Free Software

Aloha!

As the old saw goes, "The best things in life are free." There's certainly some truth to that when it comes to getting free software online - especially in these tough economic times.

As an IT tech, my favorite site for obtaining free (and legal) software is www.download.com. I've solved many a malware problem (spyware and viruses) using free software from that site – programs such as AVG antivirus, SpyBot Search and Destroy, Ad-Aware, and Hijack This. Like a knife, these programs can help or harm, so an unskilled computer user should take caution.

Recently, I've been employing another program obtained from download.com called Glary Utilities. It's designed to tune-up a Windows PC by fixing problems with the registry, shortcuts, start-up programs, etc. I've used it several times, and so far, so good.

Here's another old saw that pertains to free software too: "There's no free lunch." Yep, there's always a catch to a freebie. Most often the catch is that the free version of a software program doesn't include all the features of the paid version. And some free programs like to remind you with pop-ups that you are not using their full-featured version, that you should upgrade to it – for a price.

Some free programs, like Glary Utilities, offer to install a toolbar on your browser and/or change your default search provider. (You have the option to not do either of these in Glary’s case – just watch what you click when installing!)

Before downloading any free software to your computer, get some confidence about the download site and the program - i.e., if you don't trust them, ask someone you know, or search online for reviews or complaints about them. And never install software on a computer that's already unstable, unless you have backed up all your data and are consciously taking a risk because you want the downloaded program to fix things.

I highly recommend setting a restore point in Windows before installing any software. A restore point enables rolling back Windows to a previous working state, should a newly installed software program break things. If you’d like to learn about this feature, look up “Windows System Restore” on your computer or online.

One last tidbit: For all you cheapskates (read thrifty people angry with Microsoft’s price gouging) who grumble about having to pay for Microsoft Office because you just want to use a decent word processor and/or spreadsheet, there is an excellent, and did I mention, FREE alternative. It’s called OpenOffice. This software is provided by Sun Microsystems, the inventors of Java. You can obtain it at: http://www.openoffice.org


I find OpenOffice user-friendly and stable. If I didn’t need to be current on MS Office to support my clients, believe me, I would use this program exclusively. Then again, if it weren’t for the market saturation of Windows-based PCs and I could make a living fixing Macs, I wouldn’t be in this dance with Microsoft to begin with. But that’s another article.

Wishing you akamai computing!