#157 - Freeware - The truely free lunch

We've all heard there is no such thing as a free lunch. If its free your really can't afford it. We've found those sayings generally true. There are some free things for PCs that we use every day. There are also items that are supposedly free that are really spyware.. Buyer beware so to speak. All of the programs mentioned here can be downloaded safely at www.download.com Here are some of our favorites:

For handling pictures we use Picasa from Google. It does a very nice job of photo organization and basic editing. For more advanced editing we use the Paint program built into windows (Start, All Programs, Accessories, Paint) or the great photo editing program GIMP. GIMP is more complex to use then Photoshop, but hey the price is right!

Managing music is more problematic. We use iTunes (free from Apple) to handle our music (we do confess that this is on our Apple Mini, but it works the same on a PC). We love how it displays and sorts our music. We aren't so thrilled about how it organizes the music on a hard disk (it doesn't and that can be a problem). Microsoft's Windows Media Player has so many issues that being free isn't a plus.

The best program to find out information about your PC is the Belarc Advisor. It does a thorough job of letting you know what hardware and software is in your system. Belarc will give you a nice print out that you should keep around. No shortage of good information here.

Browsers are free and there are no shortage of them out there. Our favorites are Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. They both are quick and have extra protection features for searching the Internet. Speaking of protection, You know we use AVG antivirus in both its free and paid versions. The paid version just has better real time protection. For removing spyware/malware on an infected system Malware bytes is the leader by far.

And last for this blog, but certainly not least is Open Office. This Microsoft Office Clone has programs that read and write Word/Excel/PowerPoint files and lots more. Beware that this is a huge download (not for dialup users).