I’ve linked to various Windows Secrets newsletter items in the past. It is an excellent newsletter and I highly recommend it. The issue I received today has a link to nine freeware apps that have been regularly centred out/chosen in “best of” lists.
The “best freeware” lists published by Web sites and magazines frequently trumpet dozens of programs, but the results reflect the subjective opinions of just one or two testers.
To find the best of the best, I compared roundups of “great” freeware conducted recently by four reputable publications to find the programs that were endorsed by at least three of the reviews.
Out of the lists he looked at, only 9 programs were on 3 of the lists, and only 1 was on all 4. It’s a good read with links to each of the 9 programs.
A couple of months ago Download Squad highlighted the program FontEXPRO:
Are you constantly struggling to remember the difference between Arial, Times New Roman and Palatino Linotype? Sure, you could just keep changing fonts from the drop-down menus in your word processor, or you could use FontEXPRO to preview all the fonts stored on your computer and choose the right one for the job.
The FontEXPRO site explains it this way:
Browse a folder full of truetype fonts and view previews of them. You can enter your own text and decide which font is best for your project etc.
Features
* A preview of a folder full of fonts - select a folder and visualize each folder. Ideal for finding the perfect font for your own project
* A preview of your text in each of the browsed fonts
* A search facility to find that font
* An alphabetically sorted list
* Manage your fonts
A couple of months ago Kim Komando mentioned a program called GreenPrint which helps you eliminate those pages with 2 lines on the bottom which waste paper:
Our patent-pending print preview, GreenView, displays all pages and highlights wasteful pages in red. With a click you can: print only what you want, remove images or text, create a PDF file.
Windows Vista has all sorts of new applets that help you manage your computer. A while ago the Windows Secrets newsletter explained how you could do some of this in Windows XP. One of these utilities was XP Syspad:
XP SysPad is a Windows system monitoring utility that allows easy access to Windows system information and Windows system utilities, such as the individual control panel applets, as well as putting the “hidden” applications in Windows at your fingertips. XP Syspad also recovers lost Windows & MS-Office product keys
With XP SysPad, you can easily access hundreds of Windows operating system utilities and system monitoring information. You can also recover your Windows 2000/XP product key, get your IP address, execute web queries, monitor any running system process, launch any program, search files, and more. For convenience, it also can minimize itself to the system tray. XP SysPad has well over 250 functions in all!
There have been quite a bit of news recently about the Windows Vista upgrade DVD not really needing anything to upgrade from. You can do a clean install of Vista without putting in the product key, and then upgrade that installation. That talk has led to some talk about doing a clean install of XP, which led me to the website of Michael Stevens. He is a Microsoft MVP and has a good article about doing a clean install of Windows XP. The article is very through and has links to other resources that you might find helpful.
I heard about Recuva a couple of months ago on the Kim Komando show. I bookmarked it, and finally got around to checking it out. It is a file recover utility.
Recuva (pronounced “recover”) is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses!
I’ve tried it out and it is very easy to use. It scans the drive that you specify and then shows you a list of files that have been previously deleted. It also tells you how likely it is that file could be recovered. You select the files you want to recover, choose where to recover them to (a different drive is recommended) and then the software tries to recover the file. The program itself is very small (less than 1 MB) and you can download an installable version (a setup file) or a zip file that you can extract and save to a portable disk. That’s what I’ve done, and I will definitely recommend it to others.
In what has become a yearly tradition (see 2006 and 2007 here), PC World has compiled a list of 101 Fantastic Freebies:
Free. It’s the magic word for an ever-expanding wealth of downloadable software and online services. Free doesn’t necessarily mean good, however, and hunting for freebies can mean sifting through a lot of junk.
That’s where we come in. We surfed, clicked, and installed to find sparkling free gems capable of planning your time, keeping you in touch, and tuning and securing your PC, not to mention glitzing up your desktop, helping you stay productive, and entertaining you with music, videos, photos, and games. We paid special attention to programs and services you may not have heard of before.
We also singled out two free offerings–one download and one online service–as the best of the bunch.
PC Magazine has an article with a list of useful utilities:
We’re going back to the basics: Our 2008 collection of utility software is all about tweaking, manipulating, and totally dominating the looks and functionality of Windows XP and Vista. These 91 tools provide all the help you need to control Windows. All the products work with XP and Vista unless indicated.
The March issue of Windows IT Pro magazine has an article called Yet Another 8 Absolutely Cool, Totally Free Utilities where they highlight some free utilities. You can read the first couple of paragraphs for free, but you need to be a subscriber to see it all. However, the free tools mentioned in the article are linked to in the sidebar that everyone can see. You may not be able to read the entire article, but you can certainly look into the utilities yourself. They highlight CamStudio, CDBurnerXP, Comodo Firewall Pro, DriveImage XML, GParted LiveCD, JkDefrag, PageDefrag, and TestDisk. You can also click through to other articles in the series. Again, you can’t read the article if you’re not a subscriber, but you can follow the links to the programs in the sidebar and read up about them yourself.
There are a lot of online productivity suites out there these days. Google has probably made the biggest news as they have put together a collection of them (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software, etc) after buying several companies. But Google certainly isn’t the only one. I have previous mentioned a basic collection of similar programs by AJAX13. A more full-featured collection is from ThinkFree:
The award-winning ThinkFree Office is a Microsoft® Office compatible application suite comprised of word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation graphics software-all usable online and off.
I haven’t done much other than signing up for a free account and then playing around a bit, but it looks promising. Check it out for yourself.
Recent Comments