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• There are literally thousands of little programs and utilities available on the internet for free. Some were school projects, some are older or light versions of programs the writer would like you to buy, and then some have been created out of frustration when some capable person could not find just the right thing to do what they needed and they graciously offered them to the world. And some are open-source too.
• Very few of these are from the US - mostly from techie types from other parts of the world. Some have a good following and others have contributed translations for them in order to keep them free and widely available. • These are a small selection of what I have downloaded and previewed or actually installed and use for myself. Since I didn't know what I was doing when I began, I limited myself to those that were rated at or near the top in their respective categories by the many various reviewers. Interfaces vary because the creators have widely different viewpoints as to how something should look. How they work varies by the user too. • Take a look at these presented here - the links below are connected only to screenshots, and will open in separate windows. Simply close the window when finished. • If you are installing any of these on a network - I suggest you check with your administrator first ( hopefully not a Microsoft person with a too-narrow viewpoint of anything not Microsoft ). Explore, have fun and pick ones that you feel will help your work. There are many more out there if these don't fulfill your needs. • Some might even be postcardware or smileware too - watch for that. Many accept donations if you find them useful. A Couple here are shareware. One is adware - but worthwhile. Pick and choose the ones you need. Some you may find confusing or just not like - toss'em. It can be all too confusing. |
| Business & Productivity |
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AlternaTiff
A browser add-on that allows you to view tif files directly in your browing window. Very useful when you visit a site that offers such things as maps. ATnotes A “ sticky-note ” utility for putting notes on your desktop. Color, layout, etc., can all be changed. Black Box Mail Allows you to manipulate various aspects of your eMail for your protection. Pre / Post-dating, and such. Bookmark Wizard Allows you to create an HTML page from Internet Explorer “Favorites”. That's all - but if you need it. Doesn't work with Netscape - doesn't have to … they're already set up correctly. Calculator 98
This is widely known and tough to actually find a download location for unknown reasons. It is a simple utility designed to replace the included Windows Character Map. It is somewhat larger for easier viewing of a font. It offers viewing of a selected character in a zoomable window. You can also select multiple characters for copying into your documents. Clippy For a writer, this is simply a way to allow you to keep several things you've copied to the clipboard and to paste them in as needed. The Windows clipboard only allows one item at a time to be on the clipboard and if you were to copy something else to it, the first item disappears. Conversion Calc Convertor for alllll kinds of things. Units of weight, measure, etc. CSVdb Helps you convert databases for use on the internet. Member lists for instance. Date Calculator Calculates between dates for you. Easy Loan Calculator Calculate the real cost of loans. You can find any of the following - Monthly payment, number of years to payoff, interest rate, and backward to loan amount. Gadwin PrintScreen Said to be the most complete free screen capture program available. Hilitext Highlights every instance of a designated word in a file. HTT Tracker An open source offline browser / website copier. InfoAngel A personal information manager with the ability to keep photos, dates, and all the usual info too. Intellitamper
A 'real' on-screen orgainzer. Made to look just like a paper one. Operates like one also. Lupas Rename 2000 Another free program that is truly amazing. This utility offers many choices for changing file names and is especially useful for organizing your graphics, digital photos, and any other filing system you can think of. This is a link to the programs' screen shot / help file with 27 screens available. Mousotron Pro Want to prove you did work? Hey, my mouse moved 142 miles today - right. Well this is a little utility to keep track of mouse movement, clicks, etc. Pegasus Mail Consider moving to a better and more secure eMail client. Pegasus Mail has been around for a long long time. It is the single most-used eMail client outside of those built into browsers. Last year it was also selected the single best eMail client available anywhere. Not subject to the problems and security holes of Outlook / Outlook Explorer, is the only fully Outlook compatible client outside of Outlook, is PGP compliant, etc etc etc. NOTE – the screen shot is of my setup and not the newest version on this disc. Print Screen Deluxe My own familiar screen print program. Included here because I've used it for so long. Netscape Communicator There is a definite difference in the way Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer ( and others ) display web pages. Since we cannot guess at all of them we must at least try to see them in these major browsers. You do not need the full capabilities of Communicator but can use them of course. Navigator is what you want to use to view your pages from this software package. This is an older version that is favored and recommended by many people who do real work on the internet. Navigator offers an easy way to switch javascript and graphics on and off for various reasons, and using it can make real work as fast as high-speed connections without waiting for all the graphics to be displayed, which are mostly advertisements anyway. And just click to display graphics when needed or desired. ReadPlease 2003 Getting busier? and want someone to read to you. This might be it. ShowCalc A “ paper ” tape, as it were. An on-screen calculator that offers a paper tape. I love being able to see where I made that simple entry error – without having to keep adding columns again and again. You can save the tape too - VERY nice. Scientific, conversions, arithmetic, lots here. A paid version is also available. Another one I plan to buy for myself. Stickies a PC utility to cut down on the number of Post-It notes left stuck to a monitor - computerized version.
• Can remind you of meetings, important tasks, telephone calls, etc. • It can pop up with a reminder, play music, or use Microsoft Agent animation to remind you. • Schedule one-time reminders or recurring events. ( daily, weekly, monthly ) • Can limit alarms to certain users. • Runs in the system tray and allows easy addition of alarms. TaskPlus An “adware” program, of a paid higher version program. Task Manager is a program to help you keep track of your three jobs. Time Calendar
Just a little utility that stays in the System Tray on the Taskbar that can be set to display the date and time as you like it and has a calendar available at a click. Turbo Note
Widget Print Directory Formatting Choices Have you ever needed to print that directory from Windows Explorer? This is the free version - of an even more capable paid version - and you can set up any directory to print out for reference. A paid version is available too - I will get this one. Yankee Clipper A clipboard utility that allows you to copy several things to the clipboard without losing any of them - and can categorize them for you too. ZipGenius A zipping / un-zipping program with more files types capable of being used than most paid zip programs. Rated to be the best too. |
| Audio and Video |
BS Player
A simple program that does one thing - combines mpg files into one longer file. Works - okay. I would love to hear of a better one. CamStudio A utility for capturing various screen changes, cursor movement, etc. You can then use these capture in tutorials for teaching, troubleshooting, etc. The program automatically creates an AVI file, and get this – also will convert to SWF or Shockwave format if you choose. Very nice, and just written about this month in a computer magazine. CDex If you find the need to convert a WAV file of some speech, class, or such to an MP3 ( or vice-versa ) - this simple program will do a great job. No editing, but has plenty of options to create sound files that can be used in any number of ways, from court, to seminars, to eMailing, or even website distribution of say … a message from your President. Been around for some time. Fast and simple. Cool Edit 96
MP3 Splitter is an MP3 audio editing utility. Used it to split an MP3 into multiple files ( tracks ). May be perfect for dividing those long interviews into tracks for easy playback selection. mp3 Direct Cut
The Apple QuickTime player is used for video created in this format. WinAmp If you need a simple, stable, been around a long time program to play those audio files you've created in CDex, this is a great choice. Not the newest version. AOL bought them and this version is small and stable. Windows Media Player A Microsoft program that plays its' own format for audio and video. |
| System and Security | ||
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Ad Aware
If you travel the Internet - you can pick up little programs that “ report back ” to ? – well, this can track them down and remove them from your machine. Atomic Clock Sync A tiny utility to allow you to ping the atomic clock to set your system clock whenever you wish, or on a schedule. AVG Anti-Virus A well-known, free for personal use anti-virus program.
Allows you to hide one file inside another file for safer transmission. Receiver must use the program also. Clox 2000
Another one-purpose utility - empties your temp folders without chasing down each one. Eraser Eraser is an advanced security tool for Windows. It allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Works with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP and DOS. Eraser is FREE software and its source code is released under the GNU General Public License. The patterns used for overwriting are based on Peter Gutmann's paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" and they are selected to effectively remove magnetic remnants from the hard drive. Other methods include the one defined in the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual of the US Department of Defence and overwriting with pseudorandom data. You can also define your own overwriting methods. Why use it? Most people have some data that they would rather not share with others - passwords, personal information, classified documents from work, financial records, self-written poems, the list can be continued forever. HMonitor
This little utility allows you to see all running processes on your computer - and to shut down any you choose to. MailWasher
A whole variety of lookup tools for system and investigative uses. SpyBot Search & Destroy Supposedly a more capable program than Ad Aware - caught more intrusive programs on one test I read. I will try this one out also. Sygate Personal Firewall A free for personal use firewall - good program, and off the main path. Tweak UI 1 2 3 4 A dangerous and useful little utility. Provided by Microsoft but completely un-supported. You can change lots of little system setting with this utility - and you can really screw up your system too - be careful ! ! ! Does things like get rid of the stupid little arrow on the icons on your desktop - and so much more! Ultra Wipe Enables you to clean your hard drive by overwriting the data and clean areas several times with carefully selected patterns. You can select certain areas to wipe, set schedules, and even has a 'panic' button. Worldtime a great little program! • World Clocks A world clock with unlimited configurable clocks, each with: Own time zone Daylight savings time rule Description City, Region, Country, and Location Code ( IATA Airport Code as default ) Choose from an ever growing list of location ( free web updates ) or add your own in a window that minimizes to the system tray and/or can be set to float atop all other windows and can be displayed with or without its toolbar, status, and titlebar. • Each clock has display options including: 12/24 Hour ( user controlled time formats ) UTC ( aka: GMT, ZULU ) display Internet Time Swatch Beat Universal Time Universal Time Org Metric Time Sidereal Time Optional Date Font and Colour control Included are options to chime the hour, like big ben, or with Ship's Bells using configurable sounds (samples are included) You can even choose any of the clocks to be displayed in the titlebar of any window on the desktop! Main Display - expanded form ( screen Shot ) Time Zone Manager ( screen Shot ) • World Map A 2D or 3D world map capable of plotting any location by Lat/Long and displaying the part of the globe currently in darkness (night); World map ( screen Shot ) • System Alarms Unlimited user definable alarms based upon the local time at any location, classed as Major, Normal, or Minor and Non-Visual alarms that include the ability to execute applications, synchronize your clock, and to dial or disconnect from the internet. Each alarm can include an optional repeat interval, and when visual alarms are due the user can use an optional snooze button to hold the alarm for a configurable number of minutes. An active visual alarm will AutoSnooze after 25 seconds. The user is also notified at startup of any alarms that came due while WorldTime was not running. • Network Time Synchronizer Uses the Network Time Protocol ( NTP ) to synchronize your computers system time (UTC) to a time server. A choice of NTP protocols (Date/Time String or Simple Time) are available based on user preference. • Network Time Server Provides a simple NTP ( Simple Time and DayTime ) server in a separate application that can be used to synchronize any workstations capable of TCP from workgroup LANs to WANs Time Server ( screen Shot ) • Astronomical Data Graphically displays the current phase of the moon, Julian Date (JD) and modified Julian Date (MJD), Sun Rise/set and Moon Rise/Set, and more... The Julian Date: Obtained by counting days from the starting point of noon on 1 January 4713 B.C. (Julian Day zero). One way of telling what day it is with the least possible ambiguity. -Julian Date (JD): The Julian Day number followed by the fraction of the day elapsed since the preceding noon (1200 UT). {Example: The date 1900 January (1) 0.5 day UT corresponds to JD = 2 415 020.5 -Modified Julian Day (MJD): Equal to the Julian day. Shifted so its origin occurs at midnight on 17 November 1858. The MJD differs from the Julian date by exactly 2 400 000.5 days. Astronomical Data (screen Shot) • Stopwatch(s) A stopwatch ( count up ) and timer ( count down ) module accurate to 1/100 sec with unlimited lap times and lap average (in count up mode) - hidden until used. A Simple module that can be called up many times = have as many sententiously running stopwatches as you want at any time. Stopwatch ( screen Shot ) • TraQdate ( Important Date Tracker ) A module that tracks the amount of time since or until any number of events at specified dates and locations down to the second. On the left it calculates the cumulative Years, Months, Days, Hours, Minutes, and Seconds until/since the specified date. On the right the fractional number of Years or Months or Weeks or Days are also provided. TraQdate (screen Shot) • Time Calculator Makes simple worldwide time calculations including what time it will be at Location 'X' when it is some other time at location 'Y' or what time zone one is referring to if it is currently 'x' O'clock N O T E — Not to be confused with the Worldtime web page - which is really cool. Go here to see it. Xteq Xsetup A system tweaking program that some say is more complete than Tweak UI from Microsoft. Use carefully! |
| Photo & Graphics |
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Copy Fonts
A simple little utility allowing you to copy fonts to disc for transfer. Font Namer Name a font anything you want. Can restore to original name as well. Font Thing 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 This is one of those programs written in frustration when looking for a program to do what you need. It was written a few years ago. It officially remains a beta - and yet still receives the highest recommendations. I doubt that it will be updated anytime soon, but offers more functionality than any similar program available anywhere – that I've seen anywhere. I've included several screen shots of this program because what it offers is quite amazing. IrfanView This program is very well-known for it's tremendous versatility. It has been around for a very long time and is quite often referred to as the most complete free graphics program available - and it is not for creating any graphics at all. You can make a page of thumbnails for posting and it will generate the HTML code to go along with it. You can batch process all your digital photos to save lots of time. And - well you'll see, if you use photos for anything. jpeg Comment Editor You can store information within a jpg file - so it is not seen when viewed normally. The information stays with the file and can usually be seen in a graphics editor - a good thing. You can automatically insert the file location or some default text such as copyright information. jpeg Crop Many graphics editors, when cropping an image, will lose image quality when you hit the 'save' button. The sole purpose for this little utility is to allow you to crop your images without losing any quality. jpg Cleaner Preview Window shows process window
Create the Autorun.inf file that allows programs on CD run automatically when the CD is inserted! CDs you create can automatically display a web page, text file, navigate the user's web browser to a support web site, launch a setup program, and more. Serif Software Screenshots A collection of screenshots for a variety of inexpensive programs offered by Serif. These are often rated the same or better than much more expensive software. The range is from Page Plus - Desktop Publishing with excellent PDF support, to Draw Plus - vector drawing software, and Photo Plus photo-editing software. Others are a media manager( Media Plus ), and a program for creating your own 3d microworlds, models, and graphics ( Impact Plus ). Serif offers free versions of each of their main programs to encourage you to purchase the latest version. Free registration is required. The best deal is to order the CD ( Free for shipping charges ). For many simple uses the free versions may be all that you need. It is available here. SnIco Edit Maybe at some point you'll be asked to make an icon for the office desktops. This is only one of a couple free icon editors I've found. And it is quite capable. Square Image Designed to do just one thing - easily - crop / pad an image into a square for display on a web page, eMail, etc. True Type Renamer Permits the easy renaming of fonts from coded jibberish to their plain english name. Ulead gif Animator Ulead F/X for GIF Animator is a new plugin product for Ulead GIF Animator 2 ( or higher ), which consists of a set of 90 transition effects and 40 image filter effects. By leveraging the open plug-in architecture of Ulead GIF Animator, this set of powerful effects allows you to easily convert simple images and turn them into something entirely wild and new.
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| Website help | ||
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A2Z Computer Works Help
1. ASCII Character Chart for HTML coding for quick reference 2. Small 216 Web-Safe Color Chart for quick reference 3. Official 216 Web-Safe Color Chart 4. Named Colors Chart 5. 500 Colors - A thru L 6. 500 Colors - M thru Z 7. Lorem Ipsum Text for layout and font size testing AceHTML Free 5 Evrsoft First Page has been my first choice for my HTML work for the past two years ( even though I do have $300 Dreamweaver ) but it may disappear someday - it has not been updated in more than three years now. So my search for a replacement led me here. This seems to be a very nice program and is very highly thought of. Syntax color capable. This is a lower version of a paid editing package they hope you might buy if you like the lower level one. This program requires free registration AM Deadlink This might save you lots of time as it is designed to search out your duplicate and dead links - so you do not have to do them one-at-a-time. Bhead
This is a little utility to allow you to preview your choices for text, link, and background colors for a page before you actually set up the page itself. Been around for some time, and well liked. CheckURL beta Notice this is a “beta” utility. But it has been given the highest praise on one site I pay attention to. So I included it here because it has the potential to save much time. It is designed to check to see if all the link URLs on a website are correct. Nice - all at one time instead of clicking one-by-one. Worth a try for sure. Cpick Another color picker - depends on what style you like to work with. CSS Style Generator A utility to create Cascading Style Sheets. Evrsoft 1st Page Easy Expert Hardcore This is a professional HTML editing package that is offered as complete freeware and it is very very well rated. Sometimes refered to as the most-used editor worldwide. First Page offers three distinct interfaces for beginner, experienced, and those overly involved in hand coding. Learning to use a real editor is invaluable for consistent appearance across browsers because these avoid the problems that plague graphical editors and the proprietary code they always bring to your pages. Syntax coloring will do more for your work than any other feature in any other program, and I think this is the single most important feature offered in these kinds of editors. First Page also offers many enhancements not found in many paid editing packages, and includes paste-in JavaScripts, a tidying program, etc. GifClean32 This is a bit different than the above program - this one strips out extraneous information from the file that is unrelated to the actual graphic. Which makes the file smaller. GIF Optimizer If you create many graphics for your web pages you will most likely have gifs in abundance. Feed a folder of gifs to this program and it examines them for several things and reduces the overall size of each individual graphic if you have not done some sort of optimization on them yourself. File size savings can be substantial - and smaller files mean faster display of your pages. Good Keywords
Do you need to post a calendar on the web site? If so, here is a great program for this. It has lots of options too, so if of interest, spend some time looking through what it can do. HTML Capitalization Correction Utility I prefer all lower case HTML code - many graphical editing programs do not - and some uses require all lower case. This is designed to correct the problem for you. Simple solution to what can be a big problem. HTML Font Colorizer
A simple little utility with only one function - to assist you in creating the hidden meta tags that help search engines find, describe - and index your website. Reptile
A small tool that converts HTML for actual proper display on a page. Useful for tutorials, link instructions, any use where you need the code to be 'visible' on the page. The code can be hand done ( a time waster ) or just copy existing code to the clipboard for pasting into the program for conversion, then on into the page for display. Choose the color for display too. Smart Color A very nice and complete color selection program. T2T T 2 T or Text to Table - assists you in the creation of HTML tables from text delimited files - another possible choice for those member lists … ? Visibone HexaDecimal Color Chart HTML Tags - A to C Visibone is really a set of charts, mouse pads, etc. All designed to be used off screen - real things to touch and read. HTML and color charts in various forms. XML Editor A small XML editor for this new incarnation of HTML |
| Miscellaneous |
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Booksearch
Allows you to search several different book search services with one search. Breitling World Time The most complete world clock out there it seems – at least of the free ones, and maybe all. Calendar Maker If you need calendars for events or other schedules, here you go. Calorie Calculator
Flashcards is a learning tool. Create a stack of 'cards' and a virtual 'flip side' - you create the Questions and Answers. Periodic Library
A little program to help you manage your collection of wallpaper. Weather Pulse Display popular Satellite images and video from around the globe, share images with your friends and family, stay updated on current and expected weather conditions, it's just plain fun! Winsock ftp This is a file transfer protocol program used for uploading and transferring files. Xnews A news reader program. |