Do you need an expensive software like Photoshop, Microsoft Office or some type of antivirus software? Then this article may be for you. Check some ways to save money by using these alternative software for some really common and expensive software. Here is the top five or the best or just some extremely useful software freebies.
Top 5 or the best or just some extremely useful software freebies
As a student I was always trying to find the best deals. The best bang for my buck by scavenging for coupons for groceries and restaurants, using the Internet to comparison shop, buying used items rather than new ones (books, cds, etc.), and of course finding freebies and most importantly software freebies. And while I won’t cover every aspect in life where you can get cheaper alternatives, for this article I will give some tips and advices on free software that are out there and that can do a great job if not better than their expensive competitors. First let me just say that you can find a great number of software that is free. The list is so long and I will suffice in simply giving you a couple of links where you can find by yourself what you need.
and here of course I have to add my website (makeusmile.webs.com) and
blog (learnhowtomakemoneyonlinefast) where you can find some useful tips for everything.
For this article though, I mainly wanted to focus on just a few of the software categories that are most commonly used by everybody and in fact software that non-experts would find most useful. So here are the best, the top 5 or just some extremely useful free software or freebies. I choose five categories of software that almost everybody consistently uses, and for each of these categories I gave at least one example.
Operating Systems
Everybody knows and most likely uses some version of Windows. The most recent version is Windows Vista, and the new version, Windows 7, is coming out soon. However, the most popular version was Windows XP at least in my opinion. Well I bet that many of you believe that Windows is free, just because you never see its price tag, which is included in the price of your PC or laptop. A cheaper alternative is some type of the Linux operating system, which people who have seen it know that it is really not that different from Windows. It just takes some getting used to. I would highly recommend before you go and buy a computer that has Linux installed or go and install Linux on your computer to first run a LiveCD version of Linux and see how you like it. This is really an evaluation version where you put the CD (LiveCD) in your computer, restart your computer and you are running Linux. Then when you restart your computer again, taking out the CD of course before you do so, will return the computer in the previous Windows version. As I mentioned, it is my opinion that the only disadvantage is that Linux takes a little bit of getting used to since most of us are used to the way Windows does things. Apart from that, you can do everything as you would for a Windows system and consider this: for Linux there are numerous software that are free for which you would have to pay a lot of money to use with Windows. Some of my favorite versions of Linux are Fedora, Ubuntu and OpenSuse.
Office
If you use Windows then you definitely know the Microsoft Office package as well. With it, you can write documents, make spreadsheets, prepare presentations or create databases. Well there is a software package that does exactly the same things for free. This software is called OpenOffice and you can run it in with almost any operating system. In addition, it is highly compatible with Microsoft Office so if your friends have the last one, you can easily share your OpenOffice files and you will not have any issues. One important thing that I forgot to mention for this and of course all free software is that all updates of the free software will also be free (most likely). So while, for example, if you would like to update Microsoft Office after a couple of years you would have to pay again, for OpenOffice you will just have to download it for free.
Computer Security
For this category of software I have to mention more that one free software. They are definitely worth your time and I have to mention that from various Internet ranking/comparison sites, they have been found to be significantly better than most of their expensive competitors. These include:
a) Spybot – Search & Destroy
b) Ad-Aware
c) AVG Anti-Virus
d) Zone alarm
I have to note that for some of them, there is free version and an extended version that you have to pay. Others freebies like the Spybot SD have a donation option since they need to make the money somehow to continue to support this great software. It is your choice on what to do. However, as I just mentioned, these freebie software are excellent and it is not only my opinion, but experts have stated this as well.
Photo Editing
I bet that everybody is familiar with the amazing capabilities or at least have heard of the Photoshop software. It can take your family’s vacation photos and do miracles, right? And of course for the money that you have to spend on it, it should be doing so. Well what if I tell you that there is a software that is free and can do most of the things or at least has the most commonly used features of Photoshop. This freebie software is called Gimp and until recently only a few select people knew about it because it was a Linux thing…. again. Now a Windows version exists, which can definitely do some magic with your photos and it certainly doesn’t do magic with your wallet…. vanishing your money.
Games
Last but not least, there is something for all the game enthusiasts and especially those that once loved the video game systems like Nintendo (NES), Sega Mega drive and others. There is a software, or as it is called an emulator, that plays all those old amazing games that we spent thousands of hours getting blisters on our fingers. And this great software is called Mame. I don’t know about you, but I think it is great that using this software (Mame) you can now play thousands of games from our childhood, which of course you can’t play anymore since the equipment belongs to a museum. A little bit of exaggeration here of course, but still that doesn’t mean that Mame is not a great freebie software.
Thu, Sep 17, 2009, by reapapas
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