The Home Computer Freeware List: Updated 05/08/09

Subscribe to CFJ


Rob's great freeware list (aka "toolbox" for building a Windows-based (I know, I know :) ) computer for as little money as possible.

Note that this is a list that I recommend for every baseline installation...I will recommend various specialty applications over the course of my musings, but this is something that I believe everyone should install.

Enjoy - every product here is one that I use or have used. :)

System cleanup utility (good for routine system maintenance) - CCleaner, nCleaner Second - both are quality, but I would say CCleaner is a more intuitive to use. You can do a lot of damage with nCleaner Second if you are not careful!

Defragmenting your hard disk - JKDefrag (for more of you techie folks), Defraggler - Windows defragment is OK, but JKDefrag is quicker, and does a lot more optimization (move large files to the end of the volume, for example). Defraggler is a bit more user-friendly when it comes to appearance. Both are quality products.

Create PDFs - PDFCreator - Creates a new printer in your control panel, and allows you to convert anything that you print to a PDF.

Read PDFs - Foxit PDF reader - Nice non-resource intensive PDF reading software.

Antivirus - Avast 4.8 Home, AVG 8.0, - You should NEVER surf without some form of AV installed. Avast! is nice because it can scan your system for viruses while the screen saver is active, and protects your PC against multiple vectors. Honorable mentions: Avira AntiVir. Want free AV for a Windows server? Use ClamWin (no real-time scanner, so you will have to run scheduled scans, but it works VERY well).

Spyware Protection - Ad-Aware 2008 (not a real-time scanner), ThreatFire, SuperAntiSpyware - Spyware sucks, and these tools do a great job of cleaning them up. I would recommend installing a combination of these utilities, using one to clean-up after the other.

removed from the list: SpywareTerminator

IE Spy/Malware Protection - IE-SpyAds - This will keep 99% of activex components from being installed on your system through IE. If you are going to use IE, you should use it with *ahem* protection.

Firewall - Comodo - Very configurable - looks sharp, excellent reviews (replacing Kerio).

Remote Control (Technical Support) - CrossLoop - This one is great for consultants and other at-home tech folks - totally secure and SO easy to use. Crossloop makes remote controlling mom's computer a dream. CrossLoop now supports Mac!

Remote Control (Extending your office) - Logmein - Access your computer from a secure (256-bit encrypted) connection. You don't need someone on the other end to approve your connection (like Crossloop).

Screenshot Utility - FastStone Capture 5.3. If you can find it, use it. Newer versions are not free. Can't find it? Use Easy Capture. Are you an advanced user? Screen Captor is superior to both utilities.

VPN - Hamachi - Connect two disparate networks together with little trouble. Great for hooking up with your buddies for online gaming, or home "family" support over the Internet.

File Recovery - PC Inspector File Restore, Recuva - Did you accidentally delete your files from your digital camera? Use this to restore it. Good for system drives as well.

Internet Browsing - FireFox - Tabbed browsing, all sorts of great add-ons available, spyware/popup blocker, best of all NO activex support.

Email Client - Thunderbird - Built in spam protection, RSS reader and more.

FTP Client - FileZilla, WinSCP - Secure FTP, save your sessions, easy drag & drop interface.

Office Productivity - Microsoft Live Office (online), Google Docs (online), Open Office (local install). The non-MS apps are MS Office compatible. Text, Spreadsheet, Presentation software -These will do for 90% of your low to middle of the road users.

Zip Archiving - IZArc - New to the list is 'IZArc', recommended by fellow freeware addict, Carputers. I have to agree. If you use WinZip, then you can use IZArc. Excellent interface, supports the widest amount of archive formats, great features, just great all around!

Keep track of startup programs - Sysinternals AutoRuns - Excellent tool to discover what the heck is running at startup - definitely for advanced users. Can produce a CSV file for viewing later (or to post to online support forums), etc. VERY thorough. You can use this to help you clean up malware that is slowing down your system. Also recommended is Hijack This, which features a huge user-community.

Graphics Editing - The Gimp - EXCELLENT freebie editor with a lot of built-in effects and layering capability. If you like the Photoshop interface, you can try GimpShop. Want something simpler? Use Paint.net.

Image Touch Ups, Photo Processing - Picasa - Easy to use program that can help you catalog, view, burn, and touch-up photographs. Also, you can use Picasa to upload photos to your blog, and submit them to online digital image printing services. A digital camera's best friend.

Image Thumbnail Viewer - The classic, Irfanview, my personal favorite - FastStone Viewer and another popular one, XNView.

CD Burning - CD Burner XP Pro - Supports burning from/to ISO image files, audio CD's, DVDs, etc. - Especially nice if you have a burner, but no longer have the OEM burning software that came with it. Other quality apps are Infra Recorder and Express Burner Free.

Backup software - Syncback - Backup to/from an FTP location, compress and encrypt data, supports directory synchronization, and much, much more.

DVD viewing (video) - VLC Media Player - Play your DVD/VCD/MPEG videos from a single player. Works GREAT! You can use VLC to watch DVDs without re-installing the OEM DVD software. You can also use it to convert videos (transcode).

Video conversion - Any Video Converter Free. Convert a video file to a myriad of different formats, great for copying videos to your IPod, Zune, or other personal media player.

removed from the list: Media Converter SA, Super

Video codecs - K-Lite codec pack - this will enable your computer to play just about any video type out there.

RSS News Reader - Google Reader (online), FeedDemon NewsGator (which now will synchronize with Google Reader!) -Keep up with your online news and blogs (*ahem*, like this one?).

Multi-IM/chat client - Pidgin, and if you don't use IRC, then Digsby is for you!

More as I find 'em.

System management akin to DameWare and Hyena: Purgos 3.0.249

Purgos 3.0.249
http://www.softulz.net/

Have you ever used DameWare tools or SystemTools' Hyena products? They are GREAT paid system administration tools, essential for any network administrator to effectively support multiple users spanning different physical locations.

Purgos is a new tool to me (although it is at version 3!) which almost fills the freeware niche of "DameWare"-esque utilities in that you can quickly inventory a remote system, allows remote control via VNC or RDP, shows you quick device details, quick remote registry support and more.

Note that it is not nearly as clean as DameWare or Hyena, but it does approach those programs' level of usefulness when you need to get a quick connection to a remote computer.

With Purgos, you can quickly:

• Determine OS, Service pack version
• Remote control via RDP or VNC
• Browse locally installed hard disks on remote computer
• Filter computers/servers based upon various criteria
• Group computers/servers
• Run executables from remote station
  

Central inventory database

The main difference between Purgos and the aforementioned DameWare and Hyena products is that managed computers report into a central administration server via an installed agent, similar to SMS. That means you can view system details even when the computer is offline. Limited information is available on Purgos' website to determine exactly how the agent works...i.e. does it update statistics on a predetermined interval, or when the agent starts up?

The nice thing about a centralized database is that you can run a quick query showing how many managed computers you have where service pack 3 is installed, or how many computers have 512Mb of RAM.

Add computers to the Purgos console

You can add new computers to the console quickly via a couple different routes:

• Single computer name/IP
• Multiple computers via Active Directory import
• Multiple computers via NTLM domain
• Multiple computers via text file listing

A little refinement could be made...

It seems like the computer management console piece is a bit more refined than the 'server files' component. When I attempted to look at some of the properties of where the server files and folders where located, I get an error, but this is if no files have been dropped into the folder...

Also, it was not immediately clear what these folders are for, but more in-depth documentation hunting would probably help me out there.

There are a lot of cool features built into Purgos that I don't have time to review at this time (baby and all, right?), here's a couple interesting features:

Computer Management (Copy Files)	Section 2.4
An arbitrary set of files can be copied to one or more computers. The files that need to be copied to the server can be added to the servers file set at the time of copy or before. Select the files or set of files from all files on the server to copy.

Computer Management (Snapshots)

Section 2.9

Snapshots are a way of capturing the configuration of a given system at a given time. Once two or more snapshots have been taken you can then compare them to analyze the differences. Snapshots can be scheduled to run on a scheduled basis or can be taken immediately the compare with an older snapshot. Comparing snapshots consists of selecting the two points in time that you wish to compare and beginning the compare process . Once the compare process is complete you can view the specific details about the differences found.

I'd like to see the ability to run our own commands against a remote computer, much like Hyena's functionality. Also, I'd like to see remote printers that are installed...

If you get a chance to take a look at this, post your thoughts here.

Update: Spiceworks 4.0 coming in June

Spiceworks, a personal favorite freebie of mine is slated for a 4.0 release in June.



Some of the new non-heartburn inducing spiciness (as mentioned in the 4.0 forums):

• Network maps
• Bulk-editing of objects
• Removal of Glide support (not many people use it)
• IE6 support dropped for reports and admin interface (end user GUI will still be supported)
• Latest Ruby on Rails as a framework, resulting in faster operation
  
• New end-user portal layout
  

In the meantime, if you don't know what Spiceworks is or want to know more about what it does, review this slideshow/video:

Spiceworks Intro

View more presentations from ground047.

Comment: Getting rid of a computer? Wiping your drive once may be sufficient.

Saw this tidbit of news a little while back:

http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/888

Wiping your drive only once with garbage data is likely to be sufficient enough security to ensure that prying eyes can't get to your deleted data.

If you have been in the tech/IT industry for any time, you know that you can easily recover files and folders that have been previously deleted from a system with various forensic tools. As long as that block on the hard disk hasn't been completely overwritten by newer data, you have a great chance of getting that data back in some legible format.

When deleting data, some security tools out there will overwrite the blocks occupied by that data numerous times to ensure that the chances of recovery is impossible. While this offers a nice big helping of warm fuzzies, it isn't really necessary!

With the aid of an electron microsope, researchers had determined that while yes, multiple writes and rewrites of random series of 0's and 1's makes it impossible to yield any recoverable data, they also found that a single wipe was sufficient to block any recovery of any substantial amount of meaningful information.

Security Focus is currently investigating this claim, however:

"(Editor's note: SecurityFocus is currently investigating the veracity of the research paper mentioned in this article. Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland, an expert on secure deletion, has criticized the work in the epilogue to his paper on secure deletion.)"

My guess?

Either way, if you are wiping your disk at least once, it is better than not at all - - also, unless you are harboring some super-secret government data, the amount of effort and resources required to recover data from your drive by some random kid is probably not worth the effort.

Utilities you can use to wipe free space or data from your drive:

• Eraser
• Active @ Killdisk
• Darik's Boot and Nuke
• Shamwow - it can do it all, right? ;)