Why use Freeware?

 

I know that the time will come that I will finally be able to shun Windows and use one of the open-source operating systems. I can feel that that time is nearing.

 

But this is not that time. I have to continue to being a Windows for a little while longer. It did not help after my experience when I tried my hands on a few Live CDs of two Linux flavors, Ubuntu and DSLinux.

 

After a few frustrating minutes in trying to make everything work, I gave up and went back to Windows.

 

I know that its not the Linux OS fault. In every thing new that we have to do, there is a learning curve, but I am just lazy to sit around and learn how everything works. I want to immediately in the thick of things. And that's where the frustrations arise.

 

 

 

And I know that these are both very promising Linux flavors and there are others out there that I haven't given a test drive. But I feel that that is one of the reason why open-source OSs' are struggling to compete with Windows, there are too many of them. I believe that one of the best way to compete head-to-head with Windows is for the OSS to work together, collate their very best features and integrate them into one monsters OS. They're getting there, let's give them time.

 

Going back to my topic, using freeware. Why bother? Is it worth it? There is a saying that you get what you pay for. And since we do not pay for freeware, does it mean that they're crap, not worth the trouble of downloading and using?

 

Ay, I beg to disagree.

 

There are a lot of very, very good freeware apps out there. You just need to know where to look for, what site to download them from, and be patient and read reviews about them from refutable blog sites or sources and you should download them either directly from the author's site or from known freeware provider sites like download.com, CNet.com, PCWorld.com, and the like.

 

Try to avoid torrent or peer-to-peer sites are as they are not always virus-free.

 

And to redeem myself from still being a Windows slave, I am making it a point to try to use freeware apps. Here are some of the apps that I have been using, check them out.

 

Adobe Reader - freeware reader for .pdf files. Haven't tried one of those freeware pdf readers. Will probably do it soon. 

 

Avast! antivirus Home Edition - has become my favorite anti virus software after trying out the lot of them. I particular like the on-demand scanner and resident scanner as it captures almost all of the viruses that I downloaded from the Net

 

Audiograbber - previously a shareware audio CD ripping tool, now offered as freeware

 

Auslogic Disk Defrag - the built-in defrag tool from Windows is already competent in doing a decent job. But I tried this one and its ok.

 

CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) - I use it to clean my temp files and clean my registry.

 

CDBurnerXP - to burn my CDs and DVDs. It is capable of handling Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs, but since we are in the Philippines, we need not worry ourselves with these media format ne, hehehe. 

 

ERUNT (The Emergency Recovery Utility NT) and  NTRegOpt (NT Registry Optimizer) - used both to back up and optiomize my registry

 

IZArc - archive utility that supports a lot of format. Bye-bye Winzip.

 

K-Lite Codec Pack - a collection of codecs that a solution for playing almost all video and audio files.

 

Media Player Classic - discovered this a few weeks ago and it works great. Its a WMP alternative that looks like the old WMP. Its fast and plays a lot of multimedia files, DVDs and even .3gp files. I no longer need to install the Nokia PC Suite. What I like most is that it supports seek even when playing .3gp, unlike the Nokia PC Suite.

 

Mozilla Firefox - an Internet Explorer alternative, but more secure than IE.

 

OpenOffice.org - sounds familiar ne, but it is a very good alternative to Microsoft Office. And there are a lot of companies who use it. Can you name one, hehehe.

 

Picasa - to manage my hundreds of pics

 

Regseeker - downloaded this just yesterday and tried it out last night. Very promising but a little scary because it found a lot of invalid entries from my registry. I don't know it that's a good thing. Will do more test with it. 

 

SUPER, Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer - a multimedia file converter that can convert almost any media file to any media file. Lots of features and no need to get external codecs. Necessarycodecs are built in.

 

TrueCrypt - securing some of the files that are "for my eyes only". I created an encrypted 20 gig partition using this app and its just a matter of mounting the partition and dumping all my secret files there.

 

TweakUI - tweaking tool for Windows, very useful