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This is a list of Windows software that I have found interesting or useful on the Internet, all can be downloaded for free but some are only trials that may expire after some time as noted. Some may have Mac versions but remember that Mac is only about 2% of the world computer market so many companies are reluctant to want to maintain two versions.. As I am Australian based, any $price will be in Aussie dollars except where noted as US$. Any suggestions to expand the list are welcome, but remember it is my personal list of things I like, or find useful, or may turn out useful once I test them some more. Not arranged in any particular order. The emphasis is on photo software and of course free software if possible. This page is rather intermittently maintained so some links may be out of date, if so then use Google to find things. It's hard to categorise some programs so some may appear in an unexpected table below.
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Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 also Ultimate version with extras |
Photo editor |
30 day trial. Big download. This version X2 (Version 12) does have some more internal upgrades to make it more useful for "serious" users. Paint Shop Pro is a way better value for money program than Photoshop variants. Easy to use, many features. Corel now owns Jasc software. I've used Version 8 for years and it is good, but not a sensible colour space aware program up to V9, the new versions X onwards should fix that. Paint Shop Pro X2 should cost around Aus$200. Go to www.corel.com and look for Paint Shop Pro X2 links. If needing to save a dollar or two, any older Version 8, Version 9, Version X or X1 will satisfy the needs of 90% of users, you may see an old copy in a shop or market stall at a reduced price. On those older boxes it will be called JASC Paint Shop Pro 8 or 9. I've tried many editors, but I keep coming back to Paint Shop Pro as it is much easier to use, many functions are just left/right mouse clicks, instead of the Photoshop way of holding a keyboard key plus a mouse click, you'd be surprised how that little difference makes life easier in a long edit job like cloning out junk to repair an old crinkled photo for instance. OK I'm used to it for years now but I keep dropping back to using my old Paint Shop Pro 8 even after having others available, or after doing 30 day trials of others. In previous years with practical trials using very, very large files to edit, Paint Shop Pro did the job, albeit slowly, same big files in Photoshop crashed the system. |
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Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 |
Photo editor |
Elements 8 trial, possibly 30 days, is a large download from Adobe and costs US$139.99 and upgrade US$119.99 Elements is friendlier to use than the full-blown industrial strength Photoshop but traditionally misses out on some of the more technical and sometime useful features of the full Photoshop. Find everything from www.adobe.com and look for free trials, downloadable updates and free plugins. |
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Adobe Photoshop CS4 |
Photo Editor |
30 day trial to download (large). Has two versions, one with more pro additions. It is the standard industrial strength graphics program that handles digital photography. Lots of help available from everywhere. Steep pricing at US$699 (basic CS4 version) but look for upgrade deals on old versions that may be cheaper to buy. Also educational versions may be cheaper. From www.adobe.com |
| Adobe Lightroom 2 | Photo manager and Editor | 30 day trial to download. Cost to buy US$299. Is generally the best photo manager available, but still need something like Photoshop for occasional extra edits that Lightroom cannot do.From www.adobe.com |
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Picture Window Pro |
Photo editor |
30 day trial, online US$90 to buy. Great program, but very different to the usual Photoshop type of operation. Slightly steep learning curve but worth it. Designed by a photographer for photographers. Always download the 15 meg PDF manual to get good instructions. www.dl-c.com |
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The GIMP |
Photo Editor |
Free. www.gimp.org Always improving. Originally belonged to the Linux world but now works just fine with Windows XP/Vista. For Windows users, look at http://www.gimp.org/windows/ GIMP requires the GTK environment to be installed first on earlier Windows, but that's all made easy with the information at the GIMP site. See below in the RAW converters area for the address of the companion UFRaw RAW converter, also free. |
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PhotoCleaner |
Photo Editor |
30 day trial available. Not tested by me. Basic US$13 and Pro US$25 versions available. Evidently has many automatic features to make life easier when improving images. www.photocleaner.com |
| IDimager | Image adjuster, image organiser | Free version = "Lite" on the download page at Evidently the free version has maybe 85% of the functionality of the paid versions for image adjusts, so it is worth a serious look. It supports RAW files but not sure of camera list. Does a nice job with jpegs using slide control adjusts for basic image fixes. Not tested by me, only a brief look so far. The version that I downloaded also has a Trojan Horse attached, so be careful and always use anti-virus and anti-spyware that is kept up to date. |
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Picasa3 |
Picture organiser, limited editor |
Free, amazingly useful, find all your images wherever they hide on your disk. Easy to use simple edits and printing etc. Handles most RAW files no problems. A must-have on your computer. Google owns Picasa. http://picasa.google.com and is RAW capable. Nice customisable screen saver can be used as slide show , ways to share photos, it does keep getting better. Can have free 1 gig storage online at Picasa Web and full resolution images of up to 50 megabytes size can be uploaded. Check out details of improvements in V3 http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93773 |
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PolyView |
Photo Editor |
Shareware. Check site for pricing, not sure if it's shareware or buyware but an easy to use editor and browser. Evidently handles Olympus ORF files. Untried by me. www.polybytes.com/ |
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ACDSee |
Photo organiser, reviewer, editor etc etc |
Trial available, maybe a bit expensive for my taste at US$130 for the Pro version, but many swear by it as a very useful all-in-one solution for digital photography. Not tried by me in this version. www.acdsee.com |
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Helicon Filter |
Photo editor |
30 day full version trial, slightly limited free version unlimited time, full version online US$40 and up. Has some very nice features. Batch auto RAW conversion possible. Program is improving as rewrites take place. Full version works always internally at 16 bits per colour so extreme manipulation has less chance of banding effects. Go to www.heliconfilter.com for downloads. Some limits to features available in the free version, more at http://www.heliconsoft.com/heliconfilter.html |
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IrfanView |
Image Handling |
Free. Now up to V4.2. Very versatile image handling program. A very useful tool-box type program. www.irfanview.com |
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XnView |
Image Handling |
Free. Similar toolbox program to IrfanView. Untried by me. http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enhome.html |
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Helicon Focus |
Combines Photos for DOF |
30 day trial, online US$115 (or less, depends on version and other products owned). Get infinite depth of field, better macro images. Originally designed for microscopy images. Expensive but there's no other way to get this depth of field. http://www.heliconsoft.com/heliconfocus.html |
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AutoStitch |
Panorama |
Free. AutoStitch can combine images seemingly presented in any order and any exposure settings. Currently a very simple program in this working demo version. www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html Check the web page for links to new fully featured panorama programs that are using this panorama engine, there's now 3 including a Mac program. |
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Panorama Factory |
Panorama |
30 day trial, US$80 to buy. The seeming Rolls-Royce of Panorama programs, many features and very reliable. www.panoramafactory.com |
| Photomatix | High Dynamic Range | Forever free trial with watermarks, licence cost US$99. This is classed as an HDR program to combine multiple bracketed exposures to one high dynamic range image. Or it can take one RAW file and do much the same thing. I've seen a few spectacular images from very ordinary cameras, but don't overdo the high dynamic range stuff as images can come out rather flat looking if taken too far. Read about it and down load here, for PC and Mac. http://www.hdrsoft.com/ |
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Noise Reduction is very useful for improving those high ISO images, see an article where 22 different noise reduction methods were compared http://www.michaelalmond.com/Articles/noise.htm (in 2003 it seems) and a few are listed below. Many photo edit programs have noise reduction features inside them, some better than others, but it's generally accepted that these specialist programs work better on difficult images. They seem to improve as they each release newer versions. |
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Neat Image |
Noise Reduction |
Free, various other Neat Image versions cost US$30 up, cleans up noise in high ISO shots. www.neatimage.com There are free to download noise profiles for many cameras. This and Noise Ninja seem to be the very best of the bunch. |
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Noise Ninja |
Noise Reduction |
Cost US$35 to US$80 for various versions. Crippled watermarked trial available for download. http://www.picturecode.com/download.htm Not tried by me but has excellent reputation. |
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Noiseware |
Noise Reduction |
Free version and also cost versions at US$26 and US$49. Those cost versions have 15 day free trials. Works well enough as the free Community version (only as Standalone) for most things I want to do. In practical terms very nearly as good as Neat Image or Noise Ninja. There's Plug-in and Standalone versions available Find Noiseware at http://www.imagenomic.com/download_nwsa.aspx |
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PureImage |
Noise Reduction |
Free trial with watermark on image. Cost US$35 to buy. Easy to use noise reduction and fine tune of images. Not tested fully by me yet. Looks good so far. No RAW files. www.mediachance.com/pureimage |
| STOIK Noise Autofix | Noise Reduction | Free trial for 15 days, activation cost US$29. Not tested yet but seems after the style of the excellent Noiseware. http://www.stoik.com/stoik_noise_autofix/index.html |
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RAW conversion is now becoming a necessity with DSLRs and some more ambitious compacts, a random sample is listed here but my more complete page about RAW converters is growing here. It's getting harder to classify programs simply now, as many edit programs cross over into the area of these RAW converter programs and browser programs, which often handle all file types and act as limited function editors. |
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Silkypix |
RAW Image Input |
Full featured trial for 14 days, full featured registration costs US$149, a bit expensive even though it appears to be one of the best RAW converters available. About 12 meg download. www.isl.co.jp/SILKYPIX/english/ |
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FastStone Viewer |
Image viewer, converter, RAW capable |
Free for home users, photo viewer editor and batch converter. Currently this is my favourite file viewer as it quickly provides a clean, full screen view of a file to check for mis-focus and camera shake. A 3.5 meg download. It nags occasionally about donating money, and it's so good that I willingly donated. www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm |
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BreezeBrowser |
Viewer, organiser, editor, RAW file capable |
Limited trial, to buy costs US$70 or US$90 depending on features. Untried by me. www.breezesys.com |
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Miscellaneous Image Handling and Analysis, Time Stamp fix. memory card testing |
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| Perspective correction | Fix leaning buildings due to use of wide angle lens | Go to http://www.marcus-hebel.de/foto/index.html for Marcus Hebel's excellent freeware to fix those leaning towers and buildings when you take a wide angle lens off absolute dead level alignment. Use the automatic mode where the program finds the more important vertical or near vertical lines and corrects as well as it can for those. Manual intervention may be needed as sometimes true correction looks too exaggerated Frame sloppily if intending to correct images as the necessary realignment means edges get cropped. |
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Monitor check for calibration |
see if monitor is OK |
Go to here http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal/ to have a simple check of your monitor. Here's a link to free software to calibrate your monitor if you don't have Adobe Gamma at all....... http://www.praxisoft.com/pages/support.downloads.html and look for WiziWYG to suit your system. Do a Google search for 'monitor calibration' to find other ways to set your monitor straight. |
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VueScan |
Scan & more, RAW capable |
Free to test has watermark on images, cost US$50 or US$90. Designed originally for scanning, but now handles all file types as input, including most cameras' RAW files. Also will do camera, printer and scanner profiling. www.hamrick.com |
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DCE Tools |
Image fix plugin |
DCE Tools is a Photoshop plugin for auto enhance of images that does work with some other programs, such as Paint Shop Pro. Test the trial version before parting with money. US$39. There is also a standalone version. Not tested at all by me, no RAW files. www.mediachance.com/plugins |
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iMatch |
Image database |
Make images easier to find. 30 day limited trial US$60 to buy. Untried by me. www.photools.com |
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ImageDB |
Image database |
Another database. 60 day trial and US$25 to buy. Untried by me. www.focussoftware.co.uk |
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Qimage |
Printing |
30 day free trial. The best image printing program. There are now three versions of Qimage - Studio, Pro and Lite. Full featured Studio version for busy users is US$90, Pro version is US$50. The simpler Lite version is US$40. Not sure about the upgrade situation now with the three versions, it may have changed to all being upgrade for life. Also by same author is Profile Prism for printer profiling and it has to be sent via mail as IT8 test cards are included. www.ddisoftware.com |
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Exifer |
Manipulate exif info |
Free but send author a postcard if you like it. Find it at http://www.friedemann-schmidt.com/software/exifer/ Do things like change dates on images, add notes, or more useful is to backup exif data and restore it after some incompetent edit program has removed it. |
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Smart Photo Statistics 3.0 |
Analyse EXIF data |
Freeware. This is really a photo utility but I put it here as I think it would be lost in the Utilities section. Use this program to analyse the way you take photos. Provides analysis and summation of the EXIF data to see your most used focal lengths, apertures etc. Helps with making future lens/camera buying decisions. Needs the rather large download Microsoft .NET structure to be installed. www.softsymphony.com |
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Exposure Plot |
Analyse EXIF data |
Freeware. Another photo utility and maybe nicer than the one above. Use this program to analyse the way you take photos. www.cpr.demon.nl/prog_plotf.html |
| Time Stamp Modifier | Fix wrong times/dates on jpegs | Freeware.
Use this progam to fix those wrongly set dates and times on your jpeg
files to get them back into some sort of logical order if using two or
more cameras. Can fix time stamps that get altered when post edit. Free
but can donate if you consider it useful. http://jpgtime.learsy.com/index.html |
| Flash Memory Toolkit | Memory card speed evaluation | Free and paid versions. This allows you to check and compare flash memory card speeds in a practical fashion and maybe check if your card reader is fast enough for that latest fast card you bought. http://www.flashmemorytoolkit.com/ |
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Security: I should mention a site where you can test how safe you are against intruders. It doesn't test for anti-virus, or for Trojan horse rejection, it only tests the very many ways of sneaking into your computer when connected to the Internet - it's testing your firewall and if you are visible at all to the outside world. Go to Gibson Research site at www.grc.com and look for the "Shields Up" testing procedure somewhere amongst the information there. Also check out all the information about their other test and disk recovery products. Not all firewalls and anti-virus mentioned here, there's too many. Just Google for 'free anti virus' and see what you get. It's absolutely essential now to have a reliable anti-virus always up to date, some spyware and trojan horse detecting programs, and also a firewall if you do not have a broadband modem set to block intrusions. An aside is that people who buy the full Norton pack always seem to have problems, plus it always slows down the system badly. In one case it appears to have irretrievably changed the format on a system disk for its own purposes. I tell people to avoid Norton now and use the excellent freebies available, they work better. |
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| AVG Antivirus | Anti Virus | Free and cost versions, daily auto downloads and daily full virus checks. The paid version offers more schedule possibilities. The update can be triggered by you at anytime, and the full virus check can be aborted at any time if it slows you down too much. http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1 |
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Zone Alarm |
Firewall |
Free or paid versions. It seems to be a better firewall than Microsoft offers. Firewall not needed if using a properly set up broadband modem that has selectable port blocking. Caution... by default the free firewall does block home networks from working, you need to do some reading and setting up to get them to work. www.zonelabs.com |
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Zone Alarm with Anti Virus |
Firewall, antivirus |
15 day trial, US$20 year for updates. Firewall not needed if using a properly set up broadband modem that has selectable port blocking. www.zonelabs.com Also many more security products and repair system products on their growing list. |
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SpyBot |
Remove Spyware |
Free. Reliable. www.safer-networking.org |
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Ad-Aware |
Remove Spyware |
Free and paid versions. Probably better than Spybot, but it is safest to use both as one may catch what the other may miss due to update cycles being usually not in sync. Seems to take a bit of searching around now to find the free version on this site. www.lavasoft.com |
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The next few items are used for recovering images from corrupted camera memory cards. Sometimes from some cameras you can recover a card that has been accidentally formatted. So far in the case of Olympus I've found that an in-camera format is final - nothing can be recovered. I've tried a whole bunch of freebies and trial programs and these freebies seem to work as well as any that you will pay for. If a jpeg is written badly in the camera and corrupted then usually only a portion of the image will appear, but of course these programs listed will read all the good files that follow the bad file where normally that would cause problems with all normal download programs and methods. Cards get corrupted for various reasons, maybe a failing flash memory in the card, maybe the battery was weak or died during the image being written, maybe the card door was opened or bumped during the write, but the most likely appears to be dust or fingerprints on the card contacts. CF cards are safer here with their enclosed contacts but the smaller SD, xD etc with naked contacts are a worry, I've seen most examples of problems coming from xD cards, I've learnt to hate them. Actually, the SD card is quite safe from fingerprints, despite the exposed contacts. The little plastic ridges between the contacts help keep them clean. Try cleaning a card with a lint free cloth before insertion or a pencil eraser for really stubborn grime. Do all cleaning gently as the gold contacts are maybe only a few atoms thick and will wear away if treated harshly, plus also realise that using synthetic cloth runs the risk of static discharge. To look for and try other recovery programs, try this link....http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads38.html Many of the programs also will recover hard drive files and structures. In order of usefulness after quite a few recovery efforts.... |
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| PC Inspector Smart Recovery | Free. Recover files from camera cards. http://www.pcinspector.de/SmartRecovery/info.htm?language=1 Usually works best of all, is slow but thorough,. In one case Flash Memory Toolkit worked better for recovering AVI files. |
| Data Recovery Wizard | Free trial to see if it will recover what you need, but then need to buy it to save the files. Cost US$70. http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/ So far I have found it to be the best and way fastest of any of the recovery programs. It's worth buying it and not just pray and wait with the sometimes very slow free ones. Occasionally according to card error type it will not even see the card, so go to the next one.... |
| Flash Memory Toolkit | Free version has very limited card test routines, but pay the licence fee and get more functions, including an excellent recovery that managed to recover AVI files in one bad card situation that no other program could do successfully. http://www.flashmemorytoolkit.com cost US$40 |
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Digital Image Recovery |
Free. Recover files from camera cards. Site is German but program is in English and other languages. http://home.arcor.de/a.niggemann/ On a recent test with a bad xD card, this program worked best of this lot, found all files and movies as well. Some programs only find regular jpegs, tiffs etc. |
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PhotoRescue |
Demo available and licence cost is US$29 or US$99. Untried, but it seems that you download the demo and if it works, then purchase the program to allow the files to be written to disk. www.datarescue.com A Sandisk Extreme 3 card that I bought came with RescuePRO which works well in many cases, whether it is related to this product or not I do not know. |
| FreeUndelete 2.0 | Free. Not tried by me, seems to be aimed at retrieving accidentally deleted files. http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/index.htm |
At this point I will add a page address of interest to photographers... http://www.xs4all.nl/~wiskerke/html/toollink.html gives a list of useful photo related tools and calculators and links to find them. Maybe everything you need to know about photographic calculations is there.
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Open Office |
Office Suite |
Free. This is a full featured office suite that looks like the Microsoft effort, but has the distinct advantage of costing nothing, and being more versatile. So far I have had no problems using it and all MS Office files seem to open OK in it. The Writer program behaves a lot like MS Word and of course can read Word files. It can write files in a wide variety of formats, including many Microsoft compatible types. Can create PDF files easily. It was about a 93 megabyte download so is definitely not ideal for dialup users. Many magazine CDs seem to carry it from time to time in their collection. You would be a bit silly now to even think of buying MS Office when this excellent free product is available. http://www.openoffice.org/ |
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Kompozer |
HTML Editor |
Free WYSIWYG HTML editor after the style of MS Frontpage. Now is my standard maintenance program for these pages, it is reliable and easy to use. http://kompozer.sourceforge.net/ |
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FileZilla |
FTP |
Free for uploading/downloading stuff. A nice program to do FTP transfers and to get your web pages into place on your site. Find the download at http://filezilla-project.org/ |
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CCleaner |
Keep system safe and clean |
Use this free program
to eliminate unused stuff that hangs around and also to tidy up the
registry. Also manage the startup to stop loading and starting
those useless programs that help to slow the system down. http://www.ccleaner.com/ or download from this page http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/ |
| EasyCleaner | Keep system safe and clean | Another maybe better free program to keep the junk out of the registry, find duplicate and unnecessary files etc etc. Seem s to me to work better and easier to use than CCleaner. Find it at http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ecleane.htm |
| Startup Inspector | Startup only those programs that are necessary | For management of the startup programs, help provided to decide which are unncessary and to help make the system run faster or smoother. Free from http://www.windowsstartup.com/startupinspector.php and donations are requested if you find it useful. |
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Acrobat Reader |
Read PDF files |
Free. A must have with all the PDFs about. www.adobe.com |
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iTunes |
Music organiser |
Free. Designed for iPods but useful for any music fiddling, making MP3s etc. Put your CDs onto your PC or Mac and listen to music while you work. Seems to always install the latest version of Quicktime when it installs itself. www.apple.com/itunes |
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Firefox Browser |
Internet Browser |
Free. Firefox seems to be a much more efficient browser than Internet Explorer. Only very rarely is Internet Explorer needed now to enable some obscure feature in a web page. Definitely the preferred browser for me. www.mozilla.org |
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Internet Explorer 8 |
Internet Browser |
Free. The new IE8 has been stable for me and has added security features to help make life safer when browsing. Find it at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx |
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Thunderbird |
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Free. Easy to use email program that looks a bit like Outlook but works better for everyday use. http://en-gb.www.mozillamessaging.com/en-GB/thunderbird/ Now it will migrate easily to Thunderbrid from most other email programs. Use the Import function. An extremely useful utility is the free MozBackup http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/ which does quick and efficient backups of Thunderbird and Firefox settings and content. Extremely useful and simple to use when migrating all email to a new or a different PC. |
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D4Time |
Time Correction |
Free. Usually PC clocks are hopelessly inaccurate, this will make them very accurate when online. Uses freely accessible atomic clocks. I found that this program does compromise internet security very slightly, your PC is not completely invisible when on the internet, so do not use if you are a little paranoid. www.thinkman.com/dimension4/ |
| SpinRite | Fix drives | Cost is US$89 from www.grc.com but it evidently can work miracles in recovering data from a failed or failing hard drive or floppy or Zip disk. Also can be used in a preventative mode to help keep disasters away. It may take overnight to repair a drive but it's way faster and cheaper than sending the drive away to a data recovery service. Not tried by me, but it will be the first thing I buy when I next have a disaster. Meanwhile, always keep hard drives comfortable by keeping air flowing over them, fit extra fans as needed. Hot drives will fail faster. |
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PC Inspector File Recovery |
Recover hard drives |
Free. Analyse a bad drive and re-create the files on second drive www.pcinspector.de |
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emaxx |
Erase drives |
Free. Creates a bootable floppy or CD. Wipe vital data on old drives. Worked for me on parallel IDE drives but not on SATA drives. www.pcinspector.de |
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clonemaxx |
Clone drives |
Free. Creates a bootable floppy or CD. Make true copies of drives. Not tested by me. www.pcinspector.de |
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memtest86 |
Test memory |
Free. Creates a bootable floppy. Run it overnight to give a nice check of memory. It has found flaky memory for me that I could have sworn was a motherboard problem. www.memtest86.com |
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CutePDF |
Create PDFs |
Free. Installs as a new printer type. Seems to make smaller and more efficient PDF files than other programs that I have tried. www.cutepdf.com But I now use the free OpenOffice.org to make any PDFs that I require. Find the OpenOffice.org suite at http://www.openoffice.org/ and get rid of that expensive Microsoft Office suite. |
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SyncBack |
Backup Files |
Free for V3, cost for V4. Can schedule regular backups. Useful for backups and for synchronising folders between two locations. www.2brightsparks.com |
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DVD Shrink |
Copy DVDs |
Free. Make backup copies of your own movies or strip extras and keep only main feature, needs Nero to write. Auto compresses to fit single layer disk. Also can write to double layer disks if you have Nero up to date and a suitable DVD burner. Copying commercial movies is illegal, so if using this - do not sell, lend or give away any copies you make. www.dvdshrink.org for links to downloads. Copyright law is possibly going to change soon in Australia to allow someone to make personal copies of their own CDs and DVDs, ie make it quite legal to copy your CDs purchased by you onto your own iPod or similar. |
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DVD Decrypter |
Copy DVD to drive |
Free. Copy entire movie to hard drive seems to read DVDs that DVD Shrink has problems with. Can use PowerDVD below to see the movie on your PC, or use DVD Shrink to backup that movie to a single or double layer DVD. Links that I earlier had no longer work, or trap to Microsoft directly - DVD Decrypter has been finally erased from the Internet - good luck with finding a copy! Try DVD Fab Decrypter from www.dvdidle.com/free.htm I found this to be painfully slow, but then it may be fixed on later updates.
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Nero |
Burn CDs, DVDs |
Demo. Also cost versions, you also get free OEM version with some DVD burners, Samsung for example, (package 1 of the software only needed, about 30 megs). Need Nero for DVD Shrink for easiest operation. www.nero.com/en/nero-prog.php |
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PowerDVD |
Play DVDs, files |
Trial and cost version from CyberLink, plays DVDs or the normal or compressed files stored by DVD Shrink or DVD Decrypter on the hard drive. Easy to use. I use V5 free OEM that came with a Gigabyte Radeon video card. I also use PowerDVD to take snapshot frames from movie files. www.gocyberlink.com |
| KMPlayer | play movie files | Free. Seems to play difficult files types that Quicktime and Media Player can't handle. I like the way that it finds all movies in a mixed folder and plays them one after the other by default, easy way to review the movies in a mixed folder full of stills and movies. http://www.kmplayer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4094 |
General notes about all programs on this page:
Making choices about free programs found here can lead to a cheap setup for your PC. Of course the Windows operating system always costs but the rest can be mostly done for free - such as security via AVG anti-virus and maybe Zone Alarm firewall if you don't like the one built into Windows. For office type programs, you can't go past OpenOffice.org which appears to do it all nicely. Then to get into photo edit and handling, maybe Picasa, FastStone Viewer and The GIMP will do all that is needed. A combination of Firefox for a browser and Thunderbird for mail and of course Adobe Acrobat Reader for reading PDF documents and FileZilla with Kompozer or the HTML edit in OpenOffice Writer if you maintain web pages is all you need to add for basics. With this combination you have only spent money on the (overpriced) operating system. The rest are free and always undergoing free updates.
Some programs provide updates for life online once purchased, some provide free updates until major revision level occurs, some have annual fees and some of course are free but you can make donations if you like. Qimage Pro for instance costs US$50 and provides updates for life and is always being modified and improved. It is already possibly the best printing program in the world and is steadily getting better.
Visit the home sites for software updates and any useful upgrades (usually cost extra) or add-ons. Often the programs do have either automatic updates built in or an easy way to seek updates.
My recommendation now for PC security is optionally the free Zone Alarm, not needed with a properly setup broadband modem as that becomes the firewall. For anti-virus I run the free version of AVG and it works well.
This list only caters for PCs running Windows XP/Vista generally and maybe down to Windows 98SE and there's no intention of including Apple Mac software as it is only about 2% or 3% of the market. Many of the above sites do cater for Mac but it is a bit of a blind alley with limited support. Sorry, but I have to run with the herd.
The mention of "seen at markets" above relates to the well established Sunday computer market that used to be at Westfield North Rocks, Sydney, Australia. It now has moved to Muirfield High School on Barclay Rd a bit over 1/2 km away going west from Westfield. There is a page at... http://www.northrockscomputermarket.com.au/index.php Camera memory card prices are about the best you can find, some haggling is possible occasionally. At last visit it was still free entry, as opposed to some other Sunday computer fairs that charge $2 or so at the door.
Guy Parsons - May 2009
