DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - JUN 2016
SOURCES AND REVIEWS OF FREEWARE - PART 1
©2016 Donald R. Snow
This page was last updated 2016-06-13.
These Freeware Corner notes are published in
TAGGology, our Utah Valley Technology and
Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) monthly newsletter.
They are also posted on my Freeware Corner
Notes page on
http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where you can just click on the links and
there may be corrections or updates after the
printed version. There may also be family
history class notes about these topics on my
webpage.
SOURCES AND REVIEWS OF FREEWARE - PART 1
There are many sources of freeware, shareware,
and open-source software on the Internet and
this note will show a few with my comments.
First some definitions.
FREEWARE means it is completely free and you
can use it or give copies to anyone without
restsriction.
SHAREWARE means the author has posted it so
you can download a copy for free and try it
out to see if it meets your needs. and, if you
want to continue to use it, you are on your
honor to send him or her the required fee,
usually $10 or less. OPEN-SOURCE means the
author has posted the program and also the
computer code online for you to download and
use completely free and, if you know
programming, you can even alter the code to
make it do what you want.
GLARY UTILITIES
The Glary Utilities home page is
http://www.glarysoft.com/
and is a program and source of freeware that I
recommend highly. There are free and
commercial versions of Glary Utilities and
I've been using the free version for 10-15
years and have found it really helpful.
I run it on each of my computers about once a
week to find and clear up problems and to
check the versions of my installed programs,
both commercial and free. For one thing
it tells you how fast your computer booted and
that's very helpful information. It has
a 1-Click Maintenance button and takes a few
minutes to go through my whole computer to see
if there are problems in the registry, file
structure, shortcuts, etc. Then a Repair
Problems button comes up to repair all or only
the problems I want it to. It has
options to set so that it only checks certain
things on your computer; for example, I never
have it Disk-Repair or Defragment my Solid
State Hard drive, since that's unnecessary and
would shorten its life. After it repairs
any problems and empties the trash, I click
the Check For Updates button and it analyzes
all programs installed on my computer and
sends the data to its home page to see if
there are updates for any of them. This
includes commercial, as well as freeware
updates. Nearly every week there are 4
or 5 programs that have updates. It
shows me my installed version, the latest
version available, information about the
program, and provides a button to download the
updated version directly from their
website. When I ran the Check For
Updates on my desktop computer earlier today,
it said there were 6 program updates, i.e.,
new versions of Evernote, Calibre, VLC Media
Player, Ice Cream Ebook Reader, Firefox, and a
math program that I use. I like their
website and, as far as I am aware, I have
never got a virus from them. The virus
checker I use is AVG Free and it has never
come on to tell me that a Glarysoft download
has a virus, as it does for some other
websites. When I download a file, I
always add the following to the name of a
freeware download: -Freeware-YYYY-MM-DD.
Then all the downloads of the same file sort
together and in chronological order with the
latest at the bottom. When installing or
updating any program, I always use the Custom
Install option, not the Standard or
"Recommended" Install option, since then I can
select what I want done and it doesn't change
my default program for that file type.
When you click on the update button for any
program, on the left side of the download page
you see a list of categories of all the
freeware they have. And here is a link
directly to those freeware categories http://www.filepuma.com/
. Their website includes all of the
major freeware programs that I use. At
the end of each category listing there is a
See More button for additional programs and
descriptions. Glarysoft is a major
source of good freeware and an easy way to
keep it all updated. However, remember
that portable programs that you have on your
computer are not entered in the Registry, so
Glary Utilities doesn't know about them and
won't update them. You have to update
portable programs in other ways and there is
an entire article about Portable Apps on my
Freeware Corner page.
DOTTECH
This is a blog and website that I have
subscribed to for several years -- http://dottech.org/
. It has freeware and reviews of
freeware. Much of it is too technical
for me, but they also have tips and trick,
reviews, and downloads of programs that are
helpful. About two-thirds of the entries
seem to be "How to root (something) ..." and I
don't even know what that means. There
are buttons across the top for Giveaways,
Reviews, Tips and Tricks, and Downloads.
You can also do searches for things like "pdf
editors" in their search box and you see a
long list of tips, freeware, and
reviews. The Giveaway button shows you
things that are free that day on various
websites. The Reviews button includes
subcategories such as Windows, Mac, and Linux,
and further subcategories include things like
the Best Free Windows Software in various
categories. For example, there are
articles covering The Best Free Virus
Checkers, The Best Free PDF Editors, The Best
Free Photo Editors, The Best Free Cloud
Storage Websites, etc., all very helpful
information. They have been doing
reviews for many years, so there are many such
articles and they contain links of where you
can download the programs. Also, at the
ends of the articles, whether reviews or not,
you frequently find comments by other people
that point out additional things about the
programs or give alternative freeware that
they have used and like. The Tips and
Tricks icon has hundreds of articles and can
be searched for anything you might be looking
for, e.g. "How to disable Windows 10
notifications". Note that many of the
tips and links are to other websites and not
just dotTech, so be advised. Their
Downloads button takes you to a website called
SharewareOnSale and seems to be mostly
commercial software that is discounted, but
not free. There are free programs listed
there, but I don't see any way to find them
except to scroll down and look for them.
Doing a CTRL-F search for "free" on that page
brings them up, but includes many other
programs where the description contains words
like "free upgrades".
GIVEAWAY OF THE DAY
This is not freeware, but is free commercial
software. On this website -- https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/
-- they give away for free every day a
different commercial program. You can
subscribe to their daily email that tells you
what the free program is for that day.
If you want the day's free program, it has to
be downloaded and installed on your computer
before about 1 or 2 am, Utah time.
Software companies give away copies of their
programs here, since it makes their programs
available to techies who can give them
feedback and who may tell their friends about
it. Most of the programs they offer are
not of interest to me, but occasionally they
are and I have downloaded and installed
some. When they offer a program you are
interested in, click the download button and
save it with instructions of how to install it
and what license to use to unlock it.
You can then use the program as long as you
want at no charge, but you don't get updates
and you can't transfer it to any other
computer. One thing I have found very
helpful on this website is the comments that
people make about the programs.
Frequently, someone will point out that there
is a freeware program that will do the same
thing as this commercial program and they tell
you where you can download it. The
commercial companies sometimes include
discounts for a license for the program that
will allow you to get upgrades, unlike the
free versions. Another way I have used
this site is to do Google site searches for
information, e.g. do a Google search for
"site:https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/ pdf"
(without the quotes) and you get all the
articles on their website mentioning
pdf. By looking at the dates of the
articles, you can find ones that are recent
and see if they have information about
freeware or other things that you are
interested in.
ALTERNATIVETO
The website http://alternativeto.net/
helps find free programs that work like
commercial ones.
You tell it the commercial program you
would like an alternative for and it lists
several. For Microsoft Word it lists 46
alternative free programs. For Evernote
it lists 299 alternatives. Of course,
the alternatives don't work exactly the same
as the commercial program, but depending on
your needs, you can usually find a free
program that is close enough to do what you
want. Because of the high prices of some
software, many people have started using free
programs, instead of the commercial
ones. The first alternative program
listed for MS Word is LibreOffice and I've
been using that for several years and I like
some things about it better than Word.
The AlternativeTo page has filters, such as
Portable, that you can use to narrow down the
list and there are options for Windows, Mac,
Android, iOS, etc. It is
"crowd-sourced", that is people who use the
programs give their recommendations, so you
can see what they think. You don't have
to be a member of AlternativeTo to use it, but
joining is free and then you can give your own
recommendations and be a service to
others. You might take a look at the
webpage and find some alternative freeware
programs for some commercial ones that you
use.
CONCLUSION
There is a wealth of free software available
to do many tasks, especially for tasks in
family history. The problem is finding
the programs you need and learning to use
them. Hopefully, this Freeware Corner article
has given you some ideas and helps. I will
write more on this topic in the future, since
this article only scratches the surface.
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