Fantastic Windows Freeware

We've had several requests lately for tools and utilities to help protect computers from various internet nasties, so started looking for tools to help you out. Our most important consideration is that these tools should be free, and if possible, open source. There should be no need in this day and age to spend any extra money to keep your PC secure.

So, I started putting together this list, and got a bit carried away. It ended up turning into a recommended list of free (mostly open-source) tools to do almost all of the essential tasks most people require of their computer.

Almost all of the programs mentioned below are free open source software, though some are free versions of larger commercial products. Also note that this article is primarily aimed at Windows PC users, but almost all of these tools are also available on OSX and Linux.

Security - Anti-Virus & Firewalls

The only downside we could find to the Clamwin anti-virus package was the lack of real-time protection (scheduled scans only). If you combine it with *Winpooch, a real-time anti-spyware and anti-trojan program, then they work together to bring you complete protection, as Winpooch will actively utilise Clamwin.

*update: Winpooch is not compatible with windows XP service pack 3, and because of this we have stopped using it until it gets fixed. We are investigating other specialist anti-spyware solutions, but Advanced Windows Care (see below) will do a decent job.

The other main security package you will need is a good Firewall, to keep out hackers and bots by only allowing external access to the programs *you* decide should get it. You might find firewalls a little irritating at first, as you often have to make a decision, and you're sometimes not sure if you're doing the right thing.

Thankfully firewalls are getting friendlier, and their help files will guide you through any difficulties. Spend some time reading up on what they do as a properly configured firewall will protect you from almost any malicious attack.

The best free tool we could find isn't truly open source, it is the free version of Zonealarm 7. If you want to get all FOSS purist about your security setup, there is an open source alternative in the form of WIPFW 0.2.8.

Finally, if you wish to encrypt your data, to keep your hard drive safe from any eyes other than your own, then Truecrypt 5 will hide your data and even provides two layers of protection, as a revealed password can be set to only reveal a portion of the encrypted disk. Clever stuff for the more paranoid amongst us.

General Computing:

Many of the basic tasks we need to do on a daily basis are handled so poorly by the Operating System (OS) that we have relied on commercial software to do a better job. Now there are Free Open Source Software (FOSS) alternatives, and many are much better than the commercial equivalents.

Most of the commercial versions come bloated with all the extras they've been forced to take on board to justify their next release, and marketing budget. The best (or worst) example of this is Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) reader, Acrobat. It's huge (22MB on its own or a whopping 34 MB if you don't unclick the recommended adobe media player download!)

It takes ages to load, and as soon as you install one Adobe product you get upgrade messages nagging you on a regular basis. If all you want to do is read and print .pdf documents, quickly and with a tiny (2.1 MB) program, then the Foxit Reader is for you.

When it comes to browsing, you probably have Internet Explorer running, and version 7 isn't all that bad. The extra add-ons available for Firefox however, turn it into a much more productive tool for all but the most casual internet user, and we can't recommend it highly enough.

We have a seperate article in preparation on the best way to pimp your Firefox for various needs, but for now, just make the move to Firefox and play with it. You won't regret it.

One thing that Windows doesn't do very well is keep it's own registry clean. There are heaps of tools out there to do this, and more, but the one that's impressed us the most (though it's not true FOSS) has been the free beta of Advanced Windows Care Personal 3.

Not only does this keep our registries clean, its internet and networking optimisation had a drastic effect on our download speeds, multiplying them by 300% on two of our machines at the Mohawk studios!

The company that makes it, iobit, also makes an excellent free drive defragger and optimiser Smart Defrag, which will work in the background to keep your hard discs healthy.

The other thing that windows is traditionally poor at is recognising all but the most common forms of archive (zip), so we've had to rely on tools such as the shareware version of Winrar (which, despite the nag screen after a your free month, is still a great little program). Some relief comes in the form of 7-zip, a free alternative that also adds support for the 7z compression format , that provides incredibly good compression rates.

If you need to transfer data to a webserver, you probably need an FTP client. We don't think you can go wrong with Filezilla.

Video:

Two other bits of turgid commercial bloatware that you're often forced to install on windows are Realplayer and Quicktime, both of which have proved either buggy or feature-locked in their free forms. Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative will allow you to play back those files without downloading the commercial bloatware.

With the hassle of trying to install the right video codecs to make windows media player work with anything other than windows media files and the need for a seperate DVD player and it makes playing video on windows seem like a nightmare.

Saving the day, however, is the excellent VLC which will play almost any video file you throw at it, including DivX, XVid, DVDs and DVD images on your hard drive. No Codecs to install. It Just Works.

CD & DVD related:

While windows will burn a data CD or DVD just fine, it doesn't give you much control over the process and there's a ton of other shiny-disc-oriented action that windows just won't do.

Infra Recorder, however, will do the rest, and replace that bloated copy of Nero that a lot of us have relied on for years, despite it's astronomical level of expansion. The 'lite' version contains 12 programs, the full version 22. I only use one.

Another useful CD related task is the ability to mount an image of a disc (typically a .iso file on a hard drive) on a virtual CD ROM drive. Daemon Tools used to do this very well, but since version 4 has been packaged with a ton of spyware (boo hiss!).

The earlier Daemon Tools 3.46 doesn't suffer from this, and can be installed safely. It does its job perfectly and will run up to 4 Virtual CD or DVD drives and emulate all major copy protection systems.

Other Common Tasks:

I know a lot of people who require the basic functions of Photoshop, but none of the advanced stuff, and certainly don't want anything to do with the pricetag. Forks (development deviations) from the GIMP project , both GIMPshop and Cinepaint seem to be quite good, but we've had the best results from the excellent Paint.NET.

A couple of other common geek tools are UltraVNC for the remote-desktopping of remote machines (some of our machines here don't have monitors, mice or keyboards, they just run a VNC server) and the ever-reliable utorrent for the sharing of bittorrent files.

Finally, we are using Virtual Machines more and more. There is a free VMWare player will allow you to use virtual applications and run VMWare machines, but there is pretty good open source alternative to the full VMWare suite in the form of Virtualbox.

While most of you will not see much use in VMs, surfing from within one is the easiest, safest and most hassle free way to keep your host PC secure while on line. Once you get used to using them it makes it much easier to get into the world of Linux , Apache , MySQL and PHP , the famous LAMP stack on which most of the internet runs. This, however, is food for another article, on another day.

Remember, free software is not like free beer. It does exist in the real world, and its price is no longer an indication of its worth. All of these programs are stable, efficient, functional and easy to use.

We use all of them on our machines here at Mohawk Media, and we receive nothing in return for their recommendation. They are simply the best free tools we've found so far.

We'll keep looking, keep trying them out, and when we find a good 'un, we'll shout about it here!