Basic Computing Using Freeware
Before anyone goes out and buys software for their computer, they should examine their needs. What I mean by this do they need professional software, because of their job, or do they just need software for home use? This makes quite a difference. When software is needed for a job, it means that everyone probably needs the same software, because of compatibility, or because a particular piece of software is better suited for the needs of the company. This is usually not true for the home user. If you are a home user, it pays to look at the free software that is around. Much of it has been around for years and is steadily being improved and even has large companies behind it.
Screen shot Of Opening Page Of Open Office Free software that can be substituted for expensive commercial software and do the needed job for most people exists. I have been using a lot of it for years. A lot of people believe that they have to have Microsoft Word on their computers. As you probably know, Microsoft Word is an expensive word processor that comes in several different suites that range from about $100 for students in a small suite to hundreds of dollars in a larger suite for the rest of us. Do you use your word processor to type email and the occasional note? Even if you do heavy typing as I do, there is one free word processor that is out there and supported by one of the largest commercial companies, it is called Open Office and is a suite of programs that matches the Microsoft suite closely and it is entirely free. As a matter of fact I use it to type my articles on that are posted on the About Facts Net website. The authors claim that it has close compatibility with Microsoft Office but not 100%. It is more than you would ever need if you need a program for the home, and the accompanying suites allow you to do spreadsheets, presentations and more, including building a data base.
Screen shot Of Infanview Almost all of us take photos and we need software to manipulate them. Over the years I have found two programs that are excellent at this and both are free. The first one is called infanview and will do almost anything to photos including adding all sorts of effects. The software has been around for many years and the author just keep making it better and better. The second program is Paint.net. It is more like Photoshop and has all the bells and whistles of a drawing program besides a photo manipulation program. There is no need for most of us to buy a program like Adobe Photoshop unless we are doing professional work and even then, the powerful free program Paint.net might suffice. I have used both pieces of software for years. One of the most important pieces of software on our computer is our anti-virus and anti-spyware software. If you are like me, you are constantly being bugged to buy from companies like Norton and McAfee. In this case I would NEVER install anti-virus and anti-spyware from these two companies even if it was free. I hate Norton because many times it either comes with the computer, or downloads with some other program if you are not careful and has no uninstall feature. You have to go to their website and get a special program and run it to uninstall the software and my experience was that I had to do it several times. To me this was worse than having a virus. McAfee also has its problems. I would rather use the free version of AVG or Spyware doctor that comes for free with Google Apps. They both seem to work okay. You have to remember one thing, no anti-virus program is perfect. I would also run the free version of Advanced System Care along with a scan everyday using the free version of Spybot – Search And Destroy. It seems that all of us need to make copies of large directories, or even entire drives at one time or another and there are plenty of commercial programs out there that do that, but there are also a couple of free ones that excel in copying. One is Fastcopy and the other is TeraCopy. Here is the great part, they are incredibly fast when compared to the built in copy command on windows. Once something is copied, like a directory, it becomes very fast if you have to copy it in the future, because the program only applies the changes. To give you an idea, I copied a directory that was 13.5 gigs in only a couple of seconds, the second time. Teracopy inserts itself into the context menu on the right mouse button and is available from there. I have compared both and I believe that Fastcopy is slightly better and can meet all the needs of a home user. Sometimes some of us enjoy looking at videos on our computers, but we run into trouble when we try and view them with certain programs, because they are not in the correct format for those programs. When this happens we don't need to buy an expensive converter. There is a nice free one on the market that does quite a good job. It is called Any Video Converter. It can covert both audio and video files into many different formats and will be sufficient for most people.
Screen shot Of SMPlayer If you are like me, you want to be able to play files that are in many different formats without getting the message that your player doesn't recognize the file. You can buy an expensive piece of software to do this, or you can do what I do. I use SMPlayer, a free player that plays all different types of files and does it nicely. This eliminates the need for Quicktime to play apple files, a Flash player and even windows media player. Lastly there are files with a .pdf extension. These are the ones that you can play on Acrobat player a free player and they can be used on any machine. A better player that is not prone to virus attacks and is very flexible is the Nuance PDF reader and it is also free. There is also a simple free address book available that is called aptly enough, Address Book. It is simple and small, but for those that only need a place to put names, addresses and telephone numbers, it is perfect. You now have enough free software for the basic computer and you didn't pay a cent, but you also didn't sacrifice usability |
