Free Software and Open Source Software

Office Software

OpenOffice is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite compatible with all other major office suites. The product is free to download, use, and distribute. OpenOffice includes the most important desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program. The user interface and features are similar to other office suites. OpenOffice works with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office, and the OpenDocument standard from OASIS.

Thunderbird An e-mail application that helps you to organize your electronic mail. Thunderbird lets you prioritize and find your important email with tags, and the find bar helps you locate content within your email faster.

Sunbird Calendar is a cross-platform calendar application developed by the Mozilla team. The program has a customizable graphical display, and allows association of notes and reminders for any event.

Adobe Reader lets you read and print a document created as an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) file. PDF files preserve the original appearance of a document, and they are compact and can be shared, viewed, navigated, and printed in the format that the author intended.

CutePDF Writer Create professional quality PDF files from almost any printable document. Free for personal, commercial, government, or educational use. Supports 64-bit Windows. Create a PDF document by using the "print" function of any application and selecting CutePDF as the printer.

EditPad Lite A general-purpose text editor, with many nice features. EditPad Lite is free for non-commercial use.

System Utilities

Java Runtime Environment. The Java programming language was developed at Sun Corporation as a way of running programs under any operating system. This technology is the basis of Open Office and many other useful applications.

Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for a PC running genuine Windows. The program guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. Microsoft Security Essentials is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date.

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition provides basic protection against viruses and spyware. AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition is available for single computer use for home and non-commercial use.

Avira AntiVir Personal - Free Antivirus Basic protection. Protects your computer against dangerous viruses, worms, Trojans and costly dialers. Includes basic anti-spyware.

Spybot - Search & Destroy is a program to remove spyware and other kinds of malware from your computer. Spybot has an immunize function that works with the browser to prevent tracking cookies from entering your system. A scan function looks for spyware on the computer and produces a report that allows you to remove the spyware.

Eraser is a security tool for Windows which completely removes sensitive data from a hard drive by overwriting it several times with patterns that remove magnetic remnants from the hard drive. The program also has a secure move function that clears the area where a file was previously stored.

ZoneAlarm Free Firewall blocks hackers from infiltrating your home PC by hiding your computer from unsolicited network traffic. ZoneAlarm Free Firewall detects and prevents intrusions to keep your PC free from viruses and spyware that can steal your personal information, passwords, and financial data.

InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. InfraRecorder can be used to create custom data, audio and mixed-mode projects and record them to physical discs as well as disc images. The program supports recording to dual-layer DVDs and can create disc copies.

FSync is a command line utility for Win32 platforms that synchronizes the contents of two directories. FSync is a very practical alternative to Windows folders synchronization. It is useful for desktop/laptop data synchronization, for smart and complete backups or any other folders synchronization needs, both local or network.

File Synchronizer is a synchronizing program with a graphical user interface. The program can synchronize large collections of files (MP3s, Videos, etc.) between two different drives or folders without copying every file. Saves time by only copying the files that are new or different. The "Clone Mode" is used to synchronize a folder to match a master folder.

WinMerge is a compare and merge tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare folders or files. It presents differences in a visual format that is easy to understand and manipulate. The program is very useful for identifying the differences between two versions of a computer program or a text file.

WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows. The graphical interface represents each file as a colored rectangle, the area of which is proportional to the file's size. The color of a rectangle indicates the type of the file, as shown in the extension list.

7-Zip is an open source file archiver that supports several different types of data compression and encryption. This utility program is able to pack and unpack 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR, and it is able to unpack ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z.

Windows Grep The grep command in Unix systems is used to search globally for matches of a regular expression and print lines where they are found. Windows Grep is a Shareware program that provides this capability for Windows systems.

Web Tools

Firefox Web Browser This is a fast and secure browser that can be fully customized through add-ons.

Arachnophilia A great HTML editor with customizable user interface and built-in spelling checker. Supports several types of character encoding, including UTF-8.

FileZilla is a cross-platform graphical FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with a lot of features. It runs under Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Pixel Ruler is a virtual ruler that opens on your screen and lets you measure the number of pixels of any displayed object. Pixel Ruler can be oriented horizontally or vertically, and provides dynamic mouse tracking in pixels.

Site Meter provides an easy way to add a web counter to your web page. It can display the number of visitors to your web site and keeps statistics on the number of visits each hour and each day.

Apache Web Server is an open-source HTTP server for UNIX and Windows NT. It is an essential tool for developing and testing CGI scripts before publishing them on the Internet.

Xenu's Link Sleuth A spidering program that checks web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on normal links, images, frames, backgrounds and local image maps. The program displays a list of URLs which can be sorted by different criteria to produce a report. Portions of the reports produced by Xenu can be used for a site map.

WordPress is a publishing platform for web pages and blogs with an easy-to-use interface. Some plugins change the appearance of a blog and other plugins support useful functions:

Akismet checks comments submitted to your blog against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under "Manage" and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days.
Peter's Custom Anti-Spam displays a random word (captcha) which a visitor must type before a comment is accepted. This prevents spambots from polluting your site with links. The list of words to display can be easily customized.
WordPress Database Backup saves a compressed file of your blog's database on your computer. The backup can be used for recovery, if necessary.

Graphics

IrfanView This is a versatile image viewer and editor that can be used as the default viewer for many types of graphics. The program comes with a thumbnail viewer that provides many functions, such as batch resizing of images, generation of thumbnails, and generation of web pages with customizable headers and navigation.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, and an image format converter.

DeskScan allows you to capture a full-screen desktop or a selected area as well as input from your Twain device (scanner, camera, etc.) The captures can be saved as BMP, JPG, JPEG2000, MNG, WMF, GIF, PCX, PNG, PDF and TIFF.

Virtual Magnifying Glass, a free, open source, screen magnification program for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.

WhatColor identifies the color of a pixel on the screen of your PC and provides the name of the color. This program is a fully functional evaluation Shareware copy.

HTML Color Picker Pick color from the screen, in RGB and HTML code formats, easily and quickly.

Communications

Skype Free calls, video calls and instant messaging over the Internet.

PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. This is an indispensable tool for working on a remote computer.

Programming

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl provides powerful string-processing and hashing functions that facilitate the manipulation of text files. Perl is also used for graphics programming, system administration, network programming, and CGI programming on the Web.

Java SE Development Kit (JDK) This JDK includes the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and command-line development tools that are useful for developing applets and applications. Java SWING is a toolkit for developing software with graphical interfaces for many operating environments.

NetBeans is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that can run on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris. The NetBeans platform enables developers to create web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications for Java, PHP, JavaScript, Ajax, Ruby, and C/C++.

Microsoft Visual Studio - A collection of free web-development tools and free compilers for software development that include Visual Web Developer, Visual Basic, SQL Server, Visual C#, Visual C++, and Visual J#.

Database

Field Linguist's Toolbox The Toolbox was designed as a data management and text analysis tool for field linguists. It is especially useful for maintaining lexical data, and for parsing and interlinearizing text, but it can be used to manage virtually any kind of data.

Nutrition

CRON-O-Meter is a nutrition analysis program that keeps track of your daily macronutrients (proteins, fats, carbohydrates), as well as your vitamins and minerals. CRON-o-Meter is an excellent tool for any dieter who is interested in getting proper nutrition.

More free software

If you are looking for software that is not listed above, you may want to look at Gizmo's Freeware Reviews. The web site lists and rates free software through the effort of many volunteers.