I recently put together a disc of Windows freeware for my father and stepmother (Pa & Mary, did you get it yet?) for their new PC. Most of these I have used and some I rely on frequently, some I haven't used at all. These are mostly office and system programs but there's some games included as well. Are there any (Windows) programs that should be included in v 2.0?

SYSTEM

IZarc (IZArc35) a compression / decompression utility that can handle just about any format. Install this first as it will be useful with the rest of the files.

BurnAtOnce (bao0995) a CD-burner utility. I haven't used this one myself.

SECURITY

Ad-Aware 1.06 (aawsepersonal) -- anti-spyware utility -- It will detect "cookies," you don't really need to worry too much about those, but will also pick up spyware programs that can infect your machine.

AVG (avg71free_371a669) -- AntiVirus software. As good as anything you would pay for; just make sure you set it to look for virus updates frequently.

Spybot (Spybotsd14) -- another anti-spyware utility, picks up some things that Ad-Aware misses

INTERNET

Firefox (Firefox Setup 1.5) -- web browser -- Use this instead of Internet Explorer, it's more secure. There are lots of plugins that can extend the functionality, I'd recommend first installing AdBlock to block advertising

Thunderbird (Thunderbird Setup 1.0.7) -- email client -- You can set this up to read your email with any account.

Trillian (trillian-v3.1) -- Instant Messenger client. Works with AOL, Yahoo, all other IM accounts.

WS FTP(ws_ftple) -- an FTP client, should you ever need one.

OFFICE

EditPadLite (SetupEditPadLite) -- My text editor of choice. It's very simple and I do most of my writing in it (instead of a wordprocessing program).

OpenOffice (OOo_2.0.1_Win32Intel_install_wJRE) -- Word / Excel / PowerPoint / Access replacement.

PDF Creator (Run PDFCreator-0_8_0_GNUGhostscript first, then run Patch02-PDFCreator-0_8_0) will create a "virtual printer" to make .pdf files -- you can create them from any program, just choose "PDF Creator" as the printer.

Foxit -- (foxitreader_setup) -- replacement for Adobe Acrobat PDF reader, which takes a long time to boot and constantly tries to search for updates to itself.

MEDIA

Exact Audio Copy (eac-0.95b3-cdrdao) -- the best way to rip CDs to MP3s. You'll also need the LAME program to convert the files into MP3s -- unzip the files from lame3.96.1.zip to a new folder C:\Program Files\LAME

Billy (billysetup) -- a small but clean MP3 player.

Media Player Classic (mplayerc.exe) -- a cleaner replacement for the bloated Windows Media Player.

Real Alternative (realalt146) -- a cleaner replacement for the bloated Real Media player.

QuickTime Alternative (quicktimealt167) -- a cleaner replacemen for the bloated QuickTime player (sense a theme here?)

Picasa (picasa2-current) -- a good picture manager and editor

MISC

NISTime (nistime-32bit) run this every once in a while, when your PC is on the internet, and it will adjust your system clock to the atomic clock server in Boulder.

The Font Thing (tfti.zip) A font manager.

GAMES

Prince of Persia
Alien Arena
Advanced Strategic Command
Cloud
Continuum
Doom
FreeCiv
Mono
N
New Adventures of Zak McKracken
Battle for Wesnoth

M E-L posted this on January 15, 2006
It is filed under Computers & Internet

It is also indexed with the following tags: Freeware |