Free Downloads

Everyone like free stuff and you may be surprised at how much is free! Many of the free products are better quality than the commercial counterpart. Why is it free you may ask? The answer is often simply pride - the creators (often organised teams of programmers from all over the globe) are proud to be part of the team. It also look fantastic on their CV if they can claim to be part of the team who create and maintain a package like Apache (Apache is a free web server available for most platforms and is the most powerful and most stable web server available - it is the basis of most websites).

Recommended by MJS:

• AVG Free - Feee Anti-Virus
  A free anti-virus program with all the basic feature and no bloat-ware. Forget the large hyped up packages, this will remove any virus as seamlessly as any bloated over priced product.
• Open Office - Word processing and Spread Sheets
  What a package – this is a direct replacement for Micro$oft Office and is currently owned and managed by Sun. The menus are laid out differently, but it can do pretty much the same and it’s free. Have you ever had a Word document that won’t open? Yes, it happens… too often when you’ve paid good money for a product. Don’t worry though, install Open Office and try opening the document in there. Most of the time it will open the document (though formatting may be lost) which can be saved again and opened in Word (if you dare go back to Word!). Still in development and maybe a couple of years to go is the contender for Access, but if you don’t need a database or a simple database is good enough, don’t spend money on Micro$oft until you’ve tried this. Think of the saving if you are an organisation requiring 10 copies of Office!
• Linux - when you need a stable machine that doesn't crash or need rebooting every couple of hours
  Linux is an operating system, like Window XP or Windows Vista. It’s different and most Windows programs won’t work on it (though you can run a Windows emulator or even a virtual Windows machine to run such apps), but it’s more stable and it’s free. It doesn’t crash and it doesn’t need rebooting (though for the newbie it is often suggested that a reboot be carried out rather than services restarted). It’s not uncommon for a Linux workstation or server to be running non-stop for over a year. Patching is simple, it does it in the background, but it doesn’t pop a message up saying “Windows updates have finished and your system needs to be restarted to complete installation. Go and defrost a steak, fire up the BBQ and do some cooking, when you’ve finished eating your PC may just about be ready for you to start using again” (then when you get back to it several hours later there’s a pop-up saying “are you sure?”). If all you want to do is surf the web, email, word processing/spread sheets, a bit of graphics and a bit of video editing, give Linux a go! There are a large number of Linux packages bundled with Open Office, Apache (web server), PHP/MySQL, range of mail servers, the biggest name is probably Red Hat. However, Red Hat started charging for their bundle, but there are several copies – Fedora is good, but CentOS is my favourite because it seems to have the best range of drivers with it. Download the ISO image and burn to CD's or DVD, then install.
• VMWare - Virtual Machines
  Welcome to the world of Virtual Machines – VMWare offer a free version of their virtual machine. If you have a couple of GB of RAM, you can install several virtual machines, each running it’s own operating system (Linux and/or most versions of Windows), each isolated from the others. This could be a good way to experiment. VMWare is downloadable from the VMWare site. Many rented dedicated servers are a virtual machine based on a version of VMWare.

Other favourites (direct download):