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Celtic Radio Community > Retro Computers > Best Free Software On The Web

Posted by: subhuman 17-Jun-2008, 11:21 PM

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.

http://www.cdburnerxp.se/download.php is the best freeware CD burning software I've used to-date. However, http://www.pcmech.com/article/cd-burner-xp-pro-3-vs-deep-burner-free/ 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

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/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.

http://www.ccleaner.com/ 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

http://www.xnview.com/ 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....

http://www.gimp.org/, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, aka "the freeware Photoshop." Versions avail for Win, Mac, eComStation and Linux

http://www.virtualdub.org/, 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.

http://www.imgburn.com/ 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.

http://www.bonkenc.org/ 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.

http://alba.sourceforge.net/ does AlbumWrap format MP3s better than AlbumWrap itself, even recovering partial or damaged files.

http://www.videolan.org/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...

http://www.winamp.com/player 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.

http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/announcements.php 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...

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm 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 http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html 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 http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm 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.

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/single/trialpay.php 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, http://www.defraggler.com/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 http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php. 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.

Posted by: iolanda 27-Jun-2008, 04:51 PM

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 !!

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.

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....

Slainte

Iolanda

Posted by: iolanda 12-Jul-2008, 04:20 PM

Hallo,
I've just discovered and installed a new web browser (maybe you know it very well

) : 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

For better informations go on www.opera.com
Have a good surfing

Slainte

Iolanda

Posted by: jime307 23-Jul-2008, 07:29 PM

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

Posted by: Aaediwen 23-Jul-2008, 08:37 PM

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.

Posted by: jime307 24-Aug-2008, 04:20 PM

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.

Posted by: Harlot 24-Aug-2008, 05:58 PM

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

Posted by: subhuman 27-Aug-2008, 10:42 PM

QUOTE

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.

Posted by: Harlot 28-Aug-2008, 08:48 AM

QUOTE (subhuman @ 28-Aug-2008, 12:42 AM)

QUOTE

Thanks for the information and I like the web site it goes to I got the new AVG.

Posted by: subhuman 01-Sep-2008, 12:48 AM

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.

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?

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."

Posted by: subhuman 05-Sep-2008, 01:35 PM

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.

Here's one I keep forgetting because it's not related to any of the free software I mentioned above: http://wesnoth.org/.
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.

Posted by: ogdenmusic 26-Sep-2008, 06:47 PM

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?

Posted by: jime307 29-Sep-2008, 04:02 PM

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..
Free and open source

Posted by: subhuman 29-Sep-2008, 08:06 PM

QUOTE

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.

Posted by: ogdenmusic 14-Oct-2008, 10:47 PM

Thanks for the help and information. I appreciate it.

Posted by: subhuman 12-Dec-2008, 10:54 PM

Found a new one recently: http://jzip.com/
* Create, open and extract Zip, TAR, GZip and 7-Zip. Open and extract from RAR and ISO.
* jZip is absolutely FREE for everybody, home and enterprise users

Note: you cannot create RAR archives with this, however it is freeware and allows you to extract from already existing RAR archives. If you're looking for maximum compression, 7-Zip usually beats RAR and is faster as well.

Posted by: subhuman 12-Dec-2008, 11:08 PM

Not a stand-alone program, but worth mentioning anyway is the https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/16 plugin for Firefox.
Chatzilla is a full-featured IRC client. If more people installed it, the chat rooms here at celtic radio wouldn't always be so empty.

The only negative to Chatzilla is that as a plugin, it cannot run unless Firefox is also running. For me, this is not an issue as I always have FF running.

Posted by: subhuman 05-Jan-2009, 12:18 PM

This one has saved my proverbial ass more than once: http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php
"SpeedFan is a program that monitors voltages, fan speeds and temperatures in computers with hardware monitor chips. SpeedFan can even access S.M.A.R.T. info and show hard disk temperatures. SpeedFan supports SCSI disks too. SpeedFan can even change the FSB on some hardware (but this should be considered a bonus feature). SpeedFan can access digital temperature sensors and can change fan speeds accordingly, thus reducing noise. SpeedFan can find almost any hardware monitor chip connected to the 2-wire SMBus (System Management Bus (trademark belonging to SMIF, Inc.), a subset of the I2C protocol) and works fine with Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, 2003, XP and Windows Vista. It works with Windows 64 bit too. "

I keep this running all the time; just last week a noticed a 10 degree (Celsius) jump in all temperatures. Upon investigation, I discovered that the fans in my power supply had failed. Thanks to this, I was able to correct that before any damage occurred.
By checking the S.M.A.R.T values of your hard disks, you can also (sometimes) have warning before drive failure- this has also saved my ass more than once.

For some reason, I keep forgetting these programs that I run constantly.

Posted by: Lady-of-Avalon 05-Jan-2009, 05:22 PM

But is it only good on commercial computer...what I mean is I only have an ordinary HP Pavillion home device that I bought at " Best Buy" store?
Though it's big enough for what I use it for...it's nothing in comparison then what you probably have.

I downloaded it but I'm not sure if it's worth having it on a small home computer!

LOA

Posted by: subhuman 05-Jan-2009, 10:30 PM

I'm almost afraid to ask what kind of computers you think I have..

It should work on most PCs, unless you have some really off-the-wall system with really obscure components. The only computers I've had that it couldn't get values from were older- and by that I mean from around 1998 or so.

The bigger factor is that not everyone will find every piece of software useful; if this isn't useful to you then uninstall it.
Just because *I* think it's necessary doesn't mean everyone else will feel the same way. No doubt there's some software you use daily that I would have absolutely no use for as well.

Posted by: Lady-of-Avalon 06-Jan-2009, 11:17 AM

QUOTE (subhuman @ 05-Jan-2009, 11:30 PM)

I'm almost afraid to ask what kind of computers you think I have..

It should work on most PCs, unless you have some really off-the-wall system with really obscure components.� The only computers I've had that it couldn't get values from were older- and by that I mean from around 1998 or so.

The bigger factor is that not everyone will find every piece of software useful; if this isn't useful to you then uninstall it.
Just because *I* think it's necessary doesn't mean everyone else will feel the same way.� No doubt there's some software you use daily that I would have absolutely no use for as well.

Well from what I read from your posts and details on computers explanations you seem to me either a professionnal IT or a very good "connaisseur"

in computer and I think that you must have a "super bomb" that is from a wall to wall floor to ceiling thing....while what I have is like I said a simple home computer....

And even though it's a simple thing I can't believe all this freaking wiring that I am just sitting by and with all this electro magnetics I will probably end up with a$$ cancer

or whatever...so I thought that maybe by having this program on that it would reduce somehow the "heat" coming from it though it's not that hot but could prevent some future damage.

LOA who's trying to learn about computer gizmos

Posted by: Lady-of-Avalon 07-Jan-2009, 09:33 AM

Subhuman I need help please....

I tried to "uninstall" the fan program and simply doesn't work.Everytime I try there is a pop window that says that to shutdown Speedfan first...but I can't and don't know where to go...

The reason that I want to uninstall the program is that my computer seem to froze all the time since I installed it...never had this problem until then.

Can you guide me in this please?

Thanks

LOA

Posted by: Lady-of-Avalon 13-Jan-2009, 01:24 PM

It would've been nice to have a reply back....

LOA

still waiting...thank you

Posted by: deadeye08 16-Jan-2009, 02:47 PM

LOA Try starting your computer in safe mode and then uninstall it. It should work that way since all the programs do not startup.

Posted by: subhuman 17-Jan-2009, 08:45 PM

Sorry, haven't looked at this thread for a while.

If safe mode doesn't work, I don't know what to tell you. I just uninstalled it as a test, and had no problems.

You could try finding the process in Task Manager and killing it through there first.

Posted by: Taliesin 17-Mar-2009, 04:38 PM

I've never installed SpeedFan, but I can tell you that by right-clicking on your taskbar (where all your running programs are usually displayed), in a blank area, you should have the opportunity to select Task Manager.

From there, you should click the "Processes" tab, and look for something that resembles "SpeedFan". Some possibilities are spdfn.exe, speedfan.exe, sf.exe, etc. I have no idea what it might be called, but if you find something that looks like a likely culprit, you can click on it, and then click the "End Process" button. This will kill that task. Then try to do the reinstall.

Using this method, you can't do any permanent harm to your computer, as if you restart it, everything that is supposed to run will run again.

Hope this helps, LOA, if you've not already taken care of this problem.

Posted by: Taliesin 17-Mar-2009, 04:41 PM

I was wondering if anyone has any good Free for Enterprise anti-spyware software out there?

SpyBot S&D, Ad-Aware, and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware are all not free for corporate users. Our company is not that large, and can't really afford to pay a license fee for another software package. We'll do it if we have to, but I was wondering if anyone else had something to suggest.

I know the fees for this kind of software are usually not much, but a small business in this economy needs to pinch every penny to stay afloat.