Don’t Buy, Don’t Steal: The best Freeware for everyday needs

Oh I love freeware…best way to enjoy your computing experience without cheating and sometimes I don’t even understand why people have to ‘steal’ software (my rant on software thief ‘friend’).

Here are some of my favorites, must have in my Windows:

1. 7Zip: Archive utility. Supports, among others, 7z, rar and zip.
2. AVast Free Antivirus: My favorite free Antivirus since ages. With a little bit of common sense in internet usage, this has never let me down (though, I might say, it feels like getting bloated now).
3. VLC Player: If it contains video, VLC will play it (and audio too!)…no more messing around with codec packs.
4. Tixati for torrents.
5. CutePDF: Virtual printer to save and share webpages, files etc. as PDF. And unlike other virtual PDF printers, Cute PDF has no ugly watermarks.
6. Calibre for EBook conversions.
7. CDBurnerXP: Who needs crappy Windows’ inbuilt CD burning when we have this.
8. Free Download Manager.
9. XnView: Image manipulator – cut-copy-paste-resize-rotate-effects etc. XnView + MS Paint, enough for causal use. For more, there’s always GIMP.
10. PDFSAM: Split and Merge PDF Files.
11. DocuFreezer: Batch convert multiple supported file formats (doc/dot/xls/ppt/pdf/xps/jpg/htm/txt) to other formats (jpeg/pdf/png/tiff).

Almost always, when I needed software I found some kindly and/or adventurous soul(s) who has/have coded software completely free of cost for all to enjoy. So much so that besides Windows OS, and Microsoft Office (two software I cannot do without, though if you are into lightweight text editing, Open Office is pretty good, and there goes one more commercial software!), almost everything else in my Computer is a freeware 🙂 Some, I find actually rare but really worth having like:

1. Open Visual Trace Route: There was a time when visual tracert was rather easy to find…not anymore. If you don’t know what it is, you probably don’t need it!
2. HD Graph: Nice little expandable piechart representation of what is using your disc space (again, it used to be easy find some time back, and rather rare now).

Then there are those clowns who start as Freewares, but pretty soon turn to Commercial Shareware making it clear that their intent was always to use Freeware users as Beta Testers for free. I ain’t against it fundamentally; only, why the deception and pretense of being a Freeware. And the worst sleazeballs distributing software touted as free, but really bundled with bloatware or really worse, malware.