Freeware I use
(and recommend)
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Cross-Platform (well, Windows and Linux)
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- Mozilla,
of course, or rather Firefox and Thunderbird.
- OpenOffice
provides first-class word processing, spreadsheet,
etc. and can read files generated by a certain
over-priced office software suite that for some
reason fails to run under Linux.
- The world's best editor is
Emacs. It's available for 32-bit Windows
here.
- My children are very fond of TuxPaint,
a paint program specifically designed for younger
users.
- PGP
because even law-abiding people don't much like the
idea that any Joe, Dick, or Edgar can read their
mail. (For Americans: that's McCarthy, Nixon, and
Hoover respectively.)
- XaoS
is a nice fast fractal progam with interactive
zooming, but fewer fractals and options than
Fractint, and needs a CPU of at least a GHz.
- VNC has
been massively useful on several occasions.
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Linux
I'm using Ubuntu's "Dapper Drake".
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- Pan is
a decent Usenet newsreader with good support for
people who still dial up to the Net with a
modem.
- Rezound
has far more features than I use, but is a good editor
for many kinds of audio files.
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Windows Only
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IrfanView is a
wonderfully fast viewer/converter for a wide range
of graphics file types. It was also a nice small
download (about 350k for version 2.90), but has
been getting bigger. The added features are still
worth it.
It makes thumbnails for your photo album, too.
- TreeSize
is a very easy way of finding out where all that
space on your disk went. There is also a paid
version, which can generate nice-looking reports
and so on.
- WiZ
is a useful GUI tool for reading and writing Zip
archives.
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Programmer's File Editor, by Alan Phillips of
Lancaster University, is freeware and pretty decent
for a small editor. There's also a smaller program
called NewPad,
which resembles Windows95's Notepad more closely
but is better in several ways.
- Tiny
Alarm is a nice clean little alarm clock
utility that can remind you to get up from your
computer and do something healthier.
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