Top Freeware Links

[Matt]

There is clearly something wrong at COMODO Towers, these products are all free....

 

http://www.comodo.com/products/free_products.html

 

Get them while they're free, get them now - use them - don't ask stupid questions, just do it.

 

 

 

 

[beag_teeets]

Yes sir! Downloaded and no questions asked!

 

Might prompt for license codes when installing but won't know that till I try at home - no need to put these products on here at work

[Ackey]

GIMP

 

Rummy, I can't help but feel it's a bit, well, :censored:. It seems to be lacking, or I can't work out how to do, some pretty simple functions... it's certainly better than the nothing I had before though!

 

Do you know, is it something that has regular updates from a dev. team or is it just a random release when someone gets round to it?

[Matt]

No idea, I use photoshop - on the gfx forums I frequent it is held in high regard, it does do almost everything that photoshop can do it's just different.

 

While I'm here just a word on the freeware GOM Player that's linked above, I installed this last week and it caused untold damage to my PC. Whilst it was installing it clearly stepped all over some system files which caused explorer.exe buffer to overrun, catastrophically slowing down my system to an unusable level - and seemingly damaged my roll back options with system restore. It's a good job I know what I'm doing, still - a full OS install did cross my mind for an instant.

 

I'm using Vista Home Premium so take note, if any other OS users use it please post up your experiences.

 

Based on mine, I'd advise users to avoid GOM and keep to the KLITE codec pack and the bundled unbloated mplayer - much better....

[beag_teeets]

Interesting, I use GOM a fair bit and haven't had a problem on Vista Home Premium & Ultimate or XP Pro & Home. Generally use it to watch films and in fullscreen mode so not using any other apps at the same time but haven't noticed any problems.

[Matt]

FeedDemon : "Looking for a great way to view and manage your RSS feeds from your desktop? Look no further than FeedDemon, the most popular Windows RSS reader." - I've been using this for about 2 months now, superb functionality.

 

Free FLV Converter : "Leawo Free FLV Converter is an easy-to-use and complete free FLV to video converter. With this free FLV Converter, you can easily and greatly convert FLV to AVI, convert FLV to MPEG for burning to DVD, CD or other use, convert FLV to WMV for playback on Zune, Creative Zune player, Pocket PC, etc., Convert FLV to MP4 for uploading or playback on iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, PSP, etc., and convert FLV to 3GP, 3G2 for playback on Cell Phone, Blackberry, etc. This Free FLV Converter also can be used to convert FLV to video in formats of MOV, DV, FLV, TS and audio in any formats."

 

JDiskReport : "JDiskReport enables you to understand how much space the files and directories consume on your disk drives, and it helps you find obsolete files and folders."

[Matt]

I'm not in the Win7 users group, so I really can't comment on any tweaks or fixes, however I've recently recovered my 5 y-o laptop from it's disk thrashing hell to a nice streamlined platform.

 

Shame that XP will lose it's MS support from 2014, it's a decent user friendly platform, although I noticed nothing but pain with my XPproSP3 update...

 

What I've done:

 

My old laptop doesn't have a lot of space: around 50gb, so resources are tight, so as a project - it's interesting.

I've created three partitions, two for XP and one for Linux LXDE in a dual boot environment - the reason for the dual boot is I wanted a Linux learning platform without cocking up my big box PC that the whole family uses. I reckoned that there's more to lose it trying to partition that than an old laptop that's going to get formatted anyway. As a side note, LXDE is so lightweight and flexible that it's the OS of choice for the beginners using RasPi - so that's a space win.

 

XPproSP2 was installed barebones - hardly anything on startup apart from drivers AV and firewall. For AV I used Avast free with a minimal install which is such a light runner, and the little known Privatefirewall which is also so light on resources you barely notice the impact. Klite codecs was the next install, WinRAR, and finally Chrome. No MS Word or Excel - I use Googledocs for that.

 

Use list:

 

Gparted: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Avast: http://www.avast.com/index

Personalfirewall: http://www.privacyware.com/personal_firewall.html

K-Lite: http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

WinRAR: http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm

Chrome: https://www.google.com/chrome

 

LXDE: http://lxde.org/

[Matt]

I posted Personalfirewall above, use this instead as a light runner:

 

Tinywall >> http://tinywall.pados.hu/

[Yard Dog]

Just got a new laptop. I've downloaded tinywall but McAfee (a trial version of which came pre-installed on my asus laptop) seems to still be the firewall protecting me rather than windows defender (which I understand tinywall tags onto). Can't seem to turn off McAfee and turn on defender as the options in the action center are greyed out ?

 

Also downloaded avast antivirus free and will down ccleaner soon. Anything else I should download security wise ?

 

Are malware bytes and spybot still necessary ?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Matt]

To uninstall McAfee: http://service.mcafe...spx?id=TS101331

 

Tinywall needs a lot of manual intervention early on to create an exceptions list, however if the mode is changed to AUTOLEARN it'll ask whether or not to allow service to an application, and add it to the list (the list of exceptions can be found in MANAGE). Of course you could always browse to the applications you would like to add to the exceptions using ADD APPLICATION in MANAGE. It's not bad, a toss-up between Personalfirewall and Tinywall for me.

 

Spybot and MBAM are optional extras I suppose. A lot of extensions for Chrome and Firefox deal definitely help beef up prevention and protection; Adbock and Poper Blocker being the two I'd recommend.