Free Software
As a Linux user, it never ceases to amaze me how much absolutely fantastic software is available for free for Linux. But that’s not true for Windows, of course. Although there is quite a lot of purportedly “free” software available for Windows, it’s certainly not safe to just download and install anything you fancy.
However, although there’s not nearly as much of this sort of thing available to Windows users, there are still quite a few exceptionally good software packages that you can download and install for free. Here’s a list of some free and safe Windows software that you’re likely to find useful.
OpenOffice is a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office. OpenOffice Writer does pretty much everything that Word can do – and more. And OpenOffice Calc is a replacement for Excel, which does pretty much everything that Excel can do. Writer can open and save Word documents and Calc can open and save Excel documents, so there are rarely any problems when it comes to sharing files with Microsoft Office users.
OpenOffice also comes with a presentation program, Impress, which replaces PowerPoint, a drawing program, a mathematics formula program and a database program. All of this is downloadable in one package for free.
One of the nice things about OpenOffice is that it comes with an inbuilt ability to save documents as PDF files – something which Word doesn’t do (or at least it didn’t do it last time I looked!).
There is one very minor drawback with OpenOffice and that is that, by default, it saves documents in its own file formats (although, of course, “Save As” allows you to save them as another type of document). But that’s very easily fixed if you want your documents to be compatible with MS Office users and not have to mess around with “Save As” all the time – you just change the default to save documents as Word files, Excel files, etc.
Download from http://OpenOffice.org
Firefox is a web browser. In my opinion, it is considerably better than Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 7 was a big improvement on version 6 – and included the ability to open web pages in tabs (like Firefox). But Firefox 3, which came out recently, has taken Firefox into the lead again.
Download Firefox from http://mozilla.com/firefox
Thunderbird is a mail reader from the same people who created Firefox. Windows comes with Outlook Express for reading and writing email – but it’s not very good, because Microsoft want you to pay for the full-featured version. Thunderbird is a free alternative.
Download it from http://mozilla.com/thunderbird
Gimp is a graphical image manipulation program. A basic Windows installation doesn’t include much in the way of graphics software, so if you want to edit photos or produce graphics for desktop publishing or the web, you’ll have to find some software to do it with yourself. You may have heard for Photoshop – it’s a professional graphics application. And it will cost you more than five hundred pounds! But Gimp can do pretty much everything photoshop can – and it’s free.
Download it from http://gimp.org