A Guide to the Best and the Safest Freeware Out There( Collaboration)
Intro: A Guide to the Best and the Safest Freeware Out There( Collaboration)
STEP 1: Lets Start With the Small Stuff....... Paint.Net
Now Ms paint is good and all but Paint.net was designed to be a Ms paint competor but looks like photoshop 2. Rating for program------8.7 Here it is Paint.net
STEP 2: Lets See Photoshop......$999 AUGHHHHHHH Gimp Shop----Free Yay!
Gimp shop is a photoshop alternitave and does a good job at that. You will not get all of the features of photoshop but you will get a great picture editing tool that works better thav anything else on the freeware market. You can get it Here
STEP 3: Animate It--------Pivot Stickfigure Animator
Now... you have probally watched stickfigure animations and wanted to know how to make them. Pivot is an amazing piece of software which is more powerful than it appears. You can get pivot here
STEP 4: Ditch Ms Office and Get the Better Side of Life_________ OpenOffice
OpenOffice is an better word, powerpoint, and excel with great features.... The setup may take a while but it will be totaly worth it!!!!!! you can get it here
STEP 5: Firefox
What needs to be said? It is free, more adaptable than IE, more standards compliant than IE, has a huge number of user-written addons (like the indispensible Adblock, and endless user tweaks like Mouse Gestures, GreaseMonkey etc. to customise your browsing)... I have to use both IE7 and Firefox every day in my work, and the occasions when I have to use IE feel like a chore compared to using Firefox.
Get Firefox here
Get Firefox here
STEP 6: Audacity
Audacity is a free, well-featured sound editor available for both Windows and Linux. It has an intuitive interface that lets you import, mix, edit and export multi-track sound projects. Out of the box it can't save to MP3 format but this is quickly fixed by downloading an MP3 encoder such as LAME. It's not a professional editing suite, so don't expect a vast slew of features, but it is plenty capable of simple mixing and basic effects.
It also intelligently saves recordings in progress to the hard disk on the fly, so it is capable of continuously recording uninterrupted sound for as long as you have hard disk space- if you have a reasonably sized hard disk this is a large number of hours, so you can happily leave Audacity to record, say, a whole radio show.
Get Audacity here, debian packages are also available.
It also intelligently saves recordings in progress to the hard disk on the fly, so it is capable of continuously recording uninterrupted sound for as long as you have hard disk space- if you have a reasonably sized hard disk this is a large number of hours, so you can happily leave Audacity to record, say, a whole radio show.
Get Audacity here, debian packages are also available.
STEP 7: Eclipse SDK
The Eclipse SDK is a Java-based integrated development environment (IDE). As it is Java-based, it will run on any platform the Java runtime environment is available for. It is primarily intended for Java, but environments are also available for AspectJ, C/C++, COBOL and PHP. It lets you keep track of your source files in a main tabbed pane, with secondary windows for a variable and function view, a console for console apps, type hierarchy etc. It provides the usual code editor features (syntax highlighting including syntax error flagging, automatic indentation and automated code reformatting) and a debugging environment for the language.
I started off writing Java programs in Notepad and compiling them at the command line, but for projects over a certain size this approach becomes impractical- this is where Eclipse steps in.
Get the Eclipse IDE here, debian packages are also available.
I started off writing Java programs in Notepad and compiling them at the command line, but for projects over a certain size this approach becomes impractical- this is where Eclipse steps in.
Get the Eclipse IDE here, debian packages are also available.
STEP 8: Puppy Linux
OK- I'm not going to debate which OS is better, all the many reasons you should use Linux, religious arguments, any of that. Use whichever OS you want. Puppy is not meant to be a replacement for your primary desktop OS.
Puppy Linux is a Linux live cd- throw it in your CD drive, turn your computer on, make sure the BIOS is set to check for bootable CDs and it will fire up. The entire operating system is 50MB in size, meaning it will also fit on a USB stick the size that you can get free from career fairs- this is worth doing as you can save files onto the remainder of the stick to use with Puppy if you don't want it to touch your hard disk.
It's pretty full featured- has a browser, email, instant messenging, basic office software (writer, spreadsheet), drawing programs, music and DVD player, CD burner and a lot of system administration tools for things like partitioning and formatting hard drives which make it very useful as a system rescue disk.
The programs are mostly chosen for their lightweight nature- rather than the latest Firefox it uses the very simple Dillo browser, for instance, with the result that it can run on even the oldest computers. I used Puppy to rejuvenate an elderly laptop (500MHz PIII, 64MB RAM, 4GB hard disk) that was too slow to run Windows ME properly and it ran like a dream with Puppy.
It isn't a panacea that will solve all your computing woes- the interface, while simple, is odd (single clicks on files or shortcuts open them and you can't change this), and like any Linux system it requires a little knowledge of how UNIX-like systems behave, but it is still remarkably easy to use. The newer versions include hardware detection so an average PC with standard components should autodetect without any problems.
But if you needed any more persuading that Puppy is worthwhile having...
Imagine you use Windows, and for some reason your installation gets damaged or corrupted in some way and won't boot up. Would you rather
a) use the Microsoft repair utility, hope that it can patch up whatever is wrong with your machine and hope that if that is possible, you will still have some of your files left at the end, and of course go to an internet cafe every time you want to check your emails
b) stick in a CD, boot into a fully-featured operating system with all the tools mentioned above that will let you recover your files, try to fix the problem yourself and let you be productive with your machine while your primary OS is down?
Download a Puppy Linux ISO here and check out the documentation and Wiki
Puppy Linux is a Linux live cd- throw it in your CD drive, turn your computer on, make sure the BIOS is set to check for bootable CDs and it will fire up. The entire operating system is 50MB in size, meaning it will also fit on a USB stick the size that you can get free from career fairs- this is worth doing as you can save files onto the remainder of the stick to use with Puppy if you don't want it to touch your hard disk.
It's pretty full featured- has a browser, email, instant messenging, basic office software (writer, spreadsheet), drawing programs, music and DVD player, CD burner and a lot of system administration tools for things like partitioning and formatting hard drives which make it very useful as a system rescue disk.
The programs are mostly chosen for their lightweight nature- rather than the latest Firefox it uses the very simple Dillo browser, for instance, with the result that it can run on even the oldest computers. I used Puppy to rejuvenate an elderly laptop (500MHz PIII, 64MB RAM, 4GB hard disk) that was too slow to run Windows ME properly and it ran like a dream with Puppy.
It isn't a panacea that will solve all your computing woes- the interface, while simple, is odd (single clicks on files or shortcuts open them and you can't change this), and like any Linux system it requires a little knowledge of how UNIX-like systems behave, but it is still remarkably easy to use. The newer versions include hardware detection so an average PC with standard components should autodetect without any problems.
But if you needed any more persuading that Puppy is worthwhile having...
Imagine you use Windows, and for some reason your installation gets damaged or corrupted in some way and won't boot up. Would you rather
a) use the Microsoft repair utility, hope that it can patch up whatever is wrong with your machine and hope that if that is possible, you will still have some of your files left at the end, and of course go to an internet cafe every time you want to check your emails
b) stick in a CD, boot into a fully-featured operating system with all the tools mentioned above that will let you recover your files, try to fix the problem yourself and let you be productive with your machine while your primary OS is down?
Download a Puppy Linux ISO here and check out the documentation and Wiki
STEP 9: Inchman's Contribution
Here is inchman's contribution:
Two more applications that free, fast, small, and amazingly effective are irfanview and VLC player.
First, is irfanview.It's an image viewer software on steroids. Not only is it the only program you need to deal with images and even video, but it can do some great batch processing of files.
Here is the website:
http://www.irfanview.com/
With this software, you can quickly view and categorize image files. It's small, lightweight, and completely full featured. This software needs to be on every machine you work on.
Here are just a few of it features:
Multi language support
Thumbnail/preview option
Paint option - to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc.
Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD)
Show EXIF/IPTC/Comment text in Slideshow/Fullscreen etc.
Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters
Fast directory view (moving through directory)
Batch conversion (with image processing)
Email option
IPTC editing
Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)
Capturing
Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs
Lossless JPG rotation
Unicode support
Some of its benefits are:
Only one EXE-File, no DLLs, no Shareware messages like "I Agree" or "Evaluation expired"
Plenty of add-ins!
No registry changes without user action/permission!
The second free application is VLC Player.
This is one of the most amazing video players I have ever seen. It handles just about every file type, fast and without delaying a codec each time.
Website:
http://www.videolan.org/
VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player supporting most audio and video formats (H.264, Ogg, DivX, MKV, TS, MPEG-2, mp3, MPEG-4, aac, ...) from files, physical media (DVDs, VCD, Audio-CD), TV capture cards and many network streaming protocols.
It can also convert media files, transcode and act as a streaming server over unicast or multicast and IPv4 or IPv6. It doesn't need any external codec, program or codec pack to work.
Two more applications that free, fast, small, and amazingly effective are irfanview and VLC player.
First, is irfanview.It's an image viewer software on steroids. Not only is it the only program you need to deal with images and even video, but it can do some great batch processing of files.
Here is the website:
http://www.irfanview.com/
With this software, you can quickly view and categorize image files. It's small, lightweight, and completely full featured. This software needs to be on every machine you work on.
Here are just a few of it features:
Multi language support
Thumbnail/preview option
Paint option - to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc.
Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD)
Show EXIF/IPTC/Comment text in Slideshow/Fullscreen etc.
Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters
Fast directory view (moving through directory)
Batch conversion (with image processing)
Email option
IPTC editing
Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)
Capturing
Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs
Lossless JPG rotation
Unicode support
Some of its benefits are:
Only one EXE-File, no DLLs, no Shareware messages like "I Agree" or "Evaluation expired"
Plenty of add-ins!
No registry changes without user action/permission!
The second free application is VLC Player.
This is one of the most amazing video players I have ever seen. It handles just about every file type, fast and without delaying a codec each time.
Website:
http://www.videolan.org/
VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player supporting most audio and video formats (H.264, Ogg, DivX, MKV, TS, MPEG-2, mp3, MPEG-4, aac, ...) from files, physical media (DVDs, VCD, Audio-CD), TV capture cards and many network streaming protocols.
It can also convert media files, transcode and act as a streaming server over unicast or multicast and IPv4 or IPv6. It doesn't need any external codec, program or codec pack to work.
83 Comments
darthbindy 11 years ago
nutsandbolts_64 13 years ago
Gifted Motion-1.19 GIF Animator which runs off Java
PS: The download is at the bottom most part of the page, and it really is 69KB
Steganography 1.0 Build 12 Steganography software also in the KB range
Download mirrors are below the large download button which you shouldn't press unless you wanted to.
Google SketchUp 7 3D modeling software
You have to view the video tutorials in their website to know how to use it though. Once you do, it's a nearly indispensable tool. Until you get AutoCad that is. Make sure to download Google SketchUp 7 and not Google SketchUp Pro or it won't be freeware anymore.
CadStd Lite 3.7.1 2D design software
A good tool to make almost professional-looking designs. You have to read the online instruction manual to know how to use it though. If you can't find the manual PM me and I'll show you where. Again, still in the KB range, but a bit large for dial-up users.
All freeware mentioned in this comment has been used by me, and I guarantee safe downloads if you use the right sources. Brothersoft and CNET are good sites to get your freeware from. They also show shareware which you have to pay for to continue using 'em, so read the item of interest and everything on it carefully before downloading.
nutsandbolts_64 13 years ago
Guess what, I edited it using MS Paint!!!
sumguysr 16 years ago
mattameo213 15 years ago
tinkerC 14 years ago
Epeoples 14 years ago
mattameo213 14 years ago
zeon 14 years ago
Epeoples 14 years ago
mattameo213 14 years ago
The correct term is actually nine cubic yards, because when you used to buy cement it came in units of nine cubic yards (the capacity of one cement truck), so you had to buy it and get it poured as one entire truck at a time. Just FYI...
Really, it's cool if you get MSOffice with Windoze, the OpenOffice is just for everyone who didn't get it / doesn't have it.
Epeoples 14 years ago
mattameo213 14 years ago
Se1f_Destruct 14 years ago
Epeoples 14 years ago
And Google Chrome is the best browser yet.
And who could forget Google Earth?
jad51 14 years ago
tinkerC 14 years ago
robots199 14 years ago
tinkerC 14 years ago
robots199 14 years ago