OpenOffice.org
This is a free office suite that can make documents compatible with MS Office 97, 2000, 2002/XP
as well as other formats, including Word, Excel and PoerPoint.  It also will open documents made
with those suites as well as other office products. It even cam make PDF documents!
What more can you ask for?

VideoLAN Media Player - VLC
This WONDERFUL little utility plays dang near ever audio and video file format
known to mankind! Sure there are exceptions, but in my use those are very few :)

IrfanView
A nice trim program that I use as a way to scan through large amounts of pictures
quickly and easily when needed. BUT WAIT THERE"S MORE!
It also does batch conversions, slide shows, and a lot more!

Mozilla Fireox
Great free web browser that tends not to have anywhere near the security
issues that a certain company seems to have to patch every few days due
to security flaws and holes.

Google Chrome
A nicely packaged web browser from the folks at Google.
While it is a little faster than most web browsers, it's not for everyone.
NOTE:
I do have to warn that when installing it pay attention to what you're
doing and make sure to pay attention to those pesky little check boxes
for options you may not want, like the google toolbar or google desktop.
While some find they like all the toolbars and extras, I feel I must point out
that each toolbar you add to a browser takes away from your browsers
viewing area and can slow down web page loading. Also things that install
and run on computer start up tend to slow down how fast your computer
starts up so maybe you want to avoid accidentally installing things like
google desktop because you just didn't pay attention to what you were
installing :)

7-Zip
I'm sure you've heard of WinZip and other compression tools/utilities
over the years, most of which are shareware or trial versions, but this
one does pretty much everything those others due and it's FREE!!!!!
It will extract files from .zip .rar. arj and many many more!

Free Anti-Virus
There are currently NO free anti-virus programs that I can recomend.
Since some time last year (2008) I've been seeing 10 or more computers
every month with free anti-virus programs up to date and infected so
badly with some of the worst things to hit computers that for the time
being, and foreseeable future I seriously recomend against using free
programs that are meant to handle your computer safety and security.
For more on this line of thought, click here.

BACK TO PC NURD HOME PAGE