What’s better than free software? How about free software that’s as good as most commercial applications and fills a void that fee-based software doesn’t? That’s what it takes to make it onto any respectable list of must-have freeware. Read on to see if some of these battle-tested free applications can make your computing life easier.
System Tools
What do you use when you need to find duplicate files on your computer, clean your Internet tracks, optimize the startup of your PC for maximum speed, shred or encrypt files, or remove spyware? You could turn to a lot of small add-on tools, or you could just use Glary Utilities (http://www.glaryutilities.com/). This free utility pack beats the massive all-in-one utility suites of yesteryear because it contains efficient tools that are useful to most computer users but consumes a mere 19 megabytes of disk space. Tools are organized neatly into the categories such as “clean up and repair,” “optimize and improve,” and “privacy.”
If all you need to do from time to time is clean the junk files that inevitably clog a Windows computer, CCleaner (http://www.piriform.com) is the one essential free tool that many swear by.
Image Viewers
A rudimentary thumbnail viewer is built in to Windows. But the moment you need to view images in the RAW format of your digital camera — or another less common format — you run into trouble. That’s where dedicated image viewers come in, and most computer users need one. Unfortunately, commercial image viewers have become unwieldy and slow, piling on features that most never use.
XnView (http://www.xnview.com) is a refreshing, free change. It’s fast, simple, and ties in nicely with your image editor of choice. With a drive tree on the left and the image thumbnail viewer on the right, it’s compatible with most image formats today, and there’s even a…