Great Free Software

Date: May. 21, 2013

Introduction to Great Free Software

Selected and reviewed by Wells Anderson - wells@ellenwellsfamily.com

Personal computers are full of unpleasant surprises. Over many years I have identified and used a variety of both free and commercial software to make life with computers easier, more productive and less stressful.

This collection of great free software is intended to make your computer life safer and easier.

In the course of trying a wide variety of free applications, I rejected many more than I have approved. The clunkers often are not easy to spot immediately. I have carefully weeded out the clunkers from this collection of great free software.

Some free applications get pretty techie. These descriptions let you know which ones require more computer skill than others.

Except where otherwise noted, these great free programs are limited to personal, home or academic use. They may not be used for business purposes.

Mac users: See the Mac software section.

Macrium Reflect Free - Backup your entire hard drive, including Windows

A free disaster recovery solution for your home computer.
Protect your documents, photos, music and emails.
Clone your hard drive and create disk images that securely save everything in an easily recovered backup file.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

Paragon Backup and Recovery 2013 Free

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free

Complete Backup - Create an exact copy of your PC including the operating system, applications, user settings and all data
Differential Backup - backup only changed data
Backup Scheduler - plan your regular backup
Backup Capsule - you can place a backup image to a special secured place on the hard disk called the Backup Capsule and get additional level of security to all archives which it contains
Any backup destination - including external storages, CD/DVD/Blu-ray discs, network as well as the secured hidden partition (Backup Capsule)
Automatic data exclusion - automate the process of building up contents of the future backup image, by excluding irrelevant data such as movies, music, etc.

FreeFileSync - Automatically copy files from PC to external & network drives

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/

FreeFileSync is an easy-to-use utility for copying or synchronizing files from one drive or folder to a destination. The destination may be another hard drive, an external USB drive or a network drive. Use it to take files with you, change or add to them, and then synchronize them back to your PC.

FreeFileSync can to continuous, real time synchronization, but that is a bit difficult to set up. The advantage of real time synchronization is that it gives you up-to-the-second protection against losing your valuable files to a hard drive crash. FreeFileSync can even copy open files, so you can protect your Outlook email file and other files that remain open.

Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+

Website: http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware.php#
Download link: http://www.lavasoft.com/download/adaware_download.php?p=adaware_free

Heads Up: You should probably uncheck the boxes for Secure my online search and for Protect, set and keep my homepage. These options can block bad apps from changing your settings or infecting your computer, but they change your homepage and your default search engine. The program itself protects you from malware. If you are careless about clicking on sketchy websites that turn up in your search results or about what you download, leave these boxes checked.

Google Picasa - Photo organizing and editing

http://picasa.google.com/

Organize, edit and share your photos. Upload and share your photos on Google+. Tag your Google+ friends and share pictures of them. Transform your photos with a variety of effects.

Picasa requires a Google account and stores your photos online.

Picasa uses facial recognition technology to find and group similar faces together across your entire collection of photos. By adding name tags to these groups of faces, new people albums are created.

doPDF - Create PDF documents from any file

http://www.dopdf.com/quick-download.php

To create PDF files with doPDF:

Open the document that you want to convert to a PDF file (just double click on it).
In the program that opened the file, go to: File->Print
Select doPDF from the Printers list.
Click on Print and choose a location for your PDF file

PDF-XChange Lite 2012 - Free PDF viewer with annotation features

http://www.tracker-software.com/PDFX5SA_LE_H.zip

The free Acrobat Reader is fine for reading PDF files, but it has limitations you won't find in PDF-XChange Lite 2012. PDF-XChange lets you fill in PDF forms and annotate PDF documents. It is much less vulnerable to security holes that keep cropping up in Adobe Acrobat and require constant updates.

http://www.tracker-software.com/PDFX5SA_LE_H.zip

Scanner - Graphical view of disk space usage

http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/

Scanner is a great tool for finding out what is using up too much disk space on your disk drives. It shows you a graphical view of all your drives or of a single drive. You can double-click on any ring in the view to drill down and find a particular folder that is storing big files. You can delete files and folders if you want to clean up your disk and free up space.

Disk Wipe - Securely erase everything on a disk

Before you recycle or give away a hard disk, flash drive or computer, you should securely erase everything on it. Simply deleting files or formatting the drive does not remove all of the information you have on the drive. You need to overwrite everything on the drive to protect against the recovery of your files by a stranger.

Disk Wipe securely overwrites any Windows drive that you select. To guard against accidentally erasing a drive, you are required to type "erase all" before it will begin the erasing process.

Disk Wipe first performs a Windows Quick Format to speed up the erasing processing. But on some disks, it does not present the check box for Quick Format and will take a lot longer - 20 minutes, an hour, or more depending on the drive size - to fully format the drive.Next, it begins the overwriting process. That can take a very long time and depends on the size and the write speed of the drive.

Securely erasing a drive is the sort of thing you will want to run overnight or even longer for large hard drives (1TB is large).

As alternatives, consider physically destroying the drive or erasing just the folders that contain especially private or sensitive information. For a program that lets you choose which folders to erase, consider Eraser below.

Eraser - Securely erase folders and files

http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/

An alternative to Disk Wipe, Eraser is a bit more technical to use. It refused to erase free space on an external USB drive I tested, but does a fine job of erasing folders and files.

LastPass - Save passwords and login to websites automatically

http://www.lastpass.com

For Windows and Mac
LastPass is an add-on or extension for your Web browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera

LastPass automates the process of logging into password-protected websites. Do you use multiple websites where you have accounts and need to login? LastPass can both save you a lot of time, spare you from remembering and entering logins and passwords, and keep you much safer by allowing you to use multiple, truly strong passwords.

With LastPass you use one login and one super-secret, strong password to store and protect all your passwords and critical private information. No one can access the contents of your account without your master password. Your master password is not known to LastPass administrators, and they cannot recover or restore it.

Your LastPass page becomes your homepage for logging into any website using any or all of the major Web browsers (Microsoft Internet Explorer, FireFox, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, iPad). Login to LastPass once and a single click opens any site or service for you.

Sure, maybe the idea of trusting all your passwords to some company scares you. But LastPass makes you much safer. It protects you against hackers who could crack your passwords and break into your online bank accounts and other online accounts If you reuse your passwords, use variations on the same password, or use passwords shorter than 12 characters, you are at risk. "Clever" passwords that substitute numbers or punctuation for letters no longer protect you. Hackers know these tricks and can crack those clever passwords.

Do you want some assurance that LastPass is safe? Steve Gibson, a trustworthy authority on Internet security, has approved it. His analysis is exhaustive and impartial. For more information:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LastPass_Password_Manager
www.grc.com/sn/sn-256.htm

The service is available in free and premium ($1.00 per month) versions. The free version is fully functional but displays an advertisement on the side of the screen. The premium version is ad-free and supports use on mobile phones.

Great Free Mac Software

LastPass - Save passwords and login to websites automatically

See the description and link, immediately above.

Doo - Find your documents wherever they are

For Mac - https://doo.net/en/

Download the software from the website.

Connect your local document folders as well as your Dropbox, Google Drive and email accounts to access all documents with one app. You can keep your documents wherever they are.

Doo automatically extracts relevant information from your documents and uses it to create intelligent tags. Selecting and combining tags, like companies, document type, file format, people, places, or individual labels, makes document search-and-retrieval a cinch. Doo provides intelligent suggestions as you type.

A version for the PC, in German!, is available now for Windows 8. Expect a Windows 7 version soon.