Great Free Software Hunt

wilbur750

Hi Gromituk

Is that last post aimed at my post or is it for someone else as I dont understand it, sorry!

rizla01

Can't let this thread continue without my nomination for a site that I have used for years.

Ziff Davies's site.

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/

Loads of great D/Ls and advice.

Also be sure ot go HERE for my fave site.
Information at your fingertips. And LOADS of it too. Sign up for some of their newsletters. Very Informative. Then Seek out XTEQ. You'll be very glad you did. It allows you to do hundreds of things with your computer.

Nicely laid out.

And not forgetting the screensavers to leave others in the dust, if you are a bloke. http://www.free-celebrity-screensavers.com/
Sorry girls but I'm sure that you will have one for the ladies.:)

(I had to chuckle when I saw the comment below the name of these models at the bottom of the page.)

Lisa Snowdon
Gwen Stefani
Kelly Clarkson

Just my juvenile mind!!

andreboyle

soulboy wrote:

I'm looking for recommendations for the above - I have a few hundred compilation CDs which I'd like to organise so that I find x track by y artist much quicker than I can today, so any suggestions re. freeware would be gratefully welcome,

If you've got Windows whatever then Windows Media player (preferrably the latest version) does a fine job of managing your library of music. It's possible to auto-encode each file to your pc as either WMA or MP3 files but not necessary. There's a few free plugins to create stub files instead of actual music files from your CDs.

It's a nice interface and more than adequately does the job for me. I prefer to use it to either iTunes or the Sony music manager I have for my MP3 players but I'm tied to them due to licensing and the particular devices I have.

It'll also synch to a media player if you have one that plays native MP3s or WMAs.

I know people slate MS but there's a heck of a lot of totally free software to be had from them if you just look for it. There's some excellent photo editing software as well as photo story which is a great little tool for making videos.

hjb_2

The first post in this thread has the wrong link for firefox. This has been mentioned before but I will say it again. The correct link for firefox is:

http://www.getfirefox.com

gerryg_2

Anorak_Tony wrote:

I would be interested in what your readers thought about me saving that money and using the open source stuff. This would not affect any exam work as all the boards use generic names for the programs but it may disadvantage the pupils post 16 if they have to familiarise themselves with MS office for work.

Tony

https://www.schoolforge.org.uk, https://www.becta.org.uk for info and support

Red Hat, SUSE probably others would love to help you

MS Office keeps changing so once you can touch type other related skills are redundant

blinky

http://www.k12ltsp.org/ might be of interest. It's aimed at American schools but I'm sure it's not a problem. It's uses the end machines as Terminals to the main server = lower hardware requirements for the desktop machines.

jjjr36

Try http://www.portello.org and edit your website in seconds, LIVE for free?

fishter

jbellj wrote:

Are the any Linux operating systems that are similar to Windows Media Center? I've had a look but can't find anything? :dance:

Probably because there isn't one. The closest you'll get is an application called MythTV http://www.mythtv.org/ . This runs on most Linux systems. Have a scout around that website and see if it fits the bill.

The basic list of features runs like this:
TV - dependent on having a TV receiver in the PC - quite cheap and very good for freeview
Recording TV according to a schedule (Sky Plus style with regard to seasons and interests)
Pause/Rewind Live TV
Watch at a different speed (imagine Eastenders being over 10 minutes early, but not missing any of the 'action')
Music (MP3 or other digital format)
Photo Gallery
VoIP - Video phone capability
News (from BBC/CNN and other sources)
Weather (from weather.com)
Web - can use built in browser or one that you specify like Firefox
DVD player - watch movies on your PC
CD player - um.... music on PC

Lexis200

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Picasa http://picasa.google.com. Great at cataloging all your photos and other image files on your PC, but also fantastic for basic image manipulation, especially if you're a novice (like my Dad )

Also for anti-spam, try http://popfile.sourceforge.net. Acts as a mail proxy, and analyses all your mail (they call it an "automatic mail classification tool"), adding a simple tag to the email header which Outlook (or other email programs) can sort into folders. Once you've spent a few days training it (not difficult) it's very accurate... I get on average 250-300 emails a day, probably 60% or more is spam... Popfile now shows over 99.3% accuracy, so accurate that I don't even bother checking what's in my spam folder in Outlook... I just delete it without hesitation.

For FTP (File Transfer Protocol - the standard way of transfering files around the web) try SmartFTP https://www.smartftp.com. Probably the best program out there, free for personal use, and the only one I've found that resumes broken transfers.

For an all-in-one Instant Messenger, try Trillian http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/. The basic version is free, and supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC, meaning you can have buddies from several IM systems but use Trillian for all of them rather than separate programs for each. It has just about everything the paid version has except the video option. If you already have one of those IMs mentioned, you can install Trillian, and it'll inherit all the settings (which may or may not be a good thing).

https://www.freshdevices.com have some useful bits, the best being Fresh Download, a multi-thread download manager which supports resuming of downloads if you get an internet connection error.

You can't beat LogMeIn https://www.logmein.com for free remote access (choose the logmein free option). If you provide support for anyone (hello Dad again!), it's perfect for securely logging on to a remote PC to help retrieve the Send button in Outlook, finding missing icons from the desktop, stopping the printer printing 127 identical pages they didn't even want to print etc etc etc

It's been mentioned before, but magazine CDs are very useful at the moment... especially Computer Shopper (the DVD version) which has had some great full programs recently. It might be £6 per month (or £1 for 3 issues if you subscribe ) but it's packed full of useful stuff so it's well worth it. PCPro is the other main mag to look out for, that has some good stuff on the front too, and it's a bit more "upmarket" to read.

HTH

richpb7

A one stop for open software is the open cd project:

http://www.theopencd.org/

Tt includes a lot of the other recommendations from this list in one package.

Rich Osborne