No money left for software ?

You are on a tight budget and you want to buy a PC and software ? Than consider spending everything on a PC and nothing on software. There are lots of free alternatives that will satisfy the needs of 90% among you. A list…

But first some remarks

• The list is aimed at users with a Windows Operating system. Most computers come with a pre-installed version. Those who are working in a Unix(-like) environment don’t really need such a list (there are literally thousands of programs and packages included in the numerous free linux distributions), and Mac OS users, well, perhaps one of the readers can make a list ?
• We have excluded online software as most of this is still a bit basic (although there are some noteble exceptions like Google Reader e.g. — another idea for a list ?)
• I have limited my suggestions to 3 maximum per application.

Browsers

Windows comes with the browser Internet Explorer. But I would strongly suggest to install some free alternatives : Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Flock.

Communication, networking, internet

Email : again a Mozilla product,Thunderbird, an e-mail and news client to replace Microsoft Outlook. Possibly you could also add the Lightning extension that adds calendar and scheduling functionality.

Next Pidgin (formerly named Gaim), a multi-platform instant messaging client. The software supports many commonly used instant messaging protocols, allowing the user to log into various different services from one application.Interesting if you love to chat.

I would also suggest Skype. It’s a software program that allows users to make calls over the Internet to other Skype users free of charge (!). Calls to landlines and cell phones can be made for a fee (lower than with traditional means). Additional features include instant messaging, file transfer and video conferencing.

You might want an aggregator to read feeds from sites, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs. Install e.g. Sage, a news aggregator extension for the Firefox browser. It’s a bit basic, but it does what it’s supposed to do without too many bells. If you use Opera, you have an aggregator included already. The same goes for Thunderbird. If you want a more advanced feedreader, than I would definitely go for Feeddemon.

Filezilla is a cross-platform FTP client. Directory Opus and Notepad++ (see below) also include a FTP client, but I prefer Filezilla.

Office suites and document editing

OpenOffice.org comes with a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a presentation program (Impress), a database program (Base), a vector graphics editor (Draw) and a tool for creating and editing mathematical formulae (Math). This open source office suit is a perfect alternative for Microsoft Office. Consider also OxygenOffice Professional which is sort of an enhanced version of OpenOffice.org and comes with extras like templates, cliparts, samples, fonts and VBA support.

Scribus is a desktop publishing (DTP) application known for its broad feature set of page layout features comparable to leading commercial applications such as Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign.

proTeXt is a free integrated development environment (IDE) for LaTeX which is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. It includes MiKTeX, a text editor ( TeXnicCenter),along with Ghostscript and GSview. I have posted the installation procedure some time ago.

Microsoft Windows systems come with the very simple text editor Notepad. I would recommend to install Notepad++, VIM or PSPad.

PDF (Portable Document Format) is a frequently used document format that requires a special reader. The obvious one is Adobe Reader. If you want to create pdf documents than you can install PDFCreator which allows the user to select PDFCreator as their printer, allowing almost any application to print to PDF. PDF can also be created with OpenOffice.Org and LaTeX. Editing exsiting PDF documents is a bit more ccomplicated. A free one is PDFedit which is an editor for Unix-like operating systems, but can be used on top of Windows if you install Cygwin. I will not start discussing the possibilities of using UNIX on Windows machines in this post as this is (a) a bit more complicated, and (b) there are numerous ways to use Unix software and Windows on the same hardware. As of version 0.46, Inkscape (see below) also allows PDF editing through an intermediate translation step involving poppler.

Security

This is a difficult one. If we stick to the idea of not spending money on software, than ClamWin is a free antivirus software worth considering. AVG is also used by many. If you would spend some money on software, than this is probably the first thing to look at. Professional security software is still way better than open source and/or free software. Look for BitDefender, Norton (slows your system sometimes) or Kaspersky.

Back-up and data management

Cobian Backup supports Unicode, FTP, compression (Zip, SQX), encryption (including Blowfish, Rijndael, DES, RSA-Rijndael), incremental and differential backup.It supports long file names (32.000 chars) on backups except on ZIP backup (256 only). The software may be installed as an application or a service running in the background. Multilingual support is done via user-submitted language files.

Install also 7-Zip, a free open source file archiver, instead of WinZip and WinRAR, which are the main proprietary competitors.

Windows Explorer is the Microsoft application that is part of the Microsoft Windows operating system since Windows 95 and that runs on top of the Windows operating system and provides a graphical user interface for accessing the file systems. I do not see a free system to replace this, but if you have already spend some money on security and you still have some left, than check out Directory Opus, especially if you have huge amounts of files (60 days free trial). It seems that Total Commander and SpeedCommander are good as well, but I have never tried these two.

Media

Where to start ? The choice is huge…

Audio editing/management/player : Audacity (editor), iTunes (management and player), VLC Mediaplayer (eh, player…)

Images : Irfanview is an image viewer that can view, edit, and convert image files (and play video/audio formats) or the very basic application Picasa

Video editing : Avidemux, Virtual Dub or VirtualDubMod. The latter is still available but I think that development has stopped. Still an option to consider.

Graphics : GIMP, a raster graphics editor used to process digital graphics and photographs and often described as a free alternative for Adobe Photoshop, Paint.net, another possible alternative for Photoshop but I prefer GIMP ; Inkscape, “an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format” ; Dia, a general-purpose diagramming software ; and Blender, a 3D animation program. This should allow you to do a lot of decent graphics work already.

Science

I will limit this to software for statistics and mathematics. If someone has experience with software in other scientific domains, let me know.

Statistics : PSPP, definitely and more or less a free alternative for SPSS. And yes, of course Gretl, an application for compiling and interpreting data mainly for econometrics.

Mathematics : SAGE, aimed at creating an “open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB”, Maxima, “a system for the manipulation of symbolic and numerical expressions, including differentiation, integration, Taylor series, Laplace transforms, ordinary differential equations, systems of linear equations, polynomials, and sets, lists, vectors, matrices, and tensors. Maxima yields high precision numeric results by using exact fractions, arbitrary precision integers, and arbitrarily precision floating point numbers. Maxima can plot functions and data in two and three dimensions”, and GNU Octave, to perform numerical computations and which is mostly compatible with MATLAB. I know I told you that I would limit suggestions to three, but let’s make an exception here. Have also a look at R and R Commander. R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics.R Commander is a GUI for the R programming language. Extremely powerful !

Content Management Systems

CMS is perhaps not the best heading for software used for blogging, Wikis, and …CMS.

Let’s start with the blogging software: WordPress.com (hosted for free like this blog e.g.) and WordPress.org (to be hosted by you). Have a look here for other possibilities.

Next Wiki software. Again there are just too many options. Have a look at MediaWiki (used for Wikipedia), TWiki and PmWiki. Or check out the WikiMatrix for a comparaison of Wiki software.

With CMS we mean Web Content Management Systems in this overview. Or software that helps you publishing content to web sites. Have a look at Drupal and Joomla!

No heading

A nice piece of software is also FreeMind, a mind mapping application written in Java. It’s fun and useful at the same time !

You might have noticed that I didn’t include any P2P software. I haven’t seen any that I really like just yet (read : without junk).

And to end this post, one last piece of software : PortableApps. PortableApps.com is a compilation of free and open source applications founded by John T. Haller. The applications run directly from any storage equipment, like a flash drive, iPod, external hard drive, or directly from a computer. Ideal to have your favourite free software on a simple USB flash drive.

There are alternatives for most of the software I suggested in this list, and everyone has probably his own favourites. An endless discussion in some cases. I would however concentrate on one alternative and learn to use all of its features iso swapping software regularly just for some (mis-)perceived advantage.

Suggestions are of course welcome.

UPDATES:

Revo Uninstaller is not just an uninstall application, but it also includes other utilities and features that will help you clean your Windows based computer system. Very useful tool.