Some Good Things are Free

Grammy Blicktx had to get a new computer and her Beloved Husband had to reformat. She mentions in her blog today that they now don't have some programs they had and really liked. I thought of when I got my laptop and couldn't use a lot of programs I  have. But I knew about a lot of free things that would work on my new system. I didn't think they would be as good as they have turned out to be but I'm sold. I now use MS office only at work for the most part.

If you are not opposed to free stuff but are concerned about their value and problems they may cause, a good place to find them is Cnet.com and PC World, they review them all the time. PitstopPC is a great place to to get information on free items and their drawbacks and they have several free system scans that will find weaknesses in your set up.

Here is the list of items I have on my new laptop that cost me nothing and work as well as the more expensive software. I've had NO problems from any of these items and I've used some of them since before I had my desktop...that's about 5 years.

• OpenOffice.org  is free and does EVERYTHING MS Office does.
• Avast Anti-virus is free and works as well as Norton... I've been using it five years. Never been down because of a virus since I started. There are several other free anti-virus programs but do look for reviews before installing. There were some in the past that actually had viruses. I've stuck with Avast because of the I've had no problems, it catches bugs, and the reviews just continue to be good.
  
• Paint.net is free and does amazing things with photos. You can play for hours with this thing. If you've used other photo programs you're ahead of the game.Gimp is another free one on a par with Photoshop. I've never used it because of the learning curve and time involved to learn it. My artist friends may like it.
  
• E-Sword is free and excellent for Bible work.
• yWriter  is free and a wonderful program to help you put a novel together.
• Google Earth - is free and more fun than a barrel of monkeys to play with and it is great for getting directions and maps to places you want to go. The street view takes you to the ground so you can look around the neighborhoods.
• Spybot - great little spyware program I use to clean off my computer weekly. I've been using this for probably 8 years.
• Auslogics has a FREE defrag program that works in about 3 minutes on my huge drives. (That is only a small exaggeration) Better than Microsoft's built in.
• Firefox - free browser
• Xmarks free little browser program to keep your bookmarks sync'd and accessible whichever computer you log in on. I have it on both computers and the one at work. I never have to say... Oh, I saved that link on my other computer!" And it works on Chrome and IE (for diehards). You can open the xmarks organizers and arrange your bookmarks, edit them or delete them, synchronize it with the server and when you are on your other computer, it will synchronize those and do all that work for you!
  
• Google Chrome - lightening browser - free. Works really well. More improvements on the way. We'll see
• Gmail - best email program if you want to get less junk. It is what I use for all personal email. Virtually NO spam and it goes where it is supposed to go. Also has a desktop offline feature so always can read email later if you can't be on line long enough. I have hotmail and yahoo but  gmail wins hands down in the spam/junk department. I now use Yahoo for those places that  require an email address but from whom I do not wish to get trash in my inbox. Hotmail is similar but that is for places I actually want to try a newsletter to see if I like it. I am able to redirect my hotmail to my gmail without giving my gmail address away. ;) I love Google in all it's forms! Brilliant thinkers there.

There you have it. Free programs! They all have worked well for me. No problems. I can't say that about some of the purchased programs I've used. More than once I've bought one that caused conflicts, or I had to call tech support to get it set up. None of these required this. And as far as I can recall, the help files are more than adequate... but I can't recall using them much except to learn how to use the programs!