Some of the best free Software I have seen out there is as good, or better then some of the software that costs $100’s. Most of it was originally written for Linux. Some of it was written for Windows. Almost all of it now has Windows versions.
- Open Office – A very nice free Office package. Allows you to do Word Processing, Presentations, Flow Charts, Math Formulas. It is a great package!
- IBM Lotus Symphony – Office productivity software that is intuitive, easy to use and provided at no charge. Based off from the framework of Open Office, but with more spit and polish.
- VirtualBox – Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.
- Scribus – A great Desktop Publishing Program! Wonderful, and free! I highly recommend it!
- The Gimp – A very good free Graphics editor! With a little bit of work, it will do most anything that the more popular editors will that cost big bucks. If you have the time, and are willing to put in the effort, it is a great package, and has lots of documentation.
- Paint.net -Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows.
- Gramps – Genealogy software. Very nice and easy to use.
- Inkscape – Vector Graphics editing software.
- Ktoon – KToon is a 2D Animation Toolkit designed by animators for animators.
- Pidgin – A free Messenger software that works with many different Messenger services. I have been using it for years. Used to be called Gaim.
- ClamAV – A free Antivirus software that works pretty dang good.
- Gnucash – GnuCash is a personal and small-business accounting program.
- Grisbi – Another personal financial program.
- Quasar – Quasar is a full function, stand-alone business accounting package.
- Thunderbird – A very nice Free Mail program. I really like it, and after using it, would never go back to Outlook Express.
- Firefox – A much safer Web browser then Internet Explorer could ever be. I recommend using at least Firefox off this list to cut down on your spy ware and Virus problems.
- Kompozer – A free web authoring package. Very nice package.
- Picasa – A nice picture manager. It allows you to resize pictures, rate pictures and other such things. Created by Google and available for free.
- Google Talk – A free IM with Voice talk.
- Google Earth – A free Earth Viewer. Gives great detail on all sorts of things. We are even able to see our car in our driveway!
- jEdit – jEdit is a mature programmer’s text editor that has lots of plugins available for it.
- CamStudio – CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your Windows computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos.
- Filezilla – FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive interface.
- Spybot Search & Destroy – Detects and removes spyware. Can also block some Spyware from ever getting on your system. Great tool!
- Free AVG – A free Virus Scanner. Works great, is what I use personally.
- Old Games – Old MS-Dos games you can play for free in your browser!
There are many more! All of these are very useful free tools!
