My Best Freeware List

Best Free Software Suite The Open CD site offers for free a wonderful collection of just about every application software product you need to run a PC. Many of these substitute admirably for expensive commercial products. There is Abi Word as an alternative for MS Word, OpenOffice for MS Office XP, ThunderBird for Outlook, The Gimp for Adobe Photoshop, 7-zip for WinZIP are many more. Note: All of the Open CD utilities can be downloaded for free as a CD ISO image. If you have a slow connection you can purchase the CD for a very modest cost. http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/programs/

Best Free Web Browser Internet Explorer has become such a target for malicious exploits that it is now a major security risk. The browser is now looking dated with most alternative products offering tabbed browsing. There are several excellent alternatives but Mozilla FireFox is the stand-out pick. It's much safer than Internet Explorer, so safe in fact that many users have reported no spyware infections since they started using the product. It's also browses faster than Internet Explorer and since the release of version 1.0, it's stable and reliable as well. It loads a little slower than IE but once running, it zips along at lightning speed. With tabbed browsing and more free extensions than you could ever want, it offers a major upgrade in your browsing experience. Unlike IE, it's also standards compliant. FireFox is now my everyday browser . Get Firefox Best Free Anti-Virus Software There are two equal recommendations in this category. First there is AVG Antivirus 7.0 Free Edition. This product has been continuously refined since it was first released in 1991 and now offers very impressive protection capabilities. Additionally, it's relatively small, light on resources, has regular automatic updates and handles email scanning. There is a free and a pro version, the only difference being that the free version has a few non-critical features disabled and has no direct technical support. Even so, it's an impressive package and offers the financially challenged a real alternative to the major anti-virus suites. Equally impressive is the free Avast! scanner though its funky media player style interface is not to everyone's taste. Avast! also required periodic re-registration while AVG does does not http://www.grisoft.com http://www.avast.com Best Free Firewall The number and quality of free products is remarkable. My choice for "best" goes to Kerio Personal Firewall, the product that seems to cause the fewest problems for users. More adventurous users and the technically inclined may however wish to consider ZoneAlarm and Sygate which i am using at present. http://www.kerio.com/kpf_home.html

Best Free WebMail Accessory Two suggestions: the first is a nifty free product called YPOPs! (formerly YahooPops!) that allows you to collect your Yahoo webmail from within your POP email client such as Outlook, Thunderbird or Eudora. I use it on multiple Yahoo accounts and it works wonderfully. The second suggestion is an Open Source utility called MrPostman. It's a much more flexible product than YPOPs! and will download HotMail, Lycos, Yahoo and several other webmail services into your POP email client. It can also give you access to email accounts on MS Exchange 5.5. If you only use Yahoo webmail, go with YPOPs! as MrPostman is a more complex program and may need a bit of fiddling to work correctly. You'll find a couple of links below that will help you. Note that MrPostman requires the Java Runtime Environment to be installed on your PC. http://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/ http://mrpostman.sourceforge.net/ http://2mod2.com/mohot/ <= Installing Mr Postman http://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=68124 <= MrPostman forum