Free Software

We have found what we consider to be amongst the best free software available on the web. All of the programs listed here have been evaluated by us, and in most cases are still used by us. We therefore have no hesitation in recommending them for home or small business use.

Security & Antivirus

• AVG Anti-Virus Free
  Award winning and regularly updated antivirus software from Grisoft. Highly recommended.
• Zone Alarm
  Award winning personal firewall from Zone Labs to stop hackers from getting into your PC. Highly recommended.
• SpyBot Search and Destroy
  Award winning software from Spybot to protect your computer from spyware and malware. Highly recommended.
• Ad-Aware SE Personal
  Ad-Aware Personal from Lavasoft provides advanced protection from known data-mining, aggressive advertising, Trojans, dialers, malware, browser hijackers, and tracking components. Highly recommended.

Office Applications

• OpenOffice
  Open Source Office Suite from Sun Microsystems that is MS Office compatible, featuring: Writer (wordprocessor), Calc (spreadsheet), Impress (multimedia presentations), Draw (vector drawing tool) and more. Highly recommended.

Desktop Search

• Copernic Desktop Search
  Copernic Desktop Search brings the power of a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use search engine right to your PC, allowing you to instantly search files, emails, and email attachments stored anywhere on your computer.

PDF

• Foxit Reader for Windows
  Foxit Reader 2.0 is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size, breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set.
• PDFCreator
  Create PDF files from any Windows application.
• PDF Toolkit
  Combine PDF files or delete pages from a PDF file.

Internet

• Firefox
  An Open Source alternative to Internet Explorer with tabbed browsing and tighter secuirty. The functionality of Firefox can be further enhanced by installing extensions that perform specific functions. Firefox is currently rated the second most popular browser in the world and is our browser of choice. Highly recommended.
• Opera
  Another alternative to Internet Explorer offering tabbed browsing. It includes an inbuilt email client plus a range of new features such as: bit torrent, widgets and content blocking.
• Thunderbird
  The companion email client to Firefox with spam filtering and is our email client of choice. Highly recommended.
• LeechGet
  The ultimate download utility.

Graphics Editors & Utilities

• IrfanView
  A compact and easy to use graphics viewer.
• The Gimp
  An Open Source graphics editor for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
• 20/20
  Screen capture and graphics utility.
• Picasa
  A digital photo organiser from Google.
• PhotoRazor
  Easily resize selected photgraphs or an entire folder with just a few mouse clicks.

System Utilities

• CCleaner
  System optimization and privacy tool.
• IZArc
  File compression utility that supports a wide range of formats.
• Cobian Backup
  Schedule automatic backup of specified folders or files on your computer to another directory/drive or to another computer on the same network.

Music

• Winamp
  Media player that supports a wide variety of audio formats.

Special Interests

• Legacy Family Tree (Standard Edition)
  The feature-rich Legacy 6.0 makes it easy to preserve your genealogical information. Family trees containing millions of people can be recorded, displayed and reported in a variety of styles and formats.

---

accessible website design - organic search engine optimisation - home computer help - computer training