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> Best Free Software On The Web, note: most of this is windows based
subhuman 
Posted: 17-Jun-2008, 11:21 PM
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All too often, people think they need to pay for (or pirate) software in order to get results. Luckily that's not the case. You rarely hear about the free software because, well it's free- and whoever publishes it doesn't have an advertising budget.
Here I'm going to share some of my favorites, and hopefully people will contribute to this as well.

CD Burner XP is the best freeware CD burning software I've used to-date. However, this article goes into a comparison of it against a product called Deep Burner. Both get similar results at the end, but it is mentioned that CD Burner XP also does DVD video, and apparently Deep Burner does not.
In addition to just burning, CD Burner XP also allows you to rip music CDs (I prefer other program, listed below), make .ISO images, convert other formats to .ISO images and many features usually found on pay software. It's one hell of a step up from the burning software in Windows. I prefer it over Nero as well.
Operating Systems: Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista

Mozilla Firefox
THE web browser of choice. No matter what your OS, this is the one to use. Versions available for Windows, Linux, Mac and OS/2 (or eComStation) machines.

CCleaner or Crap Cleaner. Removes temporary files for many programs and cleans out your prefetch cache, but where it really shines is in its Windows Registry analysis. It's amazing how many Registry Keys software leaves behind when uninstalled, and this program works wonders on correcting this. Although it gives you an option of backing up the registry first (which isn't a bad idea) I've never yet had a single problem with it.
For removing the crap that uninstallers forget to remove, this is the program. For Win 2k/XP/2k3/Vista

XNView image viewer and converter. Just for converting from one picture format to another, doesn't do any editing. If you want to do image editing, try....

GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, aka "the freeware Photoshop." Versions avail for Win, Mac, eComStation and Linux

VirtualDub, a freeware video capture/processor. Not really an editor, but does great encoding. I use it mainly to convert videos to AVI format from wahtever crap format someone else may have had them in. Has numerous third-party plugins, the one I use most is called DeLogo, and I use it to remove network logos from videos recorded off of TV.

ImgBurn I don't use this much anymore, since CD Burner XP does more than it does. However if you want a lightweight CD burner/ripper... this may be what you're looking for. CD Burner XP only lets you burn images in ISO format, this supports other formats. If you have a need for non-ISO images, this may be your tool.

BoncEnc is a CD ripper, audio encoder and converter for various formats. It can produce MP3, MP4/M4A, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, Bonk and FLAC files. Lightweight, fast, easy. Does VBR MP3's amazingly well.

Alba Extractor does AlbumWrap format MP3s better than AlbumWrap itself, even recovering partial or damaged files.

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
Although I usually use WinAmp for videos, VLC is nice in that is doesn't require any external codecs. Speaking of WinAmp...

WinAmp for playing my audio/video files. I'm sticking to a somewhat older version, 5.093. This would be the only one I used, except I'm finding some newer videos Matroska encoded, and VLC handles them much better. But the rest of the time, and for music, WinAmp wins.

Daemon Tools for mounting CD/DVD images and making them act as an actual drive. Faster and more convenient than actually digging up the CDs. Plus, reduces the risk of damaging your original CDs since you're not actually using them. Of course, it's useless unless you use one of the programs listed above to make an image file first...

Notepad ++ is, IMHO, the best free editor around- and it gives most costly editors a good run.
A drop-in replacement for the windows Notepad, but supports tabbed editing and recognizes over 30 languages from Assembler to XML and everything in-between. Compare it to SciTe, another excellent free editor- but Notepad ++ integrates into Win better, and is uses about 1/2 the memory of SciTe.
They make it a bitch to find, but here's instructions and a download link for the "convert Notepad ++ to the default instead of Notepad" for Windows. Scroll down past the plugins, and there ya go.
This alone makes Notepad ++ the winner. Anything that tries to open Windows Notepad opens Notepad ++ instead. Double-click on a file, and it opens in Notepad++... you get the idea.

Ad-Aware 2008 for spyware/adware/malware scanning.
Don't let the name fool you, the definition files are updated at least once a week.

For a quick, small and easy to use Windows-based file defragmenter, Defraggler deserves mention. I'm not kidding about small: the entire installer is a mere 444k in size. Made by Piriform Software, the same company that publishes CCleaner (mentioned above).

For a very viable replacement for Adobe Acrobat, there's Foxit Reader. Unlike Acrobat 8, which sucks up about 80 megs on your HD, Foxit comes in at a mere 3 megs. Load times are much faster also.


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iolanda 
Posted: 27-Jun-2008, 04:51 PM
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smile.gif Hi Subhuman,
I'm not so skilful about computer science, on the contrary a newcomer! But I would like to tell you a site where you can free-download many movies,music,cartoons, programs, documents, etc. the last comes out, too.I'm in Italy,so this is an italian site but you can find a lot of them in English language, too.
Sometimes you can find a fake, but many times a lot of good things !! wink.gif
This is Emule. I don't know if you have an equivalent in your country, anyway give a look! There are 2 or 3 kinds of download (now I don't remember exactly), one of both is faster than other to dowload, but both are o.k. thumbs_up.gif
Let me know something, everything, about it; also I'm wrong or if it's no good for you :I need to learn. Another thing is: Threatfire in another good free antivirus-anti spyware etc. You may also buy it, but the free version is real good and with automated updates.
O.K. I hope has been useful.... yes.gif
bye1.gif Slainte cheers.gif
note.gif Iolanda


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iolanda 
Posted: 12-Jul-2008, 04:20 PM
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smile.gif Hallo,
I've just discovered and installed a new web browser (maybe you know it very well oops.gif ) : I mean Opera. It's very good and one of the most powerful and fastest browser. You can find a lot of options, also vocal commands ,no matter with your OS and many other things. Totally FREE wink.gif For better informations go on www.opera.com
Have a good surfing thumbs_up.gif
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jime307 
Posted: 23-Jul-2008, 07:29 PM
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Opera is great but I still prefer firefox, Another couple programs you could use are the ones included in the Google Pack, there are some great programs all of them are free with google pack there's a couple good virus scan programs and google earth and other programs of the such.
Most people have heard of it but apple's iTunes is great music managing program too, if you have Mac OS X you already have it but if you have windows you don't and it's avaliable


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Aaediwen 
Posted: 23-Jul-2008, 08:37 PM
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A required set on any install I use as a main workstation:

Firefox
Thunderbird
OpenOffice.org
GIMP
RipperX (with cdparanoia and LAME)
mplayer
ffmpeg
Xmms
GTKpod
Links
Emacs (I'm still not comfortable with VIM)
Joe
ImageMagik
Irssi
Audacity
cdrecord


yes, I list 3 different text editors, that I use for different things

OpenOffice.org's writer I use for my poetry, stories, or any sort of formal document such as a snail-mail letter (yes, I have been known to send such a thing within this century)

Emacs I use for editing config files, coding, things of that sort. . .

Joe I use for quick and dirty stuff, like taking note of phone numbers, as an additional clipboard, a quick spot for a first draft

I should probably post here the build tree for my main desktop machine, if it hasn't gotten way too fubar with typos.

My auxillary machines tend to be a lot more spartan in their feature set, with the exact complement depending on what they are used for.


Here, As I went through cblfs for my main machine, I have tried to keep track of all the packages I installed and the order they were installed in. Apaprently when I was updating to add wmmultipop3 to the list, I accidentally echoed the binary to the list instead of just the text string. Other than that it looks pretty clean, if not completely up to date.

This post has been edited by Aaediwen on 23-Jul-2008, 08:45 PM


Attached File deptree.txt
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jime307 
Posted: 24-Aug-2008, 04:20 PM
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Open Office is really a great piece of software , it's very similar to MS Word and can even read and save in .doc format, if I'm ever writing anything I use Open Office because it's free and works good, there are also open office programs mimicking PowerPoint, Exel and a few others.
For Programming Editing I'd have to say that Notepad++ is one of my favorits, although eMacs is quite nice.
I Use Audacity often for sound effects and music. As well as making podcast and really anything involving audio.
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Harlot 
Posted: 24-Aug-2008, 05:58 PM
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Hello Subhuman: I have a question . I have windows xp which one would I want to download:
XNVIEW
GIMP (windows 2000 and above)
I would like to use it to upload my pictures to here as when I try it says that I have wrong size and something about pixels. I have a Sony CYBER-SHOT 7.2

Any help I would be grateful


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subhuman 
Posted: 27-Aug-2008, 10:42 PM
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QUOTE
Hello Subhuman: I have a question . I have windows xp which one would I want to download:
XNVIEW
GIMP (windows 2000 and above)
I would like to use it to upload my pictures to here as when I try it says that I have wrong size and something about pixels. I have a Sony CYBER-SHOT 7.2

Any help I would be grateful

Both would do what you need. XNView will do simple alterations, like resizing and changing color depth. If you need to so more serious editing, then it's GIMP all the way.
I'm inclined to say XNView is probably better suited to what you need, as it's simpler to use and much smaller.
If you need to get into overlaying one image on top of another or any "real" editing, then it's GIMP.
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Harlot 
Posted: 28-Aug-2008, 08:48 AM
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QUOTE (subhuman @ 28-Aug-2008, 12:42 AM)
QUOTE
Hello Subhuman: I have a question . I have windows xp which one would I want to download:
XNVIEW
GIMP (windows 2000 and above)
I would like to use it to upload my pictures to here as when I try it says that I have wrong size and something about pixels. I have a Sony CYBER-SHOT 7.2

Any help I would be grateful

Both would do what you need. XNView will do simple alterations, like resizing and changing color depth. If you need to so more serious editing, then it's GIMP all the way.
I'm inclined to say XNView is probably better suited to what you need, as it's simpler to use and much smaller.
If you need to get into overlaying one image on top of another or any "real" editing, then it's GIMP.

Thanks for the information and I like the web site it goes to I got the new AVG. thumbs_up.gif
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subhuman 
Posted: 01-Sep-2008, 12:48 AM
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Ok, I've fallen somewhat behind on replies here... Time to catch up.
First, thanks to everyone who added to this list. Someone (*cough*Aaediwen*cough*) even added a few I wasn't familiar with. smile.gif

Iolanda:
QUOTE
I've just discovered and installed a new web browser (maybe you know it very well  I mean Opera.

Opera is a very good and small browser. Some of the older versions had occasional rendering problems, but I've heard very few reports of this on newer versions.
As a little point of useless trivia, Opera uses the Mozilla graphics rendering engine. As did Netscape versions 6+, AOL Web Browser, Gecko and IBM's web browser to name a few.
Opera is a good browser, but popular opinion is that it's best suited for PDAs and similar devices due to its low resource requirements. Compatibility issues with websites usually arise from the sites not complying with standards- not due to an error on Opera's end.

Aaediwen and Iolanda:
Two thumbs up for Openoffice.Org.
Open-Source and Cross-Platform... what more can you ask for? smile.gif

For anyone recommending anti-virus software, I can't comment on that. I don't use any. Never have.
By that I mean "active" AV software. I do quarterly scans in case something may have come through, or if I think a computer is acting funny.
Having a huge, bloated piece of software running on my PC sucking up tons of resources, in an attempt to catch a small piece of software that uses almost no resources... makes no sense to me.
On top of that, I can count the number of virii I've had in the last two decades on one finger.
That's right, one single solitary virus. That was the Monkey_B, back in 1994. the source? Original MS-DOS 6.22 install disks. (thank you, Microsoft!) No scanner would have caught that one- you would have to install the OS (and the virus with it!) before you could install a scanner to find the virus.
"Safe" computer use can protect you much better than any AV suite.
If you're going to be exposed, odds are that it will occur before your scanner's definitions have been updated to look for that virus anyway.
Hueristic scanning is the exception here- but when you tell your scanner to examine every line of code for something that might look suspicious gives you two results.
First, you're using TONS more resources- every line of code gets examined before it's executed.
Second, you get many "false positives."
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subhuman 
Posted: 05-Sep-2008, 01:35 PM
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A couple of people have sent me PMs saying they can't find software I'm recommending. I guess I should have mentioned this sooner, but I embedded links to the program's website the first time I mention them. Just click on the name, and off you go. smile.gif

Here's one I keep forgetting because it's not related to any of the free software I mentioned above: The Battle for Wesnoth.
The Battle for Wesnoth is a very rare exception to the usual rule that states the only good games are expensive. It's not a preview, it's a full game. You don't have to pay to "unlock" the whole game. Instead it's a very mature open-source project available for multiple platforms. (Win, Mac, Linux, OS/2)
If you like turn-based strategy games, I highly recommend this. I won't go into a lengthy review, you can get more info by clicking on the name above.
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ogdenmusic 
Posted: 26-Sep-2008, 06:47 PM
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With this post I know I must be behind the times. Do you get faster speeds, web pages loading quicker on firefox. I read that firefox is the latest and greatest. Can someone post the advantages of firefox?


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jime307 
Posted: 29-Sep-2008, 04:02 PM
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Here's a few,
1) Great Tabbed Browsing
2) Great numbers of helpful add-ons
3) Themes
4) Sturdy structure (REALLY Hard to crash)
5) Hieghtened Security
There's more I just can't think of a Huge list right now..
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subhuman 
Posted: 29-Sep-2008, 08:06 PM
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QUOTE
With this post I know I must be behind the times. Do you get faster speeds, web pages loading quicker on firefox. I read that firefox is the latest and greatest. Can someone post the advantages of firefox?


Actually both Firefox and Opera have been shown to be faster at page rendering than MSIE (Microsoft Internet Explorer) is.
A few years back Opera was making the claim that it was the fastest web browser. Ziff-Davis (ZD) Labs decided to do a few benchmarks, and found that Opera wasn't necessarily the fastest- but that MSIE was indeed the slowest.

As for security, According to Secunia, a computer security service provider, 16 security vulnerabilities have been publicly identified in Opera 9.x as of July 2008, zero of which remain unpatched. This stands in contrast to Firefox 3.x (zero out of three known vulnerabilities unpatched), Internet Explorer 7.x (10 out of 29 known vulnerabilities unpatched), and Safari 3.x (two out of five known vulnerabilities unpatched).

(found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_web_browser I was looking for the speed test results, but found this instead)

Note that the commercial products (Opera and Firefox are both published by non-profit organizations) are the ones that have unpatched security issues.

Let me turn your question around: what is the advantage of MSIE?

You may find some interesting reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape
Up until 1999, Netscape had over 90% of the browser market. This is relevant because The Mozilla Foundation was started by Netscape. MSIE rose to dominance when with Windows 98 and enwer versions, Microsoft made it next to impossible to remove MSIE.
"The United States Department of Justice filed an antitrust case against Microsoft in May 1998. Netscape was not a plaintiff in the case, though its executives were subpoenaed and it contributed much material to the case, including the entire contents of the 'Bad Attitude' internal discussion forum.
After the Microsoft antitrust case found that Microsoft held and had abused monopoly power, AOL filed suit against it for damages. This suit was settled in May 2003 when Microsoft paid US $750 million to AOL and agreed to share some technologies, including granting AOL a license to use and distribute Internet Explorer royalty-free for seven years. This was considered to be the death knell for Netscape."

The public's eyes are being slowly opened again, the market dominance that MSIE gained through illegal abuse of monopoly powers is slowly diminishing. Recent polls put Firefox usage as high as 40% worldwide.
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ogdenmusic 
Posted: 14-Oct-2008, 10:47 PM
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Thanks for the help and information. I appreciate it.
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