I was looking through a notes folder in Outlook today and came across this list of free or very cheap software downloads.  Not illegal or cracked software, just free, or least most of them.

I didn’t look at each link and I’m not sure where this list was taken from, although the few I looked at appear very interesting.  Just passing it along!

Anti-Virus, Anti-Spy stuff
www.clamwin.org –  ClamWin Free Antivirus is used by more than 600,000 users worldwide on a daily basis. It comes with an easy installer and opensource code. You may download and use it absolutely free of charge.
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner – CCcleaner is the number-one tool for cleaning your Windows PC. It protects your privacy online and makes your computer faster and more secure. Easy to use and a small, fast download.
http://www.malwarebytes.org/ – Malwarebytes gets rid of spybots and other nasty stuff off the internet.  Free trial only.

Security
http://www.truecrypt.org/ – Allows you to encrypt your data and hard drives so they can’t be hacked into (even by the government) (Again not for the faint-hearted.)
http://www.privoxy.org/ – setups up a proxy server on your machine that filters out advertisements, junk and malware from the internet going to your browser.
http://www.gnupg.org/ – GnuPG allows to encrypt and sign your data and communication. “signs” emails with electronic encryption. Can also be used to encrypt emails so they cannot be read.  You need a plugin to use this with Outlook. Other email clients are available which can do this natively.

Email Clients:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ – Mozilla Foundation. Thunderbird (same people that make the Firefox web-browser)
http://www.claws-mail.org/ – Claws Mail the wide variety of plug-ins for this email client makes it very flexible and secure.

Web Browsers
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/ – Firefox.
http://www.google.com/chrome/ – Chrome from google.
http://www.opera.com/  –  Opera Web Browser.

System Utilities
http://www.7-zip.org/ – Free unzipper program that does: zip, rar, arc, and a few hundred other compression types.
https://www.virtualbox.org/ – Lets you install “virtual machines” on your windows machine. For example if you wanted to install FreeDOS to run old DOS games from the 80′s
http://freedos.org – Opensource DOS operating system for old DOS programs to run on.

Office
http://www.libreoffice.org/download – Free Office software, includes Word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, etc.
http://www.scribus.net/canvas/Scribus – Desktop publishing software.
http://lyx.org – The ULTIMATE in desktop publishing software.
http://www.imgburn.com/ – CD/DVD Burning software
http://filezilla-project.org/ – FTP Software for downloading and uploading things to FTP sites.
http://live.gnome.org/Dia – Like Viso it is used for drawing diagrams.
http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ – PDFToolkit, lets you merge, cut, split, rotate, encrypt/decrypt repair PDF files.

Personal Productivity
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page – Mindmapping software
http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/ – CD RIpper. Converts CD’s to MP3 files.
http://tux4kids.alioth.debian.org/tuxtype/ – Typing tutor, learn how to type fast.
http://net2.com/nvu/ – Websight design tool with templates.

Graphics & Audio
http://www.videolan.org/ – Video & DVD Player
www.gimp.org – GIMP Graphics design program like photoshop
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ – Sound editor.
http://www.blender.org/ – 3D model making program (to make the next “Toy Story” movie) I used this to make my book trailer.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Main_Page – CAD (Computer Aided Design Software. Lets you design buildings and cars and such.

Financial
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/jgnash/index.php?title=Main_Page  jGnash personal finance manager software.
http://gnucash.org/ – Small business acounting package.. like Sage

Internet Television
http://www.mythtv.org/detail/mythtv – If you have a TV card link. You can setup a server to watch TV on demand and across the internet. (Not for the faint-hearted)

Fun
http://www.flightgear.org/ – Flight simulator
http://www.freechess.org/ – Free Chess server
http://www.tim-mann.org/gnuchess.html – Winboard Chess software
http://red.planetarena.org/ – First person shooter game. Kill the aliens
http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page – FreeCiv is an opensource version of the old “Civilization” game from Sid Meyers
http://www.oldschooldos.com/allgames.php – Old dos games that you can download.
http://www.abandonwaredos.com/ – Old dos games that you can download.
http://www.abandonia.com/ -Old dos games that you can download.
http://www.reallyslick.com/downloads.html – Screensavers
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/ – Vega Strike is an Open Source 3D Action-Space-Sim that lets you trade, fight, and explore in a vast universe.

Tucked into a corner of my office is my favorite computer. I have many new, ultra-fast systems although I continue to use this one for many projects.

Its an old Macintosh with a G4 Processor running OS X 10.2.8.

I like it since its runs several of my favorite old programs such as FreeHand 10 and MX, TypeStyler along with having an enormous selection of old fonts set up exactly as I like them using an antiquated version of Extensis Suitcase.

Yes, its no longer viable for developing software or processor intensive tasks such color separating a 100 MB file with automated techniques, BUT it can be utilized for just about everything else and for some reason, just “feels right” when I sit in front of it. Yes, quite strange yet true.

Although not entirely scientific, although there is fact behind this is I believe it continues to be surprisingly responsive since I never….ever wrote files to the internal hard drive and always used external firewire devices. The only data written to the internal drive were the applications. Due to never running into fragmentation issues, after many years it requires about 40 seconds to start-up and all applications run great with no disk thrashing or strange behavior.

Oh, one more thing…. anti-virus software was never installed since day one and this old computer was never victimized by viruses, malware, etc. Not too shabby!

Today its far too old to use modern browsers although works just fine on my network with about 8 other systems, 4 printers, 2 network drives and a Mac server.