Written by: TechAnon “Free is for me!” it sounds great but is it always a good idea? You may get exactly what you pay for. Sometimes, in a land far away, Anonymous citizens of such a society actually do provide free things for the betterment of our world. In the age of digital data some of it just happens to be handy dandy programming for your home personal computer or PC to shorten it up a bit. Granted, many pre-built PC’s already arrive with certain software installed for virus protection, music and video, backups and more.
Yes, it’s usually convenient to keep these tools installed because they’re already there. It’s worth the extra moneyright? That may not always be the case.
There ARE inexpensive and sometimes completely FREE programs out there for different tasks that are rated just as good (if not better in certain instances) than the fancy logo and big name developers. After a little bit of research and a bit of input by Technotification. a few of these programs are listed by application below.
No, it’s not our place to decide what is best for you and what you need. Generally speaking, the list below seems pretty much on the “up and up”.
Check it out. Antivirus and malware.
It’s pretty obvious what these cover. Like the giants of antivirus both ‘avast” and “AVG” not only provide you with a free app but, also follow up with free updates for virus protection. For Malware and Spy ware, “Malwarebytes” is the recommended choice 2.
Backup solutions There’s a plethora of ways to back up your precious pictures, tunes and whatnot. Even your operating system has it’s funny such way. Unfortunately, most of these involve everything being stored locally. A designated space on your internal disk, an external hard drive or for some. A plain old thumb drive (since their capacity has grown so).
What happens in the case of a disaster? You get robbed? You are told to evacuate for any reason? “Dropbox” will give you 2GB absolutely free and up to 1 terrabyte for 9.99 usd per month “Mozy” will give you 50gb for 5.99usd and some free months depending which plan you choose. Both have their pros and cons but, once again, you decide for you. Browsers Yes, the war of the browsers. Just because Microsoft comes with almost everything doesn’t mean it always works the best.
Both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome work with an endless number of websites and in certain cases? Better than I.E.
File Compression Large pictures, giant media files and maybe even “scratch and sniff” are being whipped around the networks at lightning speed due to being able to ‘compress” them. Sure “winzip” works great but, have you seen the price? Check out “7-zip.org”. It’s completely free and available for 79 different languages. They do ask for a donation but, it’s just that. It’s not a ‘fee”. Disc ripping and creation Taking the data from a CD or creating a dvd/cd can be done relatively easily by popping the disc right into your disc tray.
CDburnerxp.se offers cdburnerxp for free and also boasts to be able to burn Blue Ray and HD dsics 6. Email Maybe you have one of those archaic email systems like outlook or Aol. “You’ve got mail” has nothing on the here and now of our world. The top recommendations here would be: Mozilla Thunderbird as an email client Gmail as an online email system. FTP, SFTP and SSH Utilities Who for wha? Those of you that maintain a web page or have the need to process data to and from a server will be familiar with these.
Although there are plenty of commercial programs you can purchase to do all of this, these two animals are said to be better than most of them FTP client: “Filezilla” is a completely open source program that is “distributed in the hope that it will be useful” SSH client: “Putty “ is also a completely open source utility said to work as well as the big boys. Image editing, paint and pictures Once again, an area where there massive amounts of programming out there. Some costing hundreds of dollars and even more charging a license or subscription rate per year. The ones below arefree and seemingly reliable. Image editor: GIMP.org Paint program: Paint.net is free image and photo editing software for PCs that run Windows Picture organizer: google picasa to organize, edit and share photos 9.
Multimedia Here’s another big one. Everyone wants to be top dog in the new and exciting age of media. If you have the cash to part with you can spend hundreds. Here’s two happy little players. “Audacity” can play, record and modify sounds in windows, MAC and even linux.
Free for the download “VLC” is a free player that boasts the ability “to play most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols” 10. Office suite Another area typically dominated by Microsoft and their license fees when a program called; Apache’s “Openoffice” is out there at no charge. There you have it. Computing on a budget. Not all may work for what you need. Call it a jump in the right direction of finding what works for you. If you have used any of the products listed above or have found something you believe is better tell us about it.
Sometimes a simple review can help 100 people. There’s always someone who knows more and there’s always someone who wants to learn more. Source. So you are recommending people to choose GMail when everyone knows that GMail is the NSA’s best friend and even if Google don’t want the NSA peeking in on their data, the NSA do anyway. So good job, get people on GMail especially if they are interested in Anonymous operations, just get them to file away all their personal data with a company that is WELL KNOWN for data retention and exchanging with law enforcement.
Next is, Firefox and Chrome are ‘in some cases’ better than IE? Is this a joke? Google Chrome is an app created by a data retention company that holds information on practically millions and millions of users and is connected with the NSA (whether they like it or not) and the article makes it out like IE just about comes in third like it’s good software? It’s flawed to FUCK. It’s created by a company that can’t even be bothered to patch vulnerabilities in it’s operating system which is why Windows is by far the most targeted OS out there.
Quite simply because Microsoft have no intention of making Windows secure, they fucked that up a long time ago. IE has so many exploits. Firefox however is run by Mozilla who support many projects including the Tor Project amongst freedom of information over the internet as a whole, I can put my money on you being able to trust them to create a browser that is independent of the big corrupt money grabbing skull-fuckery companies like Microshit and Google. And AVG being the best AV out there for free? Are you fucking joking. Who the fuck uses AVG? You are supposed to be Anonymous, you are supposed to be helping people stay safe and secure on the internet.
Why would you recommend someone to get AVG when it’s an AV that was surpassed in the early 2000’s? It’s shit, EVERYONE knows that. It can’t even detect keygens let alone anything else. It’s easy to copy and paste something, this information is incorrect.
You aint attracting 70 year old grand parents who’ve never touched a computer in their life and may never need too. You’re supposed to be attracting the general public that want to learn and have the time to learn. Telling someone to use GMail and IE and AVG? Come on guys.
Merry Christmas ?. As someone who knows computers on an immediate level, i.e. Able to use Ubuntu, though with many frustrations but far less frustrations than Windows, and without any desire to learn Linux better since it’s not a focus in my life right now and talent-wise I’m not naturally inclined towards computer wizardry (forgive the apparent heresy). I can attest to having used many of the aforementioned softwares and found them to completely meet my needs. OpenOffice, Audacity, Firefox and Gmail, etc. As for anti-virus and anti-spyware however, I’m less convinced. I’ve had some pretty negative experiences with AVG, but that was many years ago and things change rapidly in that area.
But one free option I must strongly recommend is a one-time scan and fix software called ComboFix. When you think your computer is beyond saving, this can actually get rid of the toughest viruses and spyware, and at the end it produces a log if you need to take additional steps. But make sure to follow instructions, and have backups, because it’s so powerful it’s possible to accidentally damage good aspects of your computer, although this has never happened to me yet. If things get too slow and you want to reinstall Windows and start fresh, perhaps ComboFix can save you some time. Also what about the best free P2P software?
Personally Soulseek meets and exceeds my expectations. Is this article for real? You have to be kidding me. Try Libreoffice.
Try useless or try virustotal.com This is the n00best article I have ever read. You would think that anonymous could dig up better writers than this, or just not let terrible journalism like this on their site. Do I have to do this myself? I’m serious, this is a terrible effort. At least go into what ‘open source’, ‘freeware’, and ‘shareware’ are, and give good examples of the applications that people ACTUALLY use are.
The write-up on browsers is especially hillarious, when have browsers been paid for software? Try never, jeeeezus. AVG isn’t to safe, it is almost malware in itself. Avast though, I have had that for years and I have not got one virus since, plenty of Pebkac errors though, Open Office and Libre Office are the best in my opinion, I haven’t delved into the easter eggs with them yet. Gmail is the best E-mail system out there; This is do to google becoming an accidental monopoly by created a damn better than good search algorithm, Firefox, Safari, and Opera are good browsers and all work on windows. Inkscape, Gimp Image Editing Program, are also damn good open source editors. I swear by Audacity, and wish I could find an open source Design studio akin to Clay Cutting that I can use on my pc.
That is all, awesome article.
Updated: by Computer Hope There are millions of free and open source projects available, many of them better than any commercially available product. Below is a short listing of what we think are the best out there, broken down into ten categories. Antivirus and malware protection Most PC users realize that they need protection on their computer or may have an installed antivirus program from their computer manufacturer.
What most don't realize is that there are free programs that are just as good and in some cases better than the commercial products. Below are our recommendations. Antivirus program: Malware and Spyware protection: Backup solutions There are dozens of free and commercially available backup programs for computers. Unfortunately, many of those backups are stored locally, meaning if your house were to catch fire, get robbed, or if you lost your backup discs, all your data would be lost. To avoid loss of important data, we suggest users use online backup services.
Online backup solution: or Browsers Although Microsoft Internet Explorer comes pre-installed on Windows computers. There are several excellent free alternatives that everyone should try. These free alternatives can often be faster, have more options, and in many cases be more secure than Internet Explorer. Internet Browser: or Compression utility When downloading files on the Internet you'll eventually encounter a.zip,.rar, or other compressed file. Dealing with these files can be easy with our below free file compression utility. File compression utility: Disc ripper and creation utility Creating an audio or data CD/DVD, ripping the data from an audio CD, or creating a CD from a.ISO file can also be done freely using our below free recommendation.
CD burner utility: E-mail E-mail is yet another service that can be done freely. Most users today use online e-mail solutions like the one listed below. However, for those still using an e-mail client such as Microsoft Outlook we strongly suggest one or both of the below suggestions. E-mail client: Online e-mail: FTP, SFTP, and SSH Utility Users who maintain their own web page or need to upload or download files to or from a server have to use an FTP utility or an SSH client. There are many commercial programs capable of doing this but our below free recommendations beats them all. FTP client: SSH client: and Image editor, paint program, and picture organizer There are many great free solutions for editing, creating, and organizing your images on your computer.
Many of the programs capable of doing these tasks can be several hundred dollars, but all of the below programs are completely free. Image editor: Paint program: Picture organizer: Multimedia There are dozens of different multimedia programs with different capabilities and limitations. Below are our top free multimedia programs for watching video files and recording audio. Audio editing and creating tool: Video and DVD Player: and Office Suite An Office suite such as Microsoft Office is often one of the most expensive programs that a user can install on their computer. Why install these expensive programs when there are free solutions that are just as good.
Office suite: Notepad and Source code editor.
I tend to go through computer builds, A LOT. Maybe I get a new machine (please don’t ask what happened to the previous one!) or I want to format and reinstall to “get fresh” or maybe something just stops working and it’s faster (albeit less manly) to just reimage than it is to try to spend a day and a half figuring out what I broke and how to fix it. Whatever the reason, I find myself installing a lot of the same tools again and again on each new build that I have. Some of these make life easier for me as a sysadmin, others I wouldn’t want to work without. All are things I make sure I install ASAP, and I thought it would be good to share this list with you in the hopes that I can share some cool stuff with our readers, and that some of you may leave some comments to share with the rest of us of what you can’t do without.
So, without further ado and in no particular order, here are the ten IT tools installed on my computer which I can’t deal without! F.lux f.lux is an amazing little piece of freeware that subtly alters the color temperature of your display as the sun sets (based on your location) so that you get warmer, less blue lighting coming off your screen after dark.
This has the amazing effect of actually helping you to sleep by not flooding your eyeballs with sunlight-coloured brightness, which can fool your neocortex into thinking it should be flooding your neurons with neurotransmitters to wake you up. Pulling the blues out reduces that, so your brain is more readily able to let you sleep once work is done. F.lux can even control Phillips lights to set your entire workspace correctly. You can get f.lux from. Dropbox Ah Dropbox.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. There are a lot of cloud vendors on the market today that offer free and low cost storage “in the cloud” that let you store and sync stuff. I like Dropbox primarily because it just works, and it does so on Windows, Macs, Linux, iOS, Androids, and even Windows Phones. It includes public and private sharing as well as versioning. You can get a 2GB account for free at, or use this referral link to get an extra 500 MB for each of us! PSPad Hands down my favourite text editor, this is the only one I come back to again and again.
Sure, if you are a hard-core coder you may prefer Notepad, but for scripting, diffing, hexing, HTML, PowerShell, XML, PHP, HTML, JS, ASPX, and more, PSPad is the tool for me. It has a number of great tools built-in, including spell checking, lorem ipsum generation, differencing files, and working on projects. Duet Display The most expensive app I have ever purchased from iTunes, the only tool in this entire post that costs money, and the one that is worth every penny of its $14.99 price tag, Duet Display allows me to use my iOS device as a second monitor for my Windows workstation. I have an iPad Mini, which travels like a champ wherever I go, and with the smart cover, is the perfect second monitor for my laptop whether I am onsite at a customer or sitting in the hotel room.
It works just as well with my iPhone. Get it from the iTunes store, but read about it. Foxit Reader My go-to PDF reader, given the crap that Adobe has been putting out for the past ten years or so, Foxit PDF is lightweight, fast, autoupdates, and does everything I need a PDF reader to do, without the extra crap. VLC All work and no play makes Casper a dull boy, amiright? C++ code for games. And that’s why VLC must be on any machine I have, whether that’s my laptop, my desktop, my iPad, or my phone. I use VLC as my default player for both audio and video files and I haven’t yet found a format it cannot play.
Grab VLC from and accept no substitute! 7-zip The one, the only, the extreme compression machine! 7-zip is everything you want in a tool.
Lightweight, fast, and works with just about every single compressed file format I have ever heard of or needed to use. It also offers shell integration, and can encrypt those zips and even mail them for you. 7-zip is downloadable from.
Wireshark I remember way back in the day, paying several thousand dollars US for commercial-grade protocol analysers that don’t do even half of what Wireshark does for free. If you have to do anything that involves packet captures, Wireshark is the only tool you need. Download it for free from. Remote Desktop Connection Manager This is an absolute must for any Windows sysadmin. The RDC Manager allows you to maintain remote desktop (RDP) sessions to all your Windows servers and workstations. You can create groups, store creds, undock, fullscreen, and click between sessions to as many systems as you need. Public finance by h l bhatia. Download it from Microsoft.
The vital collection of cmd-line tools I have a set of cmd-line tools that must be on any machine I regularly use. To make that simple as possible, I keep them in a directory in my Dropbox, and just add that to the path statement for my machine. Copy a couple of files to%systemroot% system32 drivers etc and I am good to go!
These include the full set of PSTools, the Windows troubleshooting tool Err, and the BIND tools. Get the PSTools, Whois, and others from, the ERR tool from, and finally, you can extract DIG and WHOIS from the BIND download at Want to know which command line tools I simply cannot do without? Just click here: So those are my ten must-haves, but what about you? What tools or apps do you consider vital to your sanity and productivity? What’s the first thing you install on a new corporate image? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think of the ones on my list, and what you think I missed.
PCMag reviews products, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. When I put together a machine for family or friends, I usually install a bunch of free software that I personally use and recommend to others. They are programs that are close to being definitive and needed. Generally speaking, these programs fall into two categories. The first category is comprised of programs that are best of breedcommercial or otherwise.
This includes programs that are not as slick as commercial products, but they're are easier to use or I prefer them because of certain features. The second category contains the programs that are clearly inferior to commercial software, but they're more than adequate for everyday use or non-professional use. In other words, programs for when you don't necessarily need the high-powered commercial software. These programs also make good adjuncts to commercial software. The good news is that all of these programs are free. Here are five of the best free software programs that I recommend everyone should have.
VLC Media Player At the top of this list is the from Video LAN Organization. It's an all purpose video player, which also plays all audio formats. If VLC can't play a media format, then nothing will. This program is the answer to all those error messages from Windows Media Player, saying it does not have the codec or can't play something or other. VLC not only plays all formats but plays them well. This is one of the most important pieces of software you can have on your machine.
And it works on Windows, Linux, Mac and Unix boxes. Wow, it's a stunner.
Irfanview Next comes everyone's favorite picture viewer and minor-league editor, from Irfan. It's the definitive viewer. Makes sure you also download the plug-ins, too. It can read everything, including old Kodak.kdc files, Adobe native files, and even TXT files. It will also play most movie formats, as well as audio files. I'd advise you install it before VLC and let VLC take the media files, though. The program has a lot of features and is a great photo manager, but it only does minor photo editing, so you still need Photoshop if you are serious about editing.
ImgBurn For those of you who like to work with ISO images and need reliable ways to create and burn ISO images on and off discs effortlessly, is the CD/DVD burner utility you want. This kind of program is something you do not realize you need until you start uploading or downloading ISO images.
Programs Every Pc Should Have
Every other program is convoluted when it comes to this simple task. ImgBurn sets all the variables automatically and logs its activities beautifully. Open Office If you can't afford Microsoft Office, then will do. People who have been put off by Star Office in the past could do worse than check out Open Office, which I use to write many of my columns. I have been so impressed with the improvements in this product, as it will carry the day for 90 percent of the Office suite users out there. Microsoft Office is still king, but too expensive for many budget-minded users. The word processor is as good as Word although Word has strong and useful grammar checking and better mark-up/history abilities.
The only other real weak spot is the Excel clone, because it will not take a massive spreadsheet, which is a serious drawback for number crunchers. But I suspect that will eventually be fixed. This suite is a winner, let me tell you.
Audacity Finally, today's last recommendation, is a sound editor,. If you are an amateur podcaster or someone who likes to work with sound files but doesn't want to go pro with Cakewalk or the other professional systems, this program is a little gem. I use it to quickly edit the DH Unplugged financial podcast that I do with Andrew Horowitz, and it takes me about 20 minutes to edit and produce the final show, export it to MP3, and publish it.
It's a nice, feature-rich sound editor that can do almost anything. And since it works on all platforms (as do most of the programs I've listed), you can quickly download it for any machine you are on for emergency editing when you aren't on your main machine.
In the months ahead, I'll have a few more recommended programs for your approval. In the meantime, if you have discovered some universal, must-have, freeware program as good as any that I listed above, send me a note explaining why you like the program, and I'll do a new list in the months ahead. Email me at [email protected] and let me know.
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