Intoduction
It's nearly always nice to get something for nothing and computer users have buckets of free programs and utilities to choose from. The recommended retail cost of Adobe's CS3 which includes Acrobat, Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Illustrator is around $1,800.They are great programs but many people can't justify spending that amount of money on software - even of they've got that amount burning a hole in their pocket anyway.
I know there are plenty of ways of getting hold of expensive commercial, copyrighted, programs for free but a lot of people do not want to criminalize themselves or wait forever for some large program to download only to find it does weird things to their computer that a real copy wouldn't, or have to hunt around looking for cracks to get it to work properly then block internet access to it so it doesn't "phone home" for updates or whatever.
There is also a lot of very good shareware or "try before you buy" software around, I've even sent some of the authors money if I liked the program enough, but what I've listed here is FREE software. That is software in the public domain or has one of the GPL (General Public License) or "copyleft" licenses. See the Wikipedia and the GNU sites for more information.
The Software
Audio Utilities
Audacity - Audio capture and editor CD / DVD Utilities AudioGrabber - CD ripper File Utilities BK Replace EM - multiple file search and replace utility Image Editor Dia - drawing / diagramming Multimedia Players FLV Player 4 Free - a FLV video player |
Protection Ad-Aware - Spyware cleaner Video Utilities AVITricks Classic - AVI video editor Web Utilities Filezilla - FTP client, also the server if you need it |
Links
See what other people say is their favourite free software...
Gizmo's Top Picks
Mohawke's Best of the Best
PC Magazine
PC World
School Computing
This page created 25th April 2008, last modified 29th April 2008