Index
Free Web Sites
Google Sites allows you to start a free web site from scratch or from a template for a company intranet or a family website with 10 GB of storage. You have to have a Gmail account, but that is also free.
Tripod.com provides ad-supported web sites of 20MB and 5 web pages.
Free Blogs can be created on WordPress.com and on Blogger.com. The structure of the web pages is controlled by themes so that you can concentrate on the content of your site.
Office Software
OpenOffice is a multiplatform and multilingual office
suite compatible with all other major office suites. The product is free to download, use, and distribute.
OpenOffice includes the most important desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet,
presentation manager, and drawing program. The user interface and features are similar to other office suites.
OpenOffice works with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office,
and the OpenDocument standard from OASIS. Another free office suite with much of the same
functionality as OpenOffice is LibreOffice.
Microsoft offers free programs to view documents created with Microsoft Office.
PowerPoint Viewer lets you view full-featured presentations created in PowerPoint 97 and later versions.
Excel Viewer allows you to view, and print Excel workbooks.
Word Viewer allows you to view, print and copy Word documents.
Thunderbird
An e-mail application that helps you to organize your electronic mail.
Thunderbird lets you prioritize and find your important email with tags, and the
find bar helps you locate content within your email faster. The spelling checker supports many languages that can be downloaded
individually. The
Lightning Calendar is fully integrated with Thunderbird.
Adobe Reader
lets you read and print a document created as an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) file.
PDF files preserve the original appearance of a document, and they are compact and can be shared, viewed, navigated,
and printed in the format that the author intended.
CutePDF Writer
Create professional quality PDF files from almost any printable document. Free for personal, commercial,
government, or educational use. Supports 64-bit Windows. Create a PDF document by using the "print"
function of any application and selecting CutePDF as the printer.
Microsoft Money
The Sunset versions of Microsoft Money were made available free after Microsoft discontinued selling this
software in 2009. Microsoft Money is very useful for organizing checkbooks and categorizing expenses.
If your financial institution provides OFX or QIF statement downloads, the Sunset versions
will allow you to import those statements into your Money file.
EditPad Lite
A general-purpose text editor, with many nice features. EditPad Lite is free for non-commercial use.
Amortization and Annuities Program
Calculate monthly payments for a mortgage loan, display the amortization schedule, and determine your savings from
prepayment. Find out your yearly interest cost and principal balance.
Calculate the future value of regular deposits or of a single
deposit and also how much you should save to meet a future objective.
System Utilities
Ubuntu - The Ubuntu operating system powers millions of desktop PCs, laptops and servers around the world.
Ubuntu comes with an office suite, web browser, and music and video players.
Windows Defender Offline Microsoft Defender Offline is a powerful offline scanning tool that runs from a trusted environment, without starting your operating system.to create a bootable CD, DVD, or USB flash drive that
can be used for Windows 10, Windows 8.1, and Windows 7.
AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition provides basic
protection against viruses and spyware. AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition is available for single computer use for
home and non-commercial use.
Avira AntiVir Personal - Free Antivirus
Basic protection. Protects your computer against dangerous viruses, worms, Trojans and costly dialers. Includes basic anti-spyware.
TightVNC is a free remote control software package. With TightVNC, you can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer.
Spybot - Search & Destroy
is a program to remove spyware and other kinds of malware from your computer. Spybot has an
immunize function that works with the browser to prevent tracking cookies from entering your system.
A scan function looks for spyware on the computer and produces a report that allows you to remove the spyware.
Eraser is a security tool for
Windows which completely removes sensitive data from a hard drive by overwriting it several times with patterns that
remove magnetic remnants from the hard drive. The program also has a secure move function
that clears the area where a file was previously stored.
ZoneAlarm Free Firewall blocks hackers from infiltrating your home PC by hiding your computer
from unsolicited network traffic. ZoneAlarm Free Firewall detects and prevents intrusions to keep your PC
free from viruses and spyware that can steal your personal information, passwords, and financial data.
FreeFileSync is a free Open Source program that synchronizes files and folders for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
The program has an easy-to-use graphical interface with several synchronization options.
File Synchronizer
is a synchronizing program with a graphical user interface. The program can
synchronize large collections of files (MP3s, Videos, etc.) between two different
drives or folders without copying every file. Saves time by only copying the files that are new or different.
The "Clone Mode" is used to synchronize a folder to match a master folder.
FSync is
a command line utility for Win32 platforms that synchronizes the contents of two directories.
FSync is a very practical alternative to Windows folders synchronization. It is useful for desktop/laptop
data synchronization, for smart and complete backups or any other folder synchronization needs,
both local or network.
WinMerge
is a compare and merge tool for Windows.
WinMerge can compare folders or files. It presents differences in a visual format
that is easy to understand and manipulate. The program is very useful for identifying the differences
between two versions of a computer program or a text file.
WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics
viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows. The graphical interface
represents each file as a colored rectangle, the area of which is proportional to the file's size.
The color of a rectangle indicates the type of the file, as shown in the extension list.
UltraDefrag
An Open Source Defragmentation tool for the Windows Platform. It can defragment any system files including
registry hives and paging file. A fast program with a good graphical interface.
Works with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windox XP, Vista and Windows 7.
7-Zip is an open source file archiver
that supports several different types of data compression and encryption. This utility program is able to
pack and unpack 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR,
and it is able to unpack ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF,
WIM, XAR and Z.
Windows Grep
The grep command in Unix systems is used to search globally for matches
of a regular expression and print lines where they are found.
Windows Grep is a Shareware program that provides this capability for Windows systems.
Agent Ransack,
also called FileLocator Lite, is free file searching utility that supports searching file
contents of popular office formats including Office 2007 and OpenOffice.
The search supports Perl-compatible regular expressions. The program is available in 32-bit
and 64-bit versions.
Java Runtime Environment. The Java
programming language was developed at Sun Corporation as a way of running programs under any operating system.
This technology is the basis of Open Office and many other useful applications.
Media Tools
Miro Player
is an Internet television application supported on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
The program plays most known video files and offers sound and video, some in HD quality.
Miro can automatically download videos from RSS-based channels, manage them and play them.
Miro can download Torrent reeds, YouTube videos, and help to organize your video collection.
VLC media player
is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework, that plays most
multimedias files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols.
VLC media player plays files, discs and streams without the need for codec packs.
It is available for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Unix.
InfraRecorder
is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. InfraRecorder can be used to
create custom data, audio and mixed-mode projects and record them to physical discs as well as disc images.
The program supports recording to dual-layer DVDs and can create disc copies.
Web Tools
Firefox Web Browser This is a fast and secure browser that
can be fully customized through add-ons. The features include tabbed browsing, spell checking, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager,
private browsing, and an integrated search system.
The Tor Browser software
protects you by bouncing your communications around
a distributed network of relays. Tor prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what
sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.
Hotspot Shield sets up
a virtual private network (VPN) with HTTPS encryption to secure your web session. Protects your computer from snoopers
at Wi-Fi hotspots, hotels, airports, and other public places. Works on wireless and wired connections for Windows
and MAC operating systems. The free version displays an advertising banner that can be closed. Users of the Firefox
browser can use an add-on called Adblock to suppress the ads.
Arachnophilia
A great HTML editor with customizable user interface and built-in spelling checker. Supports
several types of character encoding, including UTF-8.
KompoZer is a web authoring system for Windows,
Linux, and Macintosh with easy-to-use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editing
features similar to expensive products like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.
KompoZer makes it possible to create web pages and manage a website with little technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.
FileZilla
is a cross-platform graphical FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with a lot of features. It runs under
Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Yawcam is
a free webcam application for Windows written in Java. Some of the features of Yawcam are
video streaming, image snapshots, built-in webserver, motion detection, FTP upload, text and image
overlays and password protection.
Tectite FormMail
A free, open source PHP form-to-email processor for all HTML web forms that provides spam-free contact forms.
Easy to set up on any web host.
Site Meter provides an easy way to add a web counter to your web page.
It can display the number of visitors to your web site and keeps statistics on the number of visits
each hour and each day.
Apache Web Server is an open-source HTTP server for UNIX and Windows NT.
It is an essential tool for developing and testing CGI scripts before publishing them on the Internet.
Xenu's Link Sleuth
A spidering program that checks web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on normal links, images,
frames, backgrounds and local image maps. The program displays a list of URLs which can be sorted by
different criteria to produce a report. Portions of the reports produced by Xenu can be used for a site map.
WordPress is a publishing platform for web pages and blogs
with an easy-to-use interface. Some plugins change the appearance of a blog and other plugins support useful functions:
Graphics
IrfanView
This is a versatile image viewer and editor that can be used as the default viewer for many types of graphics.
The program comes with a thumbnail viewer that provides many functions, such as batch resizing of
images, generation of thumbnails, and generation of web pages with customizable headers and navigation.
XnView MP
is a powerful cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) media browser, viewer and converter.
It is compatible with more than 500 formats, including Multipage and animated still formats APNG, TIFF, GIF, ICO, etc...) It can export to about 70 different file formats.
GIMP is the GNU Image
Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo
retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.
It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch
processing system, a mass production image renderer, and an image format converter.
SketchUp is a 3D modeling computer program for a wide range of drawing applications such as architectural, interior design, landscape architecture, civil and mechanical engineering, film, and video game design available in a freeware version.
DeskScan
allows you to capture a full-screen desktop or a selected area as well as input from your Twain device
(scanner, camera, etc.) The captures can be saved as BMP, JPG, JPEG2000, MNG, WMF, GIF, PCX, PNG, PDF and TIFF.
Virtual Magnifying Glass,
a free, open source, screen magnification program for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.
WhatColor identifies the color of
a pixel on the screen of your PC and provides the name of the color. This program is a fully functional evaluation
Shareware copy.
HTML Color Picker
Pick color from the screen, in RGB and HTML code formats, easily and quickly.
Communications
Skype
Free calls, video calls and instant messaging over the Internet.
PuTTY
is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator.
This is an indispensable tool for working on a remote computer.
Programming
Perl is a high-level,
general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl provides powerful string-processing and hashing
functions that facilitate the manipulation of text files. Perl is also used for graphics programming, system administration,
network programming, and CGI programming on the Web.
Java SE Development Kit (JDK) This JDK includes the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and command-line
development tools that are useful for developing applets and applications. Java SWING is a toolkit for developing
software with graphical interfaces for many operating environments.
NetBeans is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
that can run on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris. The NetBeans platform enables developers to create web,
enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications for Java, PHP, JavaScript, Ajax, Ruby, and C/C++.
PHP Language
PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML
to produce dynamic web pages. PHP is frequently used in conjunction with MySQL databases to support a wide array of applications
such as blogs, content management system (CMS), and web sites with powerful online applications.
Microsoft Visual Studio
- A collection of free web-development tools and free compilers for software development that include Visual Web Developer,
Visual Basic, SQL Server, Visual C#, Visual C++, and Visual J#.
Database
MySQL Community Server
is a freely downloadable version of one of the most popular open source databases.
It is supported by an active community of open source developers. Databases can be designed and managed with the
MySQL Workbench (GUI Tool).
phpMyAdmin
is a free software tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL databases over the World Wide Web.
phpMyAdmin supports a wide range of operations with MySQL such as managing databases, tables, fields, relations, indexes,
users, permissions, etc. The interface also has the ability to directly execute any SQL statement.
Field Linguist's Toolbox
The Toolbox was designed as a data management and text analysis tool for field linguists.
It is especially useful for maintaining lexical data, and for parsing and interlinearizing text,
but it can be used to manage virtually any kind of data.
Nutrition
CRON-O-Meter is a nutrition analysis program
that keeps track of your daily macronutrients (proteins, fats, carbohydrates), as well
as your vitamins and minerals. CRON-o-Meter is an excellent tool for any dieter who is interested in getting proper
nutrition.
More free software
If you are looking for software that is not listed above, you may want to look at Gizmo's Freeware Reviews and also HERE. The web site lists and rates free software through the effort of many volunteers.
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