amongst the most popular of these is Adblock, which filters out adverts on web pages and FlashGot which manages downloads automatically. Other useful features built into the browser include automatic spell checking on forms, incremental search and live bookmarks. Firefox is being constantly updated, and security fixes are released on a regular basis.Alternatives are Google's Chrome browser and the eponymous Opera. Whilst Chrome is technically more advanced than the current version of Firefox, it does not support customisation and has a slightly limited (if extremely well designed) user interface. Opera also supports email, irc chat and BitTorrent downloads and is notable for being available for the Nintendo Wii and in a version designed specifically for mobile phones.
2 Thunderbird
Thunderbird is another sophisticated application by Mozilla. It is a fully featured email client, capable of handling multiple email accounts, news groups and news feeds. It includes a junk mail filter and supports both POP and IMAP email accounts. Like Firefox, Thunderbird can also be extended with a variety of add-ons, including the Lightning calendar extension.Alternatives are the Opera browser, which also provides email access, and the venerable Eudora which is available for free in an ad-sponsored version.
3 AVG Free Edition
It is vital to have good virus protection on your PC, and perhaps the one area where spending a small amount of money is completely justified - consider the inconvenience and cost of your PC being wrecked. The first stop should be to install which provides virus and spyware protection. However, there are other free virus scanners, and perhaps the best of these is AVG, a full and well respected anti-virus suite which is available in a cut down free version as well as a commercial edition. The free version omits some protection - in particular it does not provide download protection nor protection from crackers, keyloggers, spam, phishing attacks and ICQ and MSN protection. It also has a slower update service and more simplistic scheduling options for virus scans. However it does provide award winning protection against viruses, spyware, adware and identity-theft.
Alternatives are Alwil Software's Avast! which has a free home edition and provides much the same protection as AVG, and Avira AntiVir which is reported to provide better standard virus protection than AVG or Avast! - though it omits email scanning and is somewhat more obtrusive and demanding of system resources.
4 Spyware Terminator
If you have decided upon a free anti-virus package, it is likely to omit spyware protection - another vital defense to keep your PC safe. Spyware Terminator can fill that gap with real-time protection, manual and scheduled scan, safe quarantine and automatic update.Alternatives are A-Squared Free Edition by Esmi Software, a cut down version of theit commercial product which has recieved many awards, and Ad-Aware Free which again is a limited version of Lavasoft's commercial offering. Both of these omit real time protection and other features as an incentive to pay for the full versions.
5 Picasa
Google's Picasa is an outstanding free photo organiser which catalogues and displays photos stored on your PC and integrates with the online PicasaWeb web album. Picasa shows off Google's skills at organising data - in this case your photo albums - and adds facilities to share, blog and print photos. The software includes easy to use editing tools to perform basic fixes and effects on your pictures.An alternative is Adobe's Photoshop Album Starter Edition, which provides similar fix, search and share facilities but doesn't have integration with an online web album.
6 Open Office
Sun Microsystems develops Open Office and gives it away free as an alternative to Microsoft's Office suite. The Sun product includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation editor, diagram editor and database application that offer a robust alternative to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Access. The applications are excellent quality and work with the majority of Microsoft documents as well as reading and writing the ISO standard Open Document Format. One new alternative office suite is KOffice, originally developed for Linux (as part of the K Desktop Environment) but now being extended to run on Windows and OS-X. The Windows version will be released as part of KOffice 2.0 which is expected to be available in late 2008, though alpha test versions are already available for the brave hearted.7 VLC media player
The VLC media player is a audio and video player which supports a wide range of formats and even supports streaming (playing a file on one computer on a network, and receiving it on one or more clients - handy if you want to set up a central 'jukebox' containing all of your music and video). It can convert formats and can play DVDs and VCDs. The player itself can be customised with a wide variety of skins and includes support for cover art on albums and other media metadata. It is Open Source software with an active development community who always welcome help and support. An alternative to VLC is Winamp, now in version five, which has a comprehensive feature list to rival any other media player. It is available as a free download, or as a commercial product (for $19.95). The free version has restricted ability to rip music from CDs to your hard disk, but is otherwise intact.8 Media Monkey
If you've installed VLC media player, and started to build up a collection of music, you're probably going to need Media Monkey. Media Monkey is a database that helps you set up, organise and synchronise your music collection with an external MP3 player. It's available as a free and commercial version, with the free version ripping music from CDs more slowly, and omitting some advanced features, such as multiple music collections and automatic detection of updated files. The MP3 encoder supplied with the free version (used to copy CDs to your computer) is time limited due to license restrictions, but can be replaced with an unlimited version (available here).9 Foxit PDF Reader
If you share documents with other people, or browse the web for a while, you're almost certain to come across Adobe's PDF document format. Unfortunately Adobe's own reader, though free, is a cumbersome and rather slow piece of software which can hassle you about updates when you just want to read a single page document. Luckily there is an alternative - Foxit Software's Foxit Reader, which is small, fast and unobtrusive. The free version is supported by adverts, displayed on the main toolbar, which can be removed by paying for the Pro version.10 Gimpshop
Picasa allows you to make basic fixes to your photographs, but if you want to make more complex changes or create your own images from scratch you need an image editor. Most Open Source advocates will point to GIMP, which was a very early success for Open Source development, providing a sophisticated image editing application for Linux. Whilst GIMP has continued to evolve and provides very professional editing facilities, its user interface has never been particularly welcoming. GIMPShop begins to address these issues by taking GIMP and adjusting it's menus and terminology to more closely match those of the industry standard Photoshop. There are many tutorials for Photoshop online and GIMPShop allows these to be followed with the free application. There are limits however, as GIMP does not support Photoshop's adjustment layers and some other features used in advanced tutorials.|
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