Comments on: Free Software To Soup Up The Home Computer

By: Jeff

Jeff — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:32:52 +0000

I’d like to add Office Live Workspace to this great list. It lets you stores several file types online, allowing for easy access from any computer with an internet connection. For a full list of features take a look at the following link: http://workspace.officelive.com/LearnMore
Cheers,
Jeff
Office Live Outreach Team

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:17:29 +0000

Scribus, for desktop publishing, is awesome as is clamwin for anti-virus.

By: topseekrit

topseekrit — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:45:04 +0000

Would also add http://www.mint.com to the list for money management. Thanks for this awesome list!

By: brista

brista — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:17:24 +0000

I checked out FreshBooks for my dad’s business and the free version only lets you have 3 clients…GIMP is awesome, though it’s not *exactly* the same as Photoshop/etc. You can use Photoshop/PSP brushes with Gimp, which is nice. I like the Open Office Present (or whatever the slideshow is called). And AVG works well for me. I can’t stand the idea of paying for a virus/spyware program.

Let’s look at free personal finance programs next. Any good desktop ones that are free? And pretty? Gnucash works but it’s not exactly user-friendly in my opinion. The online ones are usually nice-looking, but I’ve tried a lot of them…none of them synch up to my bank correctly. And I know you can manually add transactions with Wesabi but it always, always, always changes my credit card debt to a positive account…For right now, I’m using a site called like…Money Crunchin’ or something like that.

By: TStrump

TStrump — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:09:51 +0000

Open Office and AVG are great products and I use them all the time.
I also like Google Docs.

By: BayouJosh

BayouJosh — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:32:06 +0000

I’m right there with marci. I run AVG, SpyBot S&D and Adaware. The performance hit is barely noticeable.

By: Matt @ StupidCents

Matt @ StupidCents — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:04:17 +0000

1 on the Google Docs. I like the accessibility of all my documents no matter what computer I’m using.

By: Kevin M

Kevin M — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:44:54 +0000

Good info here, thanks. I’ll have to check out Freshbooks for some of my clients.

By: Skip

Skip — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:42:20 +0000

Lots of good free software out there; here are a couple more extensive lists, sorted by category:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_alternatives_to_proprietary_software
http://www.fosswin.com/

Be aware that the “online” options (Google Docs, Zoho, etc…) will normally require you to register first, and may not be available if your Internet connection is not working. (Although I believe Google Docs does have an “offline” component, I have not tried it.)

Also good to do a little checking first, not all free software is created equally.

By: marci

marci — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:38:46 +0000

Thanks mucho! Will look into a couple of these.
I can vouch for the AVG – great protection, which I use along with spybot and adware. Yes, it does run a cycle when I boot up, but it takes less than a minute for it’s updates, and that’s on a slow connection.