Free Software

The book I read to research this post is The 2014 Guide To Free PC Software by Norman William Jordan which is an excellent book which I bought at kindle. This book is written by a computer engineer and software salesperson who has quite an interest in free software. He has turned his passion into a book. The book does more than tell you about free software. It also tells you about some of the tricks supposedly free software does to relieve you of your cash. Tricks like software that supposedly cleans your registry and then charges you to fix it. On computers since Windows XP the registry generally doesn’t need cleaning and you definitely shouldn’t the software mess about with it. This kind of software invariably finds errors whether they exist or not and it’s all about exploiting you. Another trick is piling spyware and cookies on your computer as part of the software package. If it just tracks you on one website and stores your password for that site to save you having to enter it that maybe okay. What’s more of a problem is when it tracks you around the internet and tries to put adverts on your computer and sends information about your computer to an unknown source. These kinds of cookies generally don’t capture your credit card number but are something to be concerned about. There is over a 150 programs featured in the book divided into categories and I’ll mention some of the ones that caught my eye. One is DVDShrink that copies and does back up copies of retail dvds. It will copy either the main feature or the entire disc and literally shrinks the file size to fit a 4.7GB dvdr. It’s apparently quite easy to use. Another one is Exact Audio Copy that copies and rips audio cds and has error correction built in if there are problems with the state of the disc. Finally there is OpenOffice.Org  and if you want something a bit different in free office software try Libre office. OpenOffice.Org compares favorably with commercial software like Microsoft Office and has practically all the same capabilities. I really enjoyed this book and will definitely try some of the software mentioned. You can normally enter the name of the software in Google and it should take you to the site to download it. One site they recommend for free software in general is http://filehippo.com. I think this is a great book.