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The Best Freeware List
Best Free Anti-Virus Software
I normally recommend the Norton Anti-virus suite but I'm fully aware that some folks simply can't afford to buy it. If you fall into this category then you should check out AVG Antivirus 6.0 Free Edition. This product has been continuously refined since it was first released in 1991 and now offers very impressive protection capabilities. Additionally, it's relatively small, light on resources, has regular automatic updates and handles email scanning. There is a free and a pro version, the only difference being that the free version has a few non-critical features disabled and has no technical support. Even so, it's an impressive package and a offers the financially challenged a real alternative to the major anti-virus suites.(5MB)
http://www.grisoft.com
Best Free Browser Accelerator
There are dozens of products that claim to speed up your surfing
but most have little effect. NaviScope is different - it actually works! Not only does it speed up your surfing it also offers optional ad, pop-up, cookie and JavaScript blocking, an extensive set of diagnostic tools and more bells and whistles than you can imagine. My only beef is that the tool bar is very
obtrusive so once you set up NaviScope, you should select the option to turn off the toolbar. If you need it, you can always bring it up again though the quick launch icon. (614KB)
http://www.naviscope.com/
Best Free File Manager
Windows Explorer is fine for simple file management activities but when you have some serious work to do, you need a two pane file manager. I use Directory Opus which is excellent but costs $59. Recently I discovered 2X Explorer. It offers most of the functionality of Directory Opus and is totally free. As a bonus, its user interface is very similar to Windows Explorer, so most users will find this tool easy to learn and use.(392KB)
http://netez.com/2xExplorer/intro.html.
Best Free Anonymous Surfing Service
There are lots of reasons folks have for wanting to surf anonymously, ranging from simple paranoia to possibly being murdered by a malevolent foreign government. Whatever the reasons, commercial services that offer anonymity are doing real well. However one of the best services, JAP, is totally free and it's level of secrecy is better than many commercial systems. However expect your surfing to slow down as you'll be relayed through a chain of servers. You'll also need to change your browser settings to work through a proxy.
http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html
Best Free Software Suite
GNUWin II is a free software compilation for Windows. This huge suite features dozens of programs including free alternatives to many expensive commercial products. There is Abi Word as an alternative for MS Word, OpenOffice for MS Office XP, The Gimp for Adobe Photoshop, Gzip for WinZIP are dozens more. Taken collectively this suite provides more than enough software to completely set up a PC without spending a cent on applications or utilities. The suite is available or CD or you download the
CD image and cut your own.
http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/en/index.html
Best Free Notepad Replacement
There are lots of text editors and Notepad replacements. Some of these aspire to be programming editors while others try to be word processors. What I love about EditPad is that, unlike the others, it concentrates on simply being a better plain text editor and it succeeds brilliantly. It has a Notepad like interface combined with tabbed document windows and the ability to open as many documents as you like with no file size limitations. I use it every day for tasks as diverse as writing Support Alert Newsletter to examining my web log files. Some of the latter can be up to 100MB, yet EditPad handles these huge files with ease. (849KB). http://www.editpadlite.com/editpadlite.html
Best Free Hotkey Utility
Hotkeycontrol XP is a free utility that allows you to define your own hotkeys so that a single key press can launch an application, insert commonly used text, change your volume, or just about anything else. Hotkeycontrol works with all versions of Windows from 98 onwards, though some features will only work with Win2K or XP. (0.91KB)
http://www.digital-miner.com/hkcontrol.html
Best Free Registry Cleaner
To keep the registries on my PCs in top running order I use Fix-It utilities and Norton Utilities as well. Both of these are commercial products so I was delighted when subscriber Robert McMahon suggested the freeware product; JV16 Power Tools. This offers a powerful set of registry maintenance tools, too powerful in fact for inexperienced users. However if you are technically savvy, go grab this free program now. Stop press: from mid July 2003, this product is now shareware. Until I re-review the products in this category, I suggest ToniArts Easy Cleaner or download the JV16 free trial version. http://www.toniarts.com/ecleane.htm
http://www.vtoy.fi/jv16/shtml/jv16powertools.shtml
The Best Bookmark Cleaner
Check&Get scans your bookmark file for dead links or for changed content. When I tried it on my huge favorites file I discovered 17% of my links were dead. I've now got a much leaner set of favorites and the comfort of knowing that the links actually work. Check&Get is available on free license but you need to register.
http://activeurls.com/
Best Free Route Tracer
3D Traceroute graphically displays Internet route information. You can use it for technical tasks such as diagnosing slow connections or for general purpose snooping like determining the location and owner of a web site or tracing spammers. (996KB)
http://www.hlembke.de/prod/3dtraceroute/
The Best Free Screen Capture Utility
I've used over half a dozen screen-capture utilities and none of them has really satisfied. Until now. Gadwin screen capture does exactly what I want in the way I want. Further, it avoids the trap of providing lots of useless and confusing features. It's the little things that count like making the hot key PrtSc so I don't have to remember it, and automatically sequentially naming the output files for multiple screen shots. Gadwin will stay on my PC permanently. (976KB)
http://www.gadwin.com/printscreen/?prnscr
The Best Free Search Bar
Dave’s Quick Search Bar is a free utility that gives you the same easy access to Google searches as Google's own search bar but wait, there’s more. It also provides access to the excellent Teoma, FAST and other search engines. Because it resides in your task bar, it's accessible from any application. Comes with a host of other features such as dictionary/thesaurus access and even a calculator. If that's not enough for you, it's totally customizable. One cool product. (380KB)
http://www.dqsd.net/
Best Free Web Site Ripper
Whether you call it a web site explorer or offline browsing facilitator, this utility is really a web site ripper. It will speedily download non-password sites in whole or in part to your hard drive. There are many web rippers but WebReaper is amongst the best and yet it's free. (966kB)
http://www.webreaper.net/
Best Free DLL Cleaner
Over time most PCs become cluttered up with the unwanted remainders of long deleted programs. DLL Archive is a free utility that will scan your PC for DLLs that are no longer referenced. You can then archive the unwanted programs away or delete them entirely. Archived items can easily be restored to their original location if any problems arise. (227KB)
http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/system/dllarch.htm
Best Free File Cleaner
I've tried quite a few commercial products designed to clean unneeded temporary files off your hard disk but must say that the free utility "Empty Temp Folders" ranks with the best. It takes a few minutes to set up but after that, all you need do is press a button to recover many megabytes of disk space. (667KB)
http://www.danish-shareware.dk/soft/emptemp
Best Free Resource Meter
This is cute. TinyResMeter is an itsy-bitsy system monitor. Unlike many other monitors, it doesn't consume a lot of CPU utilization in order to tell you your CPU utilization. In addition to CPU usage you can optionally monitor cache, RAM, page file and swap file usage, running processes and threads, disk space utilization and a number of other parameters as well.
Also built-in, is a screen grabber that saves the current screen to disk when you press PrintScreen. How they fit all this into 96KB beats me.
http://pesoft.fr.st/
Best Free Spam Filter for the Average User
Mailwasher is for most folk, the easiest way of dealing with Spam. It's a free email preview utility that allows you to check your email on your mail server before you download it to your PC. The advantage of this approach is that you can kill unwanted messages including spam, viruses and large attachments before they get anywhere near your computer. But Mailwasher does more. It automatically flags for you any messages containing viruses and possible spam which makes for quick and easy identification. It also will send a message back to the spam mail sender saying that their message could not be delivered. Hopefully this will encourage some spammers to take your name off their mailing list. MailWasher works with any POP email account and any email client and will also check your Hotmail accounts. ( 1.35MB)
http://www.mailwasher.net
Best Free Spam Filter for Experienced Users
When it comes to effectiveness, POPFile beats the pants off every other spam filter I've tried. But this effectiveness takes a little time to develop. POPFile is a statistical filter so it has to be trained to recognize your spam from your normal mail. It takes a week or so before it starts becoming accurate and best results may take a month or more. POPFile works as a proxy mail server so that means that it can be used with any POP email client. Setup is reasonably straightforward for experienced users but beginners should stick with Mailwasher.
http://popfile.sourceforge.net/old_index.html
Best Free PopUp Stopper
The Proxomitron is not like your average popup stopper. It operates by filtering and transforming all your Web pages on the fly. As a result you can not only stop pop-ups but pop-unders, ads, flash animations, status bar scrollers and just about anything else. Besides, next time you are asked what pop-up stopper you use, you can answer; "why, I use The Proxomitron" and how cool is that. This link is to version 4.5, the last and final version of this superb utility.
http://computercops.biz/downloads-cats-19-10-10.html
Best Free Download Accelerator
Star Downloader 1.32 is not only free of charge, it's free of ads, spyware and other undesirable extras packed into most free download accelerators. On top of that, it is blindingly fast and has a raft of features including automatic mirror site detection, automatic resumption of failed downloads, download scheduling, anti-virus integration and more. If you are not yet using a download accelerator, go get this product and start counting the time you save. The faster your internet connection, the more you will gain. Users with slow modem connections will, unfortunately, benefit least. (1.3MB)
http://www.stardownloader.com
Best Free Sticky Notes Utility
Some people hate these programs others swear they can't work effectively without them. I used to be in the first category but with so many things on my plate these days, I'm slowly being converted. The function that I find really useful is the reminder that pops up at a designated time and date. Simple things like "put up the latest issue on the web site." Turbonote
is a freeware utility that provides me with just about every function I need. The same company sells an enhanced version but the free version (v3.9) will suit most folks, me included.
http://www.turbonote.com
Best Free Secure Erase Utility
Eraser is a free, GNU license utility that will securely erase files, folders or even whole disks from any Windows or DOS PC. Eraser overwrites data area with selectable random data patterns and also wipes data in the paging file, Internet cache, temporary files, Internet cookies, unused disk space and a number of other places where data can secretly lurk. It handles FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS partitions as well. Erasing files with high security will always be a difficult and time consuming task and can never offer absolute 100% safety. However Eraser makes the task about as easy as it be, with a security level beyond most conceivable requirements. An impressive package. (2.6MB)
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/
Best Free Outlook Express Backup
This free utility allows you to do a full or selective backup of OE's critical files including mail folders, newsgroups, address book and identity settings. Simple, effective ... neat. (2.1MB)
http://www.oehelp.com/OEBackup/Default.aspx
Best Free Process Viewer
PrcView displays detailed information about all running Windows processes including memory used, threads and DLL usage. For each process and DLL, full path and version information is also displayed. Individual processes can be killed or their priorities changed. It even allows you to automatically run a script to check if a process is running and kill it. All this is crammed into a tiny 100KB package. Works for all versions of Windows.
http://www.teamcti.com/pview/prcview.htm
Best Free Inventory Tool
AIDA32 is arguably the best system inventorying tools I've used regardless of price. It will document just about every aspect of your hardware and software configuration. Throw in the fact that it checks out networks, gives memory benchmarks and that it is totally free, and you end up with a product that should be in everyone's toolkit. Download from the link below but remember to download the documentation as well. Corporate users need to register - there is no charge.
http://www.aida32.hu/aida-features.php?bit=32
Best Free Adware/Spyware Remover Spybot Search and Destroy quickly hunt's down all those odious applications that are secretly bundled in with many "advertiser-supported" utilities. It also provides active protection against browser hijackers, auto-dialers and other surreptitiously downloaded scumware products. Some folks don't care about revealing their surfing and consumption behavior to advertisers. Personally I am paranoid which is why I love S&D and run it regularly. ( 2.5MB)
http://spybot.safer-networking.de/
Best Free Search and Replace Utility
I've been a long time user of Funduc Software's excellent Search and Replace utility, now in version 4. However, I have to admit that after using HandyFile's free Find and Replace program, my loyalties are torn. Granted, it does pretty much the same thing, but it's faster as changes are made in memory rather than by writing to disk. This feature also provides a degree of safety. If you need to do text file replacements over multiple files, I suggest you give this tiny free utility a spin.(361KB)
http://www.silveragesoftware.com/handytools.html
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