Great FREE software, part II

Posted on 02. Feb, 2010 by nevonnemcdaniels in Community Voices

This is the second article in a two-part series on free PC software.  In the first article I reviewed security, backup, office suites, and Web browsers.  This article covers utilities and audio and photo management applications.

Utilities

Literally thousands of free utilities that meet countless needs are available across the internet.  Some are great, but many just bloat your PC; I recommend you read reviews carefully before downloading.  A few of the safest sites with a large library of titles include download.com, filehippo.com, and tucows.com.

One of the best performance enhancing utilities doesn’t even require a download. Defragmenting a hard-drive often boosts performance and a useful defragging tool is built into most versions of Windows (look for it on the hard drive Properties windows).  If you need more features or aren’t satisfied with the results, other free defrag utilities are readily available, including JkDefrag.

Another utility that I find particularly useful, Gadwin PrintScreen, helps you take screenshots of all or a portion of your screen. This can be extremely helpful when trying to document computer instructions (click here, fill in this box, etc) or when you receive an unexpected error message.  Instead of copying down a long error message and trying to explain it to tech support, simply take a picture of the screen and send it by email.

Ever feel overwhelmed by all of your website accounts and passwords?  LastPass has a utility that’ll securely store all your passwords together in one place and automatically fill them in when you visit the appropriate website.

Finally, another must-have utility enables you to convert virtually any type of document to a PDF file.  If you already have the full version of Acrobat (not Reader) installed then you know you useful this is.  And for those with Office 2007, this function is included so you can already save Word and Excel files as PDF documents.  However, for all other programs BullZip allows you to capture as a PDF image anything that you could output to a printer.  CutePDF is another free application which works similarly.

Audio and picture management

There are an overwhelming number of options for managing your photo library including the software that comes with most cameras and on-line albums such as Shutterfly, Snapfish, and countless others.  However, my personal favorite for organizing photos on your desktop or laptop is Picassa (from Google).  Picassa won’t win any awards for sophisticated photo editing, but it is tremendously easy to use for tagging and managing photos.

For music, it is hard to beat the ease-of-use and number of titles available via iTunes. Another popular option that provides a bit more flexibility than iTunes is Winamp.

As tempting as it might be to download the latest free software, I’d recommend you exercise restraint and only install applications and utilities that will solve a specific need.  If you opt not to use free software after installing it, I strongly suggest you remove it.  ccCleaner is one last utility you might consider to help you keep your hard drive as gunk-free as possible.

Do you have other favorites?  I’d love to hear from you; drop me an email at martin@cnccpa.com.

Martin Straub, CPA, CITP, is the information technology director at Cordell, Neher & Co., PLLC. Along with managing his firm’s internal network, Straub consults with clients regarding technology issues.  He can be reached at 663-1661 or martin@cnccpa.com.

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