Everything here is FREE! No stupid limited trials or anything like that either.
Useful AppsOpen Office - Free alternative to Microsoft Office. You can even save and open Microsoft Word (Excel, etc.) documents. If you don't want to spend big bucks on the MS Office suite, this is definitely for you.
Firefox - Best web browser you could possibly get. Still using IE? Switch to Firefox! More secure and lots of add-ons that Internet Explorer lacks.
- Mozilla wrote:
- Some recommended add-ons:
AdBlock - Get rid of those annoying ads that flash in banners and such.
Speed Dial - If you've ever used the Opera browser, you know what this is already. Speed dial is a nifty little feature that you can set up as your start up page. It Displays images of 9 sites of your choosing that you can click and go to. Very good for fast browsing.
NoScript - Perhaps one of the greatest features you could add to FireFox. This app prevents scripts from running at all. So you can't get "rick rolled" or have strange java or flash programs messing your computer up. You can set up trusted sites for faster browsing.
Portable Apps - Got spare room on your USB drive? Now you can take your favorite applications with you! Some examples are GIMP, Portable Firefox, Portable Pidgin, and Portable Thunderbird(e-mail client). You can even install Portable Open Office! They offer a lot more than what is listed here. Go browse their collection to see what they offer!
7-Zip - Got a bunch of files you need to unzip? 7-Zip can do that for you. Supports .RAR, .ZIP, and various others. MUCH faster than Windows in extracting files.
CamStudio - Records video and sound at the same time off your screen. You can capture the entire screen or just a certain rectangular area. You can also do video only capture.
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Media ApplicationsDVD Decrypter - This program will rip any DVD for you and save it out to a VOB file. Search for "Auto GK" to convert the VOB files into AVI's. Get this program now before it is outlawed!
Twins Video to Ipod-Zune-PSP - Convert AVI, MPEG, MPG, DAT, WMV, ASF, MP4, M4V, 3GP, 3G2, H264, MPEG4, AVC, MOV, QT, DivX, XviD, and FLV. This handy app will make it so that you can watch the vid on your portable media player. Supports batch processing so you can do lots of videos at once.
VLC Media Player - Play virtually any video file you could ever think of. If you have a file that you just can't seems to play, VLC is your best bet at making it work.
GIMP - Also known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program, this is basically a free Adobe Photoshop. This takes some skill to learn, but then again, so does Photoshop. If you want to go beyond MS Paint, try this out.
PAINT.net - Another Photoshop alternative. You may want to try this as well and see if you like this better or GIMP.
Audacity - This free program is pretty good at editing audio files for you. It also has recording features as well. Try it out if you need something to edit your sounds!
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Virus/Spyware Protection ProgramsPosted by Cleod 9 in old forums:
FREE PROGRAMSEveryone needs virus and spyware protection. So what programs out there are FREE, and most efficient? I'd say these are the best:
Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition 1.06 - Good old Ad-Aware detects a broad range of spyware, adware, etc.
Spybot - Search & Destroy 1.4 - This is a pretty old program but it's still great to use and has updates often! It's great since it scans relatively quickly, and when it finds tracking cookies you can get the URLs of all of them and block them in you Firefox browser using (which is what I do). I haven't gotten a single spyware cookie in months!
Microsoft Anti-spyware - You probably have this already. It's a great program for alerting you if something is being installed into your startup registry or if one of your settings is being changed. It also can detect spyware.
Zone Alarm - This is the free version of ZoneAlarm and is in my opinion the BEST firewall out there. There is an awesome setting where when you first install it, it won't let ANYTHING access the Internet, and once something tries to access then it will ask you if it should let it have access and if you want it to remember that. That way you can only have the programs YOU want accessing the internet on your computer. I have avoided a virus or two with this.
Aimfix - Chances are you use AIM as your instant messaging client. If you do you may want to run this program every so often, it checks for security threats and AIM viruses. (I personally don't like using AIM since it is usually associated with spyware and adware, so I use ad/spyware-free
Pidgin)
Visual C++ or Visual Basic Express, there both free and can make amazing programs with it.
NOT FREE PROGRAMSNorton Antivirus - Everyone has heard of this, it isn't too expensive and it detects a LARGE amount of viruses, spywares, trojans, adware, joke programs, etc. The auto-protect feature is amazing, it is definitely worth the money. The only downside is that it takes awhile to scan your entire computer.
By the way, I use all of the programs and my computer has been doing great, especially since I bought Norton and told Firefox to block the cookies that Spybot found. I only find an occasional cookie maybe once a monthIf you can't find what you're looking for post a question or look on Download.com. Google also works but make sure the site is trustworthy. Also please be sure that any links to programs you give are free of viruses and spyware.
Subject: useful programs 
Tue Aug 19, 2008 4:00 pm
