Free Software

Avira (freeware – for personal use)

Avast (freeware – for personal use)

Using the same password in more than one place makes it easy for hackers to steal your information.
A Password Manager helps you choose unique and secure passwords for each account, and remembers them all.
You only have to remember one password for the password manager, which protects all your other passwords.

Keepass (Open source)

Lastpass.com (free to use – small fee for extra features)

Lastpass is an online service so your passwords will be safe even if your computer crashes and you lose data.

The first thing most software does before it installs is to ask you to read the License Agreement and agree to it. Few people take the time to do this, and as a result many end up with pop-up advertisements being added to their web browsers, advertisements being added to the bottom of their emails (smiley central does this) or worse. EULAlyzer provides a short, easy to read evaluation of these often long and technical documents.

Spybot Search and Destroy (freeware – for personal use)

This program allows you to scan for adware and spyware threats that may be on your computer.

Ad-Aware (freeware – for personal use)

This program allows you to scan for adware and spyware threats that may be on your computer.

InfraRecorder (Open Source)

For some people who don’t need perfect compatibility with Microsoft Office, this provides you with a very powerful Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Database, and Presentation program.

Audacity (Open Source)

GIMP (Open Source)

InkScape (Open Source)

This is one of the largest repositories on the Internet of free and open source software.

Maybe you like using Firefox or OpenOffice, but it’s not available on all the locations that you use computers. Portable Apps allows these and many of the programs listed here to be installed onto a usb key, which you can then plug into any PC and run the programs. This is handy if you want to have your website bookmarks with you at all times for example, since you can carry the same web browser with you where ever you go.

Firefox (Open Source)

Why use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer (IE)? The only reason IE 7 and 8 exist with tabbed browsing, better security, and new features is because many people decided to switch to alternative browsers such as Firefox. In fact, Microsoft planned to have IE 7 and newer available only for Vista and Windows 7, which would have forced people to upgrade from XP once developers stopped making websites compatible with IE 6. The popularity of Firefox changed those plans, because not offering IE 7 and 8 for XP would mean they’d lose their growing control of proprietary features on the web. Unlike IE, any security flaws found are fixed within days. Also, most people don’t realize that Internet Explorer does not conform to web standards and each browser version’s quirks aren’t even compatible with each other. This causes a lot of headaches for web developers who then have to design web pages to specifically work with the latest buggy version of Internet Explorer while trying to maintain compatibility with old versions. When you switch to an alternative browser, you’re telling Microsoft that you care about security, and want to see the web remain a place that all can access and program for, rather than a place locked up in proprietary software which forces you to upgrade.

Thunderbird (Open Source)

If you’re using Outlook Express on your Windows XP computer and prefer this over accessing your email through your web browser, you should know that it is no longer available in Windows 7. When you upgrade, you’ll need an alternative such as Thunderbird.