Hi,

This is a lit of freeware that I have come to use after years of experimenting.

Security/Protection:
Antivirus:
Avira Antivir - This is one of THE best Antivirus software in the world and it comes for free. Its significantly better that NOD or McAfee or Norton, so you can understand its power..........

Firewall:
Comodo - This one is NOT 'one of the best firewalls' in the world. It is THE best firewall in the world. And its FREE. Its quiet amazing. I really don't understand how the other firewall makers are making people to pay for their inferior products. Amazing how ignorance profits others!!!!!!!

Officesuite:
OpenOffice - As good as Microsoft Word. You can save in all the Word formats. You can save as pdf even. God, I really can't understand how people still use Word!!!!!!

Browser:
Firefox - Guess this thing requires no comments.

To Be Continued......

I've never heard of the av or firewall you mention, and Opera is obviously better than FF, can you link to all of these?

I have been loyal to Firefox for a few years now... As for the antivirus and firewalls, I may have to check those out.... I am always up for research, and especially for such added protection on the PCs.

I still use Norton because it is still under subscription... so I will be having Norton Security for a while, but if I were to reformat some older PCs, I will keep these service programs in mind... thanks for the listings...

I actually don't use a lot of free ware, Pretty much the only free ware I use is Firefox, and the occasional open office. I have the whole 2007 office suite that I use mostly. I've been using firefox for such a long time now, I don't think I can stand using any other browser.

I agree, this is the one I use as well - and with good results. Not sure if I would call it the best, I haven't experimented around much with antivirus software. I just know it's better than Norton. Way. Better.



That statement may be true as long as you stay within the paradigm of a software firewall. I would argue that even the most basic hardware-based firewall (such as the one contained in the cheapest NAT router made in China) will give you a lot more protection than any software-based firewall would ever give you - almost by definition, and by virtue of combining firewall functions with the network address translation that it does.



If we only talk about document editing (and you need to export in PDF format), I would go with the less resource-intensive combination of AbiWord and a decent freeware PDF printer driver.



I agree. I'm addicted to some of the add-ons that have been written for FireFox - so much so that I'm disincentivized against experiementing more with Opera and other browsers. Don't like FF's memory footprint much, I have to admit.

This post has been edited by dserban: Feb 2 2008, 09:29 PM

I'm going to add another section here which is very important to me anyway.

Graphics:
Paint.NET - Even though I have photoshop, I still use this for all my graphics work. It has some great features and works really well. I've got around 50 plugins for it now and they really add some functionality to the program! You can do most stuff that you can do in photoshop but just in a different and more time consuming way. Once you learn how tonuse this well, you might ditch photoshop like I did!

The only freeware I really use is paint.NET and Firefox and occasionally open office. There's also things like shockwave player, flash player, adobe reader and java but I don't really count any of them as program except for adobe reader.

I have and use PC cillin Internet security for my antivirus and firewall and that, it works great!

The softs I didn't see in your list, and which I use every day.

a) putty (ssh or telnet clients for PC's)
Filezilla (ftp client)
c) Miranda (MSN, MIRC, etc..)
d) XnView (for capture-to-JPG, image crops or resizing)