Best Freeware for your PC

The top 5 freeware PC utilities

Ashish pointed me to Darren Rowse’s new initiative - the Top 5 Group
Writing Project. The gist of it to have bloggers from all kind of disciplines writing
a post on their top 5 list. The goal is to foster interaction between indidviduals in
the Blogsphere and to increase exposure of relatively new blogs.

Being a tech blogger, who’s deeply into tips and tricks aimed to help you make the most of your PC, I jumped on the Top 5 train, and would like to contribute my favorite top 5 list: My top 5 freeware PC utilities.

The great thing about these utilities/applications, is that they provide state-of-the-art performance, functionality and support for free. I strongly recommend that you install them all on any PC you use.

So here are my top 5 freeware utilities:

Foxit Reader: No doubt that PDF has became the universal format for file sharing. Unfortunately, the PDF reader market is dominated by the extra annoying Adobe (Acrobat) Reader. The main drawback of Adobe is that it consumes plenty of your system resources. Foxit Reader, a lightweight application that enables you to read your PDF files like a breeze, is the preferred solution for PDF file viewing.
AVG Anti Virus Free Edition: Malware of any kind and specially PC viruses can hurt your productivity and cause you valuable data loss. AVG Antivirus free edition, a free antivirus utility that not only features virus scan scheduling capabilities, but also scans your incoming and outgoing emails, can help you protect your PC and fight malware.
TweakVI Basic: Tweaking a Windows Vista system can be a tough task even for Windows XP veterans. TweakVI makes Vista customization a fun thing to do, by offering a you powerful User Interface and miscellaneous settings tweaking options. Moreover, it features an extremely handy Windows utility menu, that eases the access to miscellaneous utilities (like the Registry Editor, the Backup and Restore utility and so forth).
Audacity: Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. This great piece of open source software is developed by a bunch of volunteers. Highly Recommended!
Salesforce.com personal edition: One of the main characteristics of the Web 2.0 paradigm is the emergence of Software as a Service (SAAS) applications. SAAS is a new delivery model where companies pay not for owning the software itself but for using it. Salesforce.com, a CRM (Customer Relationships Management) web based service, pioneered the SAAS domain. Salesforce.com personal edition features a super-intuitive web interface (no need to install anything on your PC!) as well as a streamlined set of processes that helps you make the most of your Contacts, Accounts, Leads and Opportunities, and increase your sales productivity. If you are into marketing and sales - this is the tool you are looking for!

Well, that’s it. I know some of you might disagree, many will ask how come i didn’t include Google Talk, Twitter, Skype, Thunderbird, Firefox, Wordpress, Joomla and those alike. I am interested to hear your thoughts, What’s your top 5 ?
[tags] Audacity, Foxit Reader, Salesforce.com, SAAS, Tweak VI, Darren Rowse [/tags]

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Posted by Gili

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51 Comments

51 Responses to “The top 5 freeware PC utilities”

on 08 May 2007 at 4:13 am1Byte of Technology

I am using “TweakVI Basic”, its great….
on 08 May 2007 at 5:32 am2Top 5 - Group Writing Project Day 1

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on 08 May 2007 at 2:23 pm5Shankar Ganesh

Good collection there. Foxit Reader is a very good alternative to Adobe PDF reader. AVG and Audacity are really great freewares, I should say.
on 08 May 2007 at 2:59 pm6Mike

Thanks so much for the tips. I’ve been looking for a free antivirus utility!
on 08 May 2007 at 4:36 pm7Today’s 10 Top 5’s | The Sun’s Financial Diary | A Personal Finance Blog on Saving and Investing

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on 08 May 2007 at 5:09 pm8Group Writing Project - Top 5 Day 1 | Techie Buzz

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on 08 May 2007 at 6:04 pm9John

The top 5 freeware programs that I actually use are:

1. Firefox (fully extended)
2. Thunderbird
3. AbiWord (lightweight standalone word processor)
4. GIMP (full-featured image editing)
5. Google Earth

Another decent free antivirus software is avast. As far as I know I have not been infected with it, and it causes fewer problems than the pay software.
on 08 May 2007 at 6:46 pm10ShadowsEdge

Thanks for this post. I just built a new computer with Vista for the OS and am in process of looking for freeware and open source equivalents to the programs I had on my old system.
on 08 May 2007 at 7:12 pm11Gili

All,
Thanks for commenting, you are more than welcome to subscibe to my full RSS feed , as i will be posting quite frequently on the best freeware available.
Gili
on 09 May 2007 at 6:12 am12Rehuel

Hey Gill,

The best one on the list for me is Audacity. I’m running Xubuntu Feisty, but most of your tips are Windows related. I will be checking your blog so now and then to see what new Open Source goodies you have.

By the way, got to your site via Problogger.
on 09 May 2007 at 8:57 am13Nirmal

Nice post on freewares. Btw I’m also participating in this project.
on 09 May 2007 at 12:16 pm14374 Top Fives

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on 10 May 2007 at 12:13 pm16Tom O'Leary

Hi
Nice top 5

Thanks
Tom
on 10 May 2007 at 4:33 pm17shashank

Foxit reader i ll definitely try i t… and i use avg .
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on 13 May 2007 at 2:42 pm34Basil Vandegriend

Good list, although I was surprised to SalesForce make the top five compared to many other potential choices. I think I’ll check out SalesForce, although I’m not in Sales and Marketing myself.

Check out my Problogger submission, which I think you’ll find relevant: Top Five Essential Practices for Developing Software
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The top 5 freeware PC utilities

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