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Lifelock Dinged $12 Million for Deceptive Business Practices By Kim Zetter: The CEO of Lifelock, Todd Davis, became famous for advertising his Social Security number on television ads and billboards promising his $10 monthly service would protect consumers from identity theft. The company also offered a $1 million guarantee to compensate customers for losses incurred if they became a victim of identity theft after signing up for the service. Cisco Router Delivers 322 Terabits per Second by Samara Lynn: Cisco Systems, has announced the launch of a super-fast and efficiency-focused router technology which will be at the heart of "the next generation of the Internet". A key impetus for its development is keeping pace with the growing demand for video, which Cisco calls today's "killer app. Developers excited by social game explosion by Daniel Terdiman: For game developers whose industry experience predates not just Facebook but even Mark Zuckerberg, you might expect that abandoning making big, complex games for simple titles like Farmville and similar social projects would be anathema. But to hear a panel of respected industry veterans who spoke before a packed house in a huge room at the Game Developers Conference here Tuesday, the truth is exactly the opposite. US Considers Some Free Wireless Broadband Service by Doug Hanchard: Commissioner Mignon L. Clyburn during a speech at the Digital Inclusion Summit suggested that the FCC may look at some wireless spectrum being set aside for at little or no cost for anyone's use. |
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We have scoured the Internet for years looking for great free software that you can use in your everyday computer use. This is a page that you are going to want to bookmark because we have comprised our picks of the best, most effective and useful free applications in the areas of Graphics, Disk Utilities, Security, Audio, and Productivity software.
Solo Computer Services is not responsible for the content of this Publisher's Description. We encourage you to determine whether this product or your intended use is legal. We do not encourage or condone the use of any software in violation of applicable laws.
Security | Productivity | Graphics | Audio & Video | Disk Utilities | Games
| Security Software |
|---|
| Anonymous Web Browser |
| The Anonymous Web Browser allows you to surf the internet anonymously, optionally removing cookies, the browser referer field, scripts (such as JavaScripts, VBScripts, etc), images, and objects (such as Flash, Java, etc). It can also encrypt your URLs and Cookies. You can also change the User-Agent (browser type) that the service sends to the website you're visiting. There is a 2 MB download limit, and a 5 second anti-flood timer. | AntiHook 2.6 |
| This Host Intrusion Prevention (HIP) program monitors the launching of applications and processes, protects against the termination of your security software (such as your firewall and antivirus software), loading of DLLs such as ActiveX controls, loading of kernel drivers (such as used by kernel rootkits), injection of code into other running programs, installation of system-wide (global) Windows hooks, and so on. Version 2.6, a Windows 2k/XP program, is free (though not the later versions). |
| Avast Free Antivirus |
| The simple home solution to great protection avast! antivirus Home Edition represents the best FREE antivirus protection currently available on the market. This edition is FREE OF CHARGE for non-commercial & home use only. Both of these conditions should be met! | AVG Free 8.0 |
| Basic antivirus and antispyware protection for Windows available to download for free. Limited features, no support, for private and non-commercial use only. |
| Avira AntiVir Personal Free Antivirus |
| Avira AntiVir Personal from Avira GmbH protects you computer against viruses, malware, adware and spyware, unwanted programs and other dangers. This manual deals with viruses and software in brief. | Clam AV - Unix / Linux |
| Clam AntiVirus is an open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX, designed especially for e-mail scanning on mail gateways. It provides a number of utilities including a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner and advanced tool for automatic database updates. The core of the package is an anti-virus engine available in a form of shared library. |
| Clamwin Free Antivirus for Windows |
| ClamWin is a Free Antivirus program for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003 and Vista. | F- Secure Black Light Rootkit Detection and Removal |
| F-Secure BlackLight Rootkit Elimination Technology detects objects that are hidden from users and security tools and offers the user an option to remove them. The main purpose is to fight rootkits and all kinds of malware that use rootkits. The F-Secure BlackLight Rootkit Elimination Technology works by examining the system at a deep level. This enables BlackLight to detect objects that are hidden from the user and security software. |
| Jotti's Online Malware Scan |
| This site scans any file that you upload to it with a variety of antivirus programs. It is particularly useful if you are suspicious about a particular file, and want to see if different antivirus software detect anything in it. | KisMac |
| The best wireless scanner for Mac. Find wireless access when you're on the go. |
| LockNote |
| LockNote encrypts your documents using AES 256. Your encrypted document will have an embedded decryption program that will run when you (or your recipient, if you are sending your document to someone else) double-click it in Windows NT/2000/XP. You can then enter the password to decrypt the document. The program is released under the GNU GPL. | Malwarebytes |
| Malwarebytes is a site dedicated to fighting malware. Malwarebytes has developed a variety of tools that can identify and remove malicious software from your computer. When your computer becomes infected, Malwarebytes can provide the needed assistance to remove the infection and restore the machine back to optimum performance. |
| Microsoft Security Essentials |
| Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. | Microsoft Virtual PC |
| Virtual PC 2007 is a powerful software virtualization solution that allows you to run multiple PC-based operating systems simultaneously on one workstation, providing a safety net to maintain compatibility with legacy applications while you migrate to a new operating system. It also saves reconfiguration time, so your support, development, and training staff can work more efficiently. Virtual PC 2007 runs on: Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Tablet PC, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, and Windows Vista Ultimate. |
| ProcessGuard Free |
| ProcessGuard controls application execution, protects programs from termination (to protect malware from killing your antivirus software or firewalls), protects applications from modification by other processes (code injection, etc), and protects your processes from being read or viewed by other processes. The program requires Windows 2000, XP or 2003. | RootkitRevealer |
| RootkitRevealer is an advanced rootkit detection utility. It runs on Windows NT 4 and higher and its output lists Registry and file system API discrepancies that may indicate the presence of a user-mode or kernel-mode rootkit. RootkitRevealer successfully detects all persistent rootkits published at www.rootkit.com, including AFX, Vanquish and HackerDefender (note: RootkitRevealer is not intended to detect rootkits like Fu that don't attempt to hide their files or registry keys). If you use it to identify the presence of a rootkit please let us know! |
| Sandboxie |
| Sandboxie runs your applications in an isolated abstraction area called a sandbox. Under the supervision of Sandboxie, an application operates normally and at full speed, but can't effect permanent changes to your computer. Instead, the changes are effected only in the sandbox. | ShadowSurf |
| ShadowSurf provides free anonymous surfing. |
| Spybot Search & Destroy |
| This little application scans and fixes spyware programs off of your computer. | Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall |
| The #1 Firewall Choice of IT Pros. Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall is the Windows IT Pro Readers' Choice Award winner for best desktop firewall! It was also the least expensive firewall among the top three contenders, proving that affordability doesn't have to compromise quality. SKPF4 offers the hacker-proof security of a leading firewall for half the cost of the competition. |
| Unhackme |
| UnHackMe - First BootWatch AntiRootkit! Now it is the must have tool for you! UnHackMe is specially designed to detect and remove Rootkits. | Vidalia |
| This TOR frontend keeps you anonymous on the web using military-grade techniques. |
| VMWare Server Free |
| Begin enjoying the benefits of server virtualization with the free VMware Server. VMware Server is a hosted virtualization platform that installs like an application on any existing server hardware and partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines. This next-generation version introduces an intuitive web-based management interface to provide a consistent management experience for Windows or Linux users. | VMWare Workstation |
| A virtual machine is a tightly isolated software container that can run its own operating systems and applications as if it were a physical computer. A virtual machine behaves exactly like a physical computer and contains it own virtual (ie, software-based) CPU, RAM hard disk and network interface card (NIC). An operating system can’t tell the difference between a virtual machine and a physical machine, nor can applications or other computers on a network. Even the virtual machine thinks it is a “real” computer. Nevertheless, a virtual machine is composed entirely of software and contains no hardware components whatsoever. As a result, virtual machines offer a number of distinct advantages over physical hardware. |
| Productivity Software |
|---|
| AbiWord |
| AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks. |
| Adobe Acrobat Reader |
| Adobe Reader software is the global standard for electronic document sharing. It is the only PDF file viewer that can open and interact with all PDF documents. Use Adobe Reader to view, search, digitally sign, verify, print, and collaborate on Adobe PDF files. |
| Buddi |
| A personal finance and budgeting program, aimed at those who have little or no financial background. |
| Filezilla FTP Software |
| FileZilla Client is a free, open source FTP client for Windows. It supports FTP, SFTP, and FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS). The client is available under many platforms, binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X are provided. FileZilla Server is an FTP server supported by the same project. It supports FTP and FTP over SSL/TLS. |
| Freemind |
| FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map) software written in Java. |
| Intuit QuickBooks Simple Start Free Edition |
| The FREE bookkeeping software solution for small businesses that want the basics. It's so easy to use, it will give you back your time so you can easily stay on top of your business. You'll spend more time growing your business and making money, not bookkeeping. * Track sales & expenses for up to 20 customers * Instantly create invoices, pay bills, & print checks * Organize your finances in one place, tax ready |
| Keynote |
| Keynote is a flexible, multi-featured tabbed notebook, based on Windows standard RichEdit control. It's always accessible with a single keypress, even if you work in another application. |
| Laconica - The Open Microblogging Tool |
| The best-known site using that code, Identi.ca, allows communication through browsers, e-mail and SMS messaging -- giving a powerful, free alternative to those seeking to build their own social networking or microblogging platforms. |
| Moodle |
| Education course management system |
| Mozilla Backup (Backup Firefox and Thunderbird Settings, Bookmarks, and Emails) |
| MozBackup is a simple utility for creating backups of Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Suite and Netscape profiles. |
| Mozilla Firefox |
| The award-winning Web browser is now faster, more secure, and fully customizable to your online life. With Firefox 2, we have added powerful new features that make your online experience even better. |
| Mozilla Firefox Extensions |
| Extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Firefox, from a simple toolbar button to a completely new feature. They allow you to customize Firefox to fit your own needs and preferences, while letting us keep Firefox itself light and lean. |
| Mozilla Thunderbird Free Email Client |
| Thunderbird delivers. Enjoy safe, fast, and easy email, with intelligent spam filters, quick message search, and customizable views. Brought to you by Mozilla, Thunderbird makes email better. |
| Notepad ++ |
| Open Source programmers notepad for Windows |
| Open Office Free Office Suite (Microsoft Office Alternative) |
| OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute. |
| Opera Web Browser |
| It's a fast, fun and easy way to browse the Web. Opera 9 comes loaded with the tools to keep you productive and safe. Try it today, it's absolutely free! |
| PDFCreator |
| PDFCreator easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. Use it like a printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows application. |
| Q Emulator |
| Q [kju:] emulator is a feature packed Cocoa port of QEMU: Run Linux, Windows, and other systems on your Mac. |
| Quicksilver |
| Quicksilver is a unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data. |
| SharpDevelop |
| Open Source IDE for the .NET Framework. Utilizes the multiple programming languages and Windows forms |
| Skype - Free Phone Calls and Chat Software |
| Skype is a little piece of software that lets you make free calls to anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world. And even though the calls are free, they are really excellent quality. If you and your friends, family or business contacts are using webcams, you can also make free video calls. You can even call landlines and mobile phones at really cheap per minute rates (and there’s no setup or subscription fee). |
| SmartFTP |
| SmartFTP is an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client which allows you to transfer files between your local computer and a server on the Internet. With its many basic and advanced features SmartFTP also offers secure, reliable and efficient transfers that make it a powerful tool. |
| TaxGeek 2006 |
| TaxGeek is a Mozilla-based US income tax program that includes Form 1040, Schedules A, B, C, C-EZ, D, E, K-1 (1065), SE (Short and Long), W2, Form 8880, Form 8863, Form 3903, and Form 2441 with access to most other files as PDFs. It is also intended to be extensible so that developers can easily add other forms that are needed without affecting the existing file formats and stored data. |
| Ubuntu Linux |
| Ubuntu is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with both community and professional support. It is developed by a large community and we invite you to participate too! The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Philosophy: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit. These freedoms make Ubuntu fundamentally different from traditional proprietary software: not only are the tools you need available free of charge, you have the right to modify your software until it works the way you want it to. |
| Virtual Box |
| VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software. Some of the features of VirtualBox are: * Modularity. VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a virtual machine in a typical virtual machine GUI and then control that machine from the command line, or possibly remotely. VirtualBox also comes with a full Software Development Kit: even though it is Open Source Software, you don't have to hack the source to write a new interface for VirtualBox. * Virtual machine descriptions in XML. The configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines. Virtual machine definitions can therefore easily be ported to other computers. * Guest Additions for Windows and Linux. VirtualBox has special software that can be installed inside Windows and Linux virtual machines to improve performance and make integration much more seamless. Among the features provided by these Guest Additions are mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest window). * Shared folders. Like many other virtualization solutions, for easy data exchange between hosts and guests, VirtualBox allows for declaring certain host directories as "shared folders", which can then be accessed from within virtual machines. A number of extra features are available with the full VirtualBox release only (see the "Editions" page for details): * Virtual USB Controllers. VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and allows you to connect arbitrary USB devices to your virtual machines without having to install device specific drivers on the host. * Remote Desktop Protocol. Unlike any other virtualization software, VirtualBox fully supports the standard Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). A virtual machine can act as an RDP server, allowing you to "run" the virtual machine remotely on some thin client that merely displays the RDP data. * USB over RDP. With this unique feature, a virtual machine that acts as an RDP server can still access arbitrary USB devices that are connected on the RDP client. This way, a powerful server machine can virtualize a lot of thin clients that merely need to display RDP data and have USB devices plugged in. |
| X-CD Roast |
| X-CD-Roast tries to be the most flexible CD-burning software ever. It allows even the unexperienced user to create or copy a CD with a few mouse clicks in a intuitive and nice looking graphical user interface. |
| Graphics Software |
|---|
| GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) - Free Photoshop Alternative |
| 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. |
| Inkscape |
| Inkscape is an open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. What sets Inkscape apart is its use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open XML-based W3C standard, as the native format. |
| Paint.net |
| Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins. |
| Scribus |
| Desktop publishing. Complicated install, but a nice app |
| Audio and Video Software |
|---|
| Audacity |
| Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. |
| Blender |
| Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. |
| Burn |
| CD and DVD Burner. Burn any video to a disc that plays in your DVD player! |
| Centerstage |
| Full-screen interface for playing audio, video, and photos. Connect it to your TV. |
| Handbrake |
| HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. |
| iEatBrainz |
| Fills in the correct metadata (title, artist, etc) for MP3s in your collection. |
| Infra Recorder |
| Infra Recorder is a high quality CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. |
| iPodDisk |
| Copy music off your iPod in the finder, like a regular disk drive. |
| Juice |
| If you want to listen to podcasts, this program is for you. Juice is the premier podcast receiver, allowing users to capture and listen to podcasts anytime, anywhere. |
| Media Coder |
| MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding in all time and at this moment, it already has millions of users from 170+ countries all over the planet. |
| Virtual Dub |
| VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images. |
| VLC Media Player |
| VLC - the cross-platform media player and streaming server VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. |
| Disk Utilities Software |
|---|
| 7-Zip |
| 7-Zip is a file archiver with high compression ratio. |
| InsomniaX |
| Disable sleep on a Mac. |
| True Crypt |
| TrueCrypt is the successor to E4M (which is no longer maintained). You can use it to encrypt an entire partition of your hard disk (including your system partition) or to create an encrypted container file which appears like a normal hard disk to Windows. You can then store and access your files on that virtual drive just like any other file. Since the program does not mark the encrypted container (or partition) in any way, there's no way to for any intruder to guess which file is your encrypted container. This, according to the author, also preserves plausible deniability. Encryption algorithms supported include AES, Blowfish, CAST, IDEA (removed in version 2.1a) and Triple-DES. The source code is available free. This program works under Windows Vista, XP, Mac OS X and Linux. |
| VOPT Disk Defragmentation for Windows |
| Free, small disk defrag program for Windows. Works much better than the included Disk Defrag program that installs with Windows. |
| Games Software |
|---|
| AssaultCube |
| AssaultCube, formerly ActionCube, is a free first-person-shooter based on the game Cube. Set in a realistic looking environment, as far as that´s possible with this engine, while gameplay stays fast and arcade. This game is all about team oriented multiplayer fun. |
| BZFlag |
| BZFlag is a free online multiplayer cross-platform open source 3D tank battle game. The name originates from "Battle Zone capture the Flag". It runs on Irix, Linux, *BSD, Windows, Mac OS X, and many other platforms. It's one of the most popular games ever on Silicon Graphics machines and continues to be developed and improved to this day. It's one of the most popular open source games ever. |
| Marathon: Aleph One |
| Aleph One is a game engine currently in development by the Open Source community. It is based on the source code of Marathon 2: Durandal, a game created by Bungie Software in 1995. Since Bungie released the source code, Aleph One has matured to include a variety of new features and improvements. |
| Zombies |
| Zombies is a turn-based game where the only goal is to outlast and destroy the zombies before they do the same to you. Can you save humanity from being overrun? |
Security | Productivity | Graphics | Audio & Video | Disk Utilities | Games
