Recently I upgraded my home PC and I thought, well, how about loading it with only freeware/open source software (On top of Windows XP)? So I started looking around and found some excellent freeware, along with a lot of trash. It took some work to evaluate all the applications but in the end, it was worth it.
I have nothing against Micro$oft or any other ISV making money though. It was just that I was on a tight budget and I wanted to see whether it was really possible to live without commercial software. Here is what I have settled on in the end.
Audio:
Nothing beats good ol’ Winamp (classic) here for playing songs. For cataloging my music collection, I use MPEG Audio Collection. It is very lightweight and can read all types of audio files. It uses Windows default player (winamp here) to play music. Apple’s iTunes is also good but it’s very resource intensive, especially if you choose to normalize the volume. I use both MAC and iTunes as they serve two different purposes. With MPEG Audio Collection, you can catalog all your CDs and search for the songs without needing the original CD. On the other hand, iTunes does not allow you to play songs based on the folders (location) but you can do that in MPEG Audio Collection.
What good is winamp without some music for it to play and again I turned to freeware. There are more sources of legal free music on the internet than we know or care about and that’s where irate comes in. When you run this program for the first time, it will download 10 tracks at random from different sources. You listen to each song and rate it on a scale of 0 to 10. Say you rate country songs higher than Blues. Then the program will start downloading more of country songs. With a little bit of training, the program can give you a hit ratio of 70% or more. And these are not streams or samples or pirated songs. These are free-as-in-beer full songs. And you can just right click on an artist’s name and visit their website.
I use CDex for CD ripping and mp3Trim for occasional mp3 editing.
Video:
Even though I got a copy of PowerDVD when I bought my DVD-ROM drive, I don’t use it as I am planning to use only freeware. But this is one area where I was disappointed. I could not find any good DVD players which are also freeware. The best I could find was VideoLan. Its interface is not as eye-candy as PowerDVD but it does play every imaginable file format, even those files that other softwares refuse to play. It’s very lightweight and highly customizable. Don’t be put off by its interface.
For video editing and capturing, the most popular freeware application is VirtualDub. For casual use, Windows Movie Maker 2 is a good choice.
CD/DVD writing:
I had always used Nero for this but CD Burner XP Pro is an excellent piece of software. It’s hard to believe that something like this is free! It works with IDE, USB, IEEE1384, SCSI CD/DVD recorders, can create bootable discs, iso files, audio CDs etc. And best of all, it has a very powerful CD ripper, featuring ogg and wma, in addition to mp3. It has made me forget Nero and that’s saying a lot.
For viewing image file, I use CDmage. It supports more than 25 formats, including .nrg, .ccd, .iso, and does an amazing variety of things.
Productivity:
The first application that comes to mind in this category is OpenOffice. It should serve you well for almost all of your needs. In case you get a complex layout file that was created in MS Office and OpenOffice is unable to render it properly, you can always download the free viewers for Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Visio from Microsoft site. I tried Abiword also but I did not like its interface that much. And since you’d be installing OpenOffice anyway, there is no need for any other word processor.
I use Keynote for note taking. It is very lightweight and has a nice tabbed interface. You can also use free version of Treepad but it does not support images.
Internet Browsing:
There are two choices for browsing the internet. Firefox and MyIE2. I do not prefer firefox that much because of its memory leak problems. Use it for 10 minutes and it would start taking 60-70 MB of RAM. But it’s very secure and comes with a built-in pop up blocker. It is recommended only if you have atleast 256 MB of RAM. Otherwise it’s better to use MyIE2 which is a shell around IE. It also supports tabbed browsing and has many more features than firefox.
Mail:
Thunderbird from mozilla organization. Though I mostly use gmail/yahoo for personal emails (at home).
IM:
Gaim is a multi-protocol IM software, supporting Yahoo, MSN messanger, AIM, ICQ, IRC, and few more. It allows you to compose your messages using its built-in WYSIWYG interface. And if your friends have multiple accounts, it can club them into one single entry which you can expand if needed. It even has RSA encryption (through a plugin). Miranda is another very good IM software.
Anti-virus:
I use a product (appropriately) called antivir from H+BEDV. It is very light on the resources and gets updated daily. You can also use AVG anti-virus from Grisoft but antivir gives you much more fine-grained control over dealing with viruses.
Firewall:
I use Kerio personal firewall from Kerio technologies. It’s highly customizable and in addition to providing network security, it also provides very good system level security. Meaning it will alert you if an executable tries to launch another executable. And you can create custom access rules for different programs. Zonelabs also gives a free version of their famous zonealarm firewall but free version does not allow you to specify policies for individual programs. Though Sygate personal firewall is also good, you can create only 20 custom rules in free version. Needless to say, do not trust Windows firewall that comes with XP SP2.
Data Compression:
7-Zip is the best freeware compression tool out there. Its proprietary compression format 7z claims 30-70% better compression ratios when compared to regular zip format. It even supports rpms and deb formats,in addition to all the other major ones.
Imaging:
irfanview is the best freeware image viewer/editor that I have used till date. It supports any image file format that you have ever heard of. And its editing capablities are more than sufficient for casual users. You can crop/convert/apply filters/get EXIF/create slideshows/change color depth and do many more things. Don’t forget to install the plugins though.
For everything else, there is of course gimp. One more good application is Paint.net. It is under active development but looks very promising. You need .Net runtime for this though.
File Utilities:
SC-DiskInfo will quickly show you how much disk space is being used by different directories. Run it on ‘Documents and Settings’ folder and be surprised by the amount of space being taken by temp files. It displays the space usage in a very nice bar graph. If you keep wondering where your disk space has gone, get this software.
To recover files that got emptied from recycle bin also, Restoration is a very handy utility. It woks on all versions of Windows and does not need any installation. Just unzip and run it, preferrably from a floppy.
Misc:
Some other programs that I use are – Spybot Search&Destroy for removing spyware, CmdHere power toy from Microsoft (for Windows XP), free version of Joel Spolsky’s CityDesk for (clean) HTML composing, and Clip Path for capturing the full path of a file/directory to clipboard.
There are many more programs out there than I could ever test. But these should be sufficient for an average home user. And if you like any of these, consider donating some money to the developers. Even five or ten dollars go a long way towards paying bandwidth and hardware costs. You can also help with documentation or programming. At the minimum, send an appreciation email to the developers and thank them. It does wonders for their motivation and encourages them to continue working on the application. Some sites like SourceForge sell T-shirts and you can show your support by buying them. Remember, no help is small help.
Let’s go exploring:
If you want all this software and more on one CD, here are some links to explore –
The Open CD – Offers CDs and free iso images containing most of the applications listed here and many more. Updated regularly.
GNUWin – This is similar to OpenCD but offers a lot more software. It was lagging a bit in terms of updates (at the time of this writing) by abount two months.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
what about Personal Finance Management ?? Money 200x, Quicken 200x…
I have used FilZip (www.filzip.com) for quite a while now. Opens almost all formats and is very similar winzip in operation. Best free zip app I have found so far.
what about Personal Finance Management ?? Money 200x, Quicken 200x…
Try AceMoney:
http://www.mechcad.net/products/acemoney/
The commercial version is $15, but there is a free Lite version available as well.
Keynote (http://keynote.sourceforge.net) is the opensource version of treepad and it supports webpages and images.
I know this is going to be extremely off topic, but does anyone have an alternative for this program in Linux? I know Treepad Lite is available, but it’s really kind of basic.
Actually though, I am looking for a program on the caliber of Winorganizer:
http://www.tgslabs.com
It’s like Keynote, but better. It has much better support for images, has PIM functionality, and lets you open more than one file at the same time. And for those of you who will surely bring up Evolution or some similar program, keep in mind that this is not a PIM – it’s an ‘outliner’ program with some PIM capabilities.
I like using IZarc for all my archiving
http://www.florida.plus.com/izarc/
I like Serence Klipfolio a lot. It can render rss/atom feeds and much much more. There are a lot of klips available on klipfarm.com
For a nice Html Editor, Html-Kit is hard to beat! Although not everybody likes its interface.
It’ll be nice to have a similar articale for Mac OS X
If you like Puyo-puyo, you should check out http://www.teepop.net
A few apps i use almost every day:
http://w1.361.telia.com/~u36114907/Web/en/minimize.htm
http://w1.361.telia.com/~u36114907/Web/en/screenshooter.htm
http://w1.361.telia.com/~u36114907/Web/en/shutdowntimer.htm
“I do not prefer firefox that much because of its memory leak problems. Use it for 10 minutes and it would start taking 60-70 MB of RAM.”
Hummm… what “memory leak problems”? I didn’t notice any problems.
I noticed many people replying to the article gave their recommendations as if they weren’t in the article, yet many were. Great reading comprehension. Only a fool spouts off what they know…a wise man listens. Wait…which does that make me!?!?
I can’t believe that no one has mentioned Miranda IM. It’s a nearly perfect application for me. Multi-IM protocls, stable, uncluttered interface and ultra, ultra low resource utilization. For me, Trillian free was too complex and was never updated. Gaim crashed constantly. Miranda IM is sitting in my tray using 3.7 MB of memory right now. Can’t beat it!
I can’t believe that no one has mentioned Miranda IM.
You’re right, nobody mentioned it – not even the article
Very excellent article. A person can only search around on sourceforge for so long.
Thanks for the useful apps.
This has been one of the best exchanges of information that I have seen for quite some time. I have really pickedup some good inforation.
Some of my favourites (shareware and freeware) include:
* TextPad ( http://www.textpad.com/ )
* TopStyle Lite ( http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/index.asp ) – for CSS
* Nvu ( http://www.nvu.com/index.html ) – a great HTML word processor
* Pretty Good Solitaire ( http://www.goodsol.com/ ) – very addictive card game
* MyInfo ( http://www.milenix.com/ ) – for organising my writing
* Python ( http://www.python.org/ ) – cause its neat
* MSWLogo ( http://www.softronix.com/logo.html ) – forget the ‘turtle’ and look how nice logo is for ‘real’ programming
* Firefox ( http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ ) – a very good browser
That enough, I could go on and on.
It would be nice if OSNews could turn this into an on-going blog; I’m sure it would be a must read for many of us.
Regards,
Peter
Here is the direct link to all my additions with external links (source). Most of them are freeware :-p
http://www.izsurfing.com/Logiciels_all.asp
Enjoy ;-p
IZ
Hi.
They forgot to list ZynAddSubFX, which is a free but powerfull software synthsizer under GNU GPL v.2.
http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net
Paul
Is this guy serious? Is someone really suggesting people should use IE for web surfing. Same as suggesting taking a bicycle to an Intersate.
Son Of Spy Freeware (freeware site) http://www.sover.net/~wysiwygx/
Angry IP Scanner (identify nodes on network) http://www.angryziber.com/ipscan/
BDE Information Utility (installs the Borland Database Engine for old apps that need it) http://ibinstall.defined.net/dl_bdeinfo.htm
Belarc Advisor (system info) http://belarc.com/free_download.html
NetLaunch (Internet dialer and app launcher) http://www.blackcastlesoft.com/netlaunch/default.asp
AbiWord (word processor) http://www.abisource.com
FontPage (font viewer) http://bluefive.pair.com/fontpage.htm
CDCheck (test CD/DVD media) http://www.elpros.si/CDCheck/download.php
Break Reminder (RSI prevention) http://cheqsoft.com/break.html
PC INSPECTOR File Recovery (undelete) http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm
DocMemory (RAM tester) http://www.simmtester.com/page/products/doc/docinfo.asp
EyeDrives (drive space viewer) http://www.softtalon.com/ST_eyedrives.html
Convert (unit conversion) http://www.joshmadison.com/software/convert/
AEdiX Suite (text/hex editor) http://www.kt2k.com/download.php
Sicyon 3 (expression calculator) http://www.sicyon.com
Calc 98 (scientific calculator) http://www.calculator.org/download.html
Partition Saving (GHOST equivalent) http://www.partition-saving.com
THE Rename (mass renamer with ID3 support) http://www.herve-thouzard.com/modules/wfsection/article.php?article…
Theophilos Bible Software http://www.theophilos.sk
XXCOPY (enhanced XCOPY) http://www.xxcopy.com
Dependency Walker (programming util) http://www.dependencywalker.com
Nu2 Productions (many utils) http://www.nu2.nu
Kids Freeware http://www.kidsfreeware.com
PDFCreator (creates PDF files via a printer emulator) http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57796
AlternaTIFF (browser plug-in for TIFF images) http://www.alternatiff.com
Skype (Internet telephone) http://www.skype.com
Psi (Jabber IM client) http://psi.affinix.com
Visual IRC (IRC client w/scripting) http://www.visualirc.net
Net Transport (download manager) http://lycos26486.l97.lycos.com.cn/default.htm
CPU-Z & PC Wizard (system info) http://www.cpuid.com
HDD Health (shows hard drive SMART status) http://www.panterasoft.com
LFN Tools (utils for Win9x-Me under DOS) http://www.odi.ch/prog/lfn/index.php
XnView (graphics viewer/converter) http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enhome.html
Oubliette (password manager) http://www.tranglos.com/free/
Multiple Clipboards by Gilson Fonseca Peres Filho (search Google for “multiple clipboards” and author)
It’d just like to point out that MAC is, in fact, properly used in this article.
<em>I use both MAC and iTunes as they serve two different purposes.</em>
He’s not talking about ‘a’ Mac, but MAC, which is MPEG Audio Collection. Apparently, you’re a little over-zealous.
Oh, and I’d like to mention <a href=”http://www.nvu.com/“>NVu. It’s Linspire’s opensource project to modernize the old Mozilla Composer as a stand alone WYSIWYG HTML editor. It’s getting more and more stable every build, plus it’s been ported from Linux to Win32 and OSX.
If you’re more hardcore with web design, I’d suggest some combination of
http://www.scintilla.org/“>SciTE Web” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/”>Web Developer and <a href=”http://mozedit.mozdev.org/“>MozEdit plug-ins.
Be ye warned, SciTE isn’t as cross platform as NVu, and MozEdit is rather unstable in OSX, which is frustrating. <a href=”http://www.uedit.tk/“>uEdit works fairly well in their place.
i used to like http://www.nonags.com
Great article, i just got rid of the Norton antivirus and installed foobar 2000. Im looking for a nice firewall now. Any advice?
Thanks!
Personally, I think “CD Burner XP Pro” is a little bloated.
And since no one else has mentioned Deepburner, I will.
I personally like Deepburner by AstonSoft better.
http://www.deepburner.com/
It’s only a 2.78Meg download.
Good article.
For those interested in more software, check http://pricelessware.org for the list of best freeware compiled annually by members of the newsgroup alt.comp.freeware.
Nice article, that.
As such, I feel obliged to bring to your a attention a small collection of ‘Zen Garden’ freeware/FLOSS software:
* Exodus – IM Client (Jabber):
http://exodus.jabberstudio.org
* Metapad – ANSI C notepad, very lightweight:
http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/
* Leo – python based outline editor:
http://leo.sourceforge.net
<rant>
It seems that about ½ of the software mentioned here is mentioned more than once. Now, assuming that the set of clickerhappy contributors didn’t bother to read through all the posts looking for duplication of effort, I suppose this little rant is lost on them too. *sigh*.
</rant>
Cheers,
ermo
—
‘Typos? Here? Darn useless monkey typists!’
How can you replace WMP with Winamp? Why does Winamp or iTunes looks “more freeware” than WMP? What is so freeware about MyIE2 and it is not in original IE? Gaim is freeware, but the news that Yahoo or MSN messengers are free haven’t reached there.
7-zip cannot handle latest RAR archives. So much for “all the major formats”…
Speaking of RAM leaks, Mozilla is not as leaker as OpenOffice.
For audio files editing, use Audacity and dbPowerAmp.
CmdHere.. oh what a PowerToy… just add to your registry:
________________________
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDirectoryshellDosHere]
@=”DOS &Prompt Here”
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDirectoryshellDosHereCommand]
@=”C:\WINDOWS\System32\cmd.exe /k cd “%1″”
________________________
You just listed your preferences here, it is like saying “I eat with the spoon because I have one” (or worse “because I hate forks and Microsoft”, instead “I eat with a spoon because I got used to use it’
There were some errors in my article as many people emailed me about them. My sincere thanks to all those kind souls.
1. Firefox does not have a “memory leak” problem. This seems to be an issue with cache management. I hope later versions of firefox would come with more sensible default settings.
2. 7-zip is not a proprietary algorithm. I should have used the term “invented by 7-zip” instead of proprietary. It is open source and some other compression softwares already support it.
3. This article was about freeware OR open source software. I did not make the distinction between zero-price and open source software as typical home users are not going to download the source and start compiling the applications. I understand that it’s good to support open source software but that’s a topic for another discussion.
sysinternals.com features a handful of freeware windows utilities… stuff like registry, file, tcp monitors, advanced process information, create junctions (ntfs symbolic links), show a file’s alternate streams, etc. Can be very useful and interesting. Source code for some utilities is included.
<p>
PS – I wouldn’t buy a shirt from sourceforge.net. Fuck them. Donate to the program author directly (or send a quick “thank you” note. you’d be surprised how few are sent).
Inkscape has me amazed. It’s a vector based drawing program like Illustrator, and FreeHand. Wonderfully designed, so easy to use. It’s a little unstable but that doesn’t cause me a problem. I find that any errors pop up in an black dialogue window and I can minimize the window. As long as I don’t close that window the program continues to run fine. I am also in the habit of saving often, so not a concern. The features on this program are already very rich and there’s been great headway lately in the development. I am not affiliated in anyway, I just love the app and I’m thankful to the folks who work on it.