Although a little late in arriving, VanRamblings offers insight into 7 essential pieces of free software that will enhance your computing life.
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Irfanview: Who says that altruism is dead? Certainly not Irfan Skiljan, that’s for sure, the creator of one of the web’s most popular free downloads. A compact, fast and friendly image viewer that supports all major graphic formats (including bmp, dib, jpeg, gif, animated gifs, png, pcx, multipage tiff, and tga), Irfanview offers a free, scaled down Photoshop-like tool featuring drag-and-drop support, directory viewing, TWAIN support, slide shows, batch conversion, and modifications — such as colour depth, crop, blur, and sharpen — as well as plug-in support for most video and sound formats, including mp3, avi, audio CD, and wma. IrfanView wraps just about every feature you could desire in an image viewer in a free download. Heck, it’s the best image viewer around.
Adobe Reader: This nifty little piece of software allows you to read the common pdf (portable document format) files that are created by Adobe’s Acrobat software. In addition to the standard features found in the standalone Acrobat Reader client, Acrobat Reader offers PDF viewing from within your Mozilla Firefox (plug-in technology at work once again) or Internet Explorer (via ActiveX technology) browsers.
Tweak XP Pro: Tweak-XP Professional adds more than 56 time-saving productivity improvements to Windows XP. In addition to tuning Windows XP to run faster, Tweak-XP has easy-to-use functions that allow you to tailor Windows XP to meet your personal needs. This useful utility provides you with the opportunity to remove My Network Places, or other icons, from your desktop, prevent Shortcut to from being appended to new shortcuts, offers a memory optimization function and supports as many system enhancements as you’ll require to ensure a safe and satisfying computing experience. Click here to download.
PowerDesk: Absolutely the best file management utility available, and a must have alternative (or replacement) for the cumbersome and annoying built-in Windows Explorer, PowerDesk offers a simple, fast and easy way to organize and manage files, digital photos, MP3 music files and web images on your PC. In just one, two or three clicks, you can customize your PC: rename, move, copy, zip, label, colour code, search, view, prioritize, convert, and use your files the way you want to use them. Try the fully functional free version of PowerDesk 5 — you won’t be sorry you did.
Windows XP IP Config Tool: Windows XP offers several methods for finding out your IP address and performing other tasks that help you troubleshoot network settings, but some are easier than others. This free tool identifies your IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway, and allows you to easily verify the IP-address assigned to your system, as well as release and renew your IP address when your network broadband connections goes on the blink. Think you don’t need it; just see how much easier life is the next time you phone your Internet Service Provider for assistance and s/he asks you for your IP address. Here’s an essential tool that’ll give you the answer with one click of your mouse. To download this free utility, click here.
WinZip: The reigning essential utility tool of the PC world, WinZip’s Classic interface accommodates both first-time and experienced users. With WinZip you can quickly and easily compress and decompress files, folders, and entire folder trees to save storage space and reduce e-mail transmission time, as well as encrypt and decrypt your sensitive documents. WinZip 9.0 features tight integration with Windows Explorer, support for most Internet file formats, and one-click zipping and e-mail.
And, last but not least, the …
DivX Player (with DivX Codec) 5.2.1: Although the latest version seems to be a bit glitchy, and as the folks at Download.com suggest, you may wish to wait for a version later than 5.2.1, the DivX player remains, nonetheless, an essential PC download. If you read through the reader reviews you’ll run across a pretty happy bunch of campers who praise the DivX player for possessing just about every codec necessary to properly play audio or video you download off the ’Net.
