Most desktops and notebook computers today come with Microsoft Windows already installed. It wasn’t included free, however. The license fee was included in the price. If you have a Windows based PC, that’s fine. After you read this article, however, you will see there is not much need to pay additional licensing fees.

A basic desktop PC should be equipped with a number of important software applications including email, web browser, word processor, spreadsheet and more. Here is a set of free software titles that will work for many types of users.

Security

The first thing I do when I am setting up a new PC is to remove the trial-version of the commercial security suite. While McAfee and Norton / Symantec will help to keep your PC safe they are bloated and consume too many resources. To keep your PC secure I recommend AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition . This is the baseline program you want to maintain security.

If you are connected directly to the Internet, that is you are not behind a firewall enabled router, then you should have ZoneAlarm, too. Please note, AVG and ZoneAlarm are free for non-commercial use only. If you are a business looking for an inexpensive security solution, please contact me for more information.

Browsing and Email

Your Windows based PC came with Internet Explorer and if you don’t have it yet, you should upgrade to IE Version 8. In my opinion, however, the best free browser is Mozilla Firefox. It is actively maintained and updated by members of the project and there are hundreds of extensions that allow you to customize it so you can make the Internet your own.

If you prefer desktop email clients to web based, then Mozilla Thunderbird is the way to go. The Lightening extension provides calendaring making this an excellent alternative to Outlook. Combine these products with GMail, Google’s free email service, and you can take advantage of the IMAP and iCal technologies. They let you work with the Mozilla tools on your desktop(s) and GMail’s browser based interface when you are mobile or at another’s PC. This setup gives you the best of both worlds.

Productivity

Instead of MS Office, use OpenOffice.org. It is a very mature Office Suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation editor, image editor, math equation editor, chart editor, and database access tool. The components were developed together from the ground up so they all play together very well. Because their interfaces are so similar, most users of Word and Excel are able to adapt very quickly to the corresponding Write and Calc found in OpenOffice. This one switch alone can save your organization hundred$ per worker. And again every few years. With OpenOffice you will never pay a licensing fee for office software again.

For graphics editor check out Paint.NET. It is an excellent alternative to Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw. Another good alternative is GIMP.

Utilities

PDF Creator lets you turn any document you can print into a PDF file for publishing on the web or email distribution.

CDBurnerXP Pro is a great tool for creating media and music CD’s, installation programs, presentations and other CD distributions.

Instead of WinZip, try 7Zip. I believe it to be a far superior tool and there are no annoying pop-ups reminding you to pay up.

Find these and more free software at The Free Software Catalog.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Free Software, Personal Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.