Great Free Software Hunt

gromituk

r01 wrote:

A complete MS Office suite look-alike designed to run on Windows ?

<snip>

I use it all the time and the version I have enables me to run up to 5 - YES 5 copies and the best part is - IT'S FREE !!

You can run as many copies of OpenOffice as you like.

r01 wrote:

A breeze to download and install and no greedy MS to pay licenses to - I love it ! It is some time since I looked at their site, but it used to be only 29.99 US Dollars to buy !

Funnily enough, if you cared to follow the link you yourself posted, you would see it is now $39.99. I thought you said it was free.

OpenOffice is free.

r01 wrote:

You have to register your email address and they send an activation key plus marketing literature, so you can always set up a Hotmail or Yahoo (or similar) account to register it and to get your activation key then happily ignore the following marketing blurb, but I find spam filters and the delete button just as useful.

OpenOffice has no such requirement and sends no such spam.

r01 wrote:

Enjoy !!

Doesn't sound very enjoyable to me!

firewalker2

To everybody - many thanks for all your advice, I'm going to give it a go and start with the simple stuff! Downloading to discs and then using them - I can do that!! I do love this site

cantaymus

Mozilla Firefox is good. So is Mozilla Thunderbird, an open source email.

KGM_2

Spybot
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

Ad-Aware
http://www.lavasoft.de/

Zone Alarm (look for the free version)
https://www.zonelabs.com

and of course OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird that already have had coverage.

And Yahoo have a (largely) free on-line games section... http://uk.games.yahoo.com/ as well as email and calendar... http://uk.yahoo.com/

One of the best things I've come across recently though is Google Talk... http://www.google.com/talk/, oh and of course Google Earth... http://kh.google.com/download/earth/index.html

Tron_3

Some of the best sites for free software (and shareware) for Apple Mac OS X are:

• http://www.versiontracker.com
• http://www.macupdate.com
• http://mac.softpedia.com
• http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/

Some of these offer software for other platforms as well

Some of you Mac OS X users out there may not be aware that much of the software already mentioned, also comes in Mac OS X versions.

tryingtosave_3

I know GIMP has been mentioned already, but I've heard (on the TWIT podcast) those that are used to Photoshop might prefer GimpShop - a GIMP hack that makes it look nearly identical to Photoshop:

http://plasticbugs.com/?page_id=294
(I think this is the right one, but there might be other versions)

I know most of the music playing software has this built in, but I still use cdex for ripping CDs.

http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/

If you're into podcasting, try ipodder (free but asks for donations) and Azureus seems to be a good bit torrent client (there are now legal torrent only sites out there now).

I think everything else I use has already been mentioned!!

wod_2

Not only is open source a great thing for the home user its fantastic for small business too - greatly reduced software costs, reduced upgrade costs - open source programs are usually less hardware hungry.

Its even getting into education in a big way - see the open source consortiums website http://www.opensourceconsortium.org. Round manchester theres everyone from primary schools to secondaries, colleges and universities going all out with it.
Theres even people like http://www.ebotech.com who will aid people in getting into it (one of my friends recommended them to me).

Armbase

Hi All.

If you want to write software for PDA's then CASL is now free (for the moment). https://www.caslsoft.com

Cheers
Bob

blinky

For ripping CD's Audiograbber it's free of course.

SamMoffatt28

http://www.ewido.net/en/onlinescan/run/

:T This program is great! It found (and removed) viruses that Norton Anti Virus and Spyware Doctor missed. best of all it's not only great but it's free!! Includes full registry / memory scan and also a quick scan too!