Freewares and Betas
List of Best Free Non-Adobe PDF Reader – Download Freeware
Sick to death of Adobe’s slow, bloated PDF Reader? If so then check out the Foxit Reader. It’s small, loads in flash, supports bookmarks, has search capability, offers many views and runs on any version of Windows. On top of that it can print PDFs as well. It runs without installation too, so it’s ideal [...]
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List of Best Free Disk De-fragmenter – Download Freeware
My top recommendation here is Diskeeper Lite [1], an older free version of Executive Software’s current commercial Diskeeper product. It works very well indeed given that it is V7 while the current commercial product is at V10 but I’ve had a few complaints from subscribers about the annoying nag screen. I have no magic fix [...]
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List of Best Free Spell-Checker – Download Freeware
This is an impressive little utility that checks individual words on a correct-as-you-type basis, from clipboard contents or from a query box. The provided dictionary is not enormous but more than adequate for normal usage and you can also add words to the dictionary as needed. Resource usage seems modest and the product can be [...]
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List of Best Free Audio Editing Software – Download Freeware
Thanks to subscriber Jay Eitelman for this suggestion: “Gizmo, I’ve switched from using $349 Adobe Audition to using Audacity [1]. It does all the recording and editing I need, and is much simpler/faster to use. Check out the noise reduction – it even allows you to select a noise profile – then remove the profile [...]
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List of Best Free Outlook Express Backup – Download Freeware
This free utility allows you to do a full or selective backup of OE’s critical files including mail folders, newsgroups, address book and identity settings. Simple, effective … neat. http://www.oehelp.com/OEBackup/Default.aspx (2.1mb)
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List of Best Free Outlook Add-in – Download Freeware
I hate opening HTML email. Despite multiple layers of protection I just know that one day some cunning new exploit is going to get me. That’s why I’m so enthusiastic about PocketKnife Peek, a small free Outlook 2002 add-in that allows you to preview your HTML email as text. RealAccount is another freeware add-in for [...]
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List of Best Free Timesheet Program – Download Freeware
This is a very lucrative class of programs and consequently the very best programs are unfortunately, commercial products. The best of the free programs is “Timesheets Lite” [1] from Moving Target Software. It’s actually an older “lite” version of that company’s full featured $29 shareware product. Its main limitation is that only one person can [...]
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List of Best Free Route Tracer – Download Freeware
3D Traceroute graphically displays Internet route information. You can use it for technical tasks such as diagnosing slow connections or for general purpose snooping like determining the location and owner of a web site or tracing spammers. http://www.d3tr.de/ (1.6mb)
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List of Best Free Parental Filter – Download Freeware
The stand-out choice in this category is K9 Web Protection [1] by Blue Coat Systems. It’s a web based service that uses a special driver installed on your PC to redirect all your browsing through K9′s servers where it is filtered for content. This means that the filtering works for any browser installed on your [...]
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List of Best Free CD Recovery Utility – Download Freeware
It’s pretty common to encounter unreadable CDs. The causes are many, ranging from simple scratches through to partially written sessions. ISOBuster is free utility that will allow you extract any usable information on the CD (or DVD) to your hard drive. It works by bypassing Windows and talking directly to the hardware. As an added [...]
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