Confessions of a Freeware Junkie
Hi all.. love the thread... I wanted to let you all know that for all of the freeware that I have dnloaded and deleted and reinstalled and..... well, you get the idea, the very best most exhaustive resource for freeware is The Freeware book... it is set up alphabetically and each site has a blurb about it, and whether or not the site is strictly freeware, or if it contains nagware/shareware, this book has literally thousands of freeware files... it can be found
http://freewarearena.org/PHPNuke/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=18
which is the homesite of the guy who put together the Freeware Book itself....
as far as progs go, I too will chime in re browsers, I like the Mozilla stuff, it seems faster than IE based browsers, and has the same bells and whistles... pop up blockers etc
I might mention some of the better antivirus progs, I do no think anyone mentioned them yet... though if you get the Freeware Book, any site you go to (btw, you need to be online to use the book as it has hypertext links in it to take you to the various freeware sites) will have these listed as reliable and effcient antivirus... they are, in no particular order; AVG, Avast! Home edition (my fav! it is awesome, constant updates, though the others are good as well), AntiVir Guard, Bit Defender Free Addition (which has some nice (and free!) add on features, ie protection written specifically for users of Yahoo, MSN and other IM progs).... though you can use the Bit Defender IM protection progs seperately, that is, in conjuntion with another different type of antivirus prog, everyone needs to be warned (in case they do not already know) to never install 2 antivirus programs at the same time! possible serious meltdown!!
I also like the free edition of Scotty, mentioned earlier, and spyware guard, also spyware blaster... I also use LavaSoft's Adaware and SpyBot, together they are great...
and another great Image viewing program is from the Fresh Device people called FreshView, they have a suite of freeware progs, you just need to register and get the free codes, they have a Download Manager, a device manager/benchmarking/etc etc prog called Fresh Diagnose, and FreshUI, a tweaking prog... all 4 are good programs... re FreshView, I am new to the image manipulation scene, we have just gotten out first digital camera, so I have not had much experience with other image prgs, but FreshView is very user friendly and has done all I have needed thus far
another prog I have not seen mentioned are File Managers.... I have never really liked Windows Explorer, some others you might try are 2xExplorer, Gyula's Navigator, Pablo Commander and Turno Navigator... but I do a lot of manipulating of files... moving stuff around etc, so if you do not do that sort of thing, Windows Explorer is probably enough.... and btw, the antivirus stuff I mentioned earlier will all, I think, give you the choice from within their prog, to right click on a given file, folder, or even drive, and the ability to scan for viruses from that point is very handy.... I am constantly downloading stuff, and so I need to be able to readily rt click and scan even individual files, or even the whole folder I have set aside as my default folder for downloads to make sure they are clean before I install....
whew!
hope this helps....
is there a 12 Step Group yet for Freeware junkies?