Best of Breed - The Best Freeware for Windows

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Configinspector is probably the best product you can get for keeping your configuration at your fingertips. It’s a lot like taskman but with detailed configuration information and performance information right on hand. It’s something that is good to keep around and everyone should have it on their system. There is no risk of keeping it around and it only runs when you ask it to.

http://flashdeli.com/config-inspector.php

I’ve been looking for a good graphics viewer. FastStone Image Viewer is a very functional freeware product. It is quick to lode, easy on the resources, provides a fast and effective way to navigate through your photos, gives you a way to do some basic editing, and it provides a utility for renaming and/or resizing your photos in batch mode! You can’t ask more from an image viewer. Except… maybe they could add a way to export photos to some of the online organizations like Flicker or Photo Bucket but I’m not complaining because FastStone image viewer packs a lot of features into their viewer while keeping resources in check and ‘load time’ acceptable.

If you are not a ’shutter bug’ and don’t do much graphic editing, this one program will do everything you need. However, for those of us who like to experiment with our photos and design graphics for applications and web pages, there is a need for a more robust graphics editor and I’ve covered those requirements in a previous post. With the addition of the FastStone Image Viewer I think we’ve nailed down the best free suite of graphic image editing and I would compare it to anything on the market.

When you go to FastStone’s download page, you will notice there are 2 other products that might sound interesting to you; the Photo Resizer 2.4 and the MaxView 2.1. Both programs are components that were rolled up and used to build the Image Viewer. So all the functional abilities in those products are rolled up into the Image Viewer.

http://www.faststone.org/download.htm

I am truly amazed and appreciative of the quality that Avast provides to it’s home users free of charge. The Avast suite is a “first class” anti-virus package. I know no better and I’ve seen most. Being an anti-virus vendor, you must establish and continually provide a vigilant relationship with your customer and Avast constantly updates their virus database and they do it as transparently and efficiently as possible for both fee and free customers. I can’t thank Avast enough for the value they provide to us free users consistently. Every home and business user should run Avast. I have no doubt, they are the best, so install their software and put your Virus troubles behind you.

More information from Avast
http://www.avast.com/eng/programs.html

‘Breedlink’=1click download
Breedlink: Download avast! 4 Home Edition FREE Download.

SpyBot Search and Destroy

Spybot is a very popular adware and virus scanner. Spybot is an essential part of any home computer system. The GUI is pretty intuitive so download it, learn what it does, and your computer will benefit. I don’t spend much time protecting my PC from all the crap that is out there. If you take a few precautions (running spybot 1 time a month is one of them) you shouldn’t have any trouble either.

The latest version (1.4) of Spybot has a ‘tea-timer’ which is a process that runs in your system tray and notifies you of any changes to the registry and allows you to approve or deny them. It’s a small process that is worth the cycles. Spybot also ‘immunizes’ your system against a lot of the spycode that is out there. It’s common sense to for any computer connected to the Internet to be running Spybot.

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

I decided it was time to take another look at the free firewalls. I found an article on LifeHacker and then an article on ‘Freeware Genius’ (both great ‘Market Sight’ resources) and they led me to a product named Comodo, which I’d never heard of before. I was suspicious but impressed to find a review by PC magazine, which named it as one of the top firewalls (bar none).  The research eventually led me to this report by MatouSec, which lists every firewall in the market, evaluates their performance, and identifies which products are free. I was blown away to find Comodo Firewall Pro, which was tagged as freeware, at the top of the list. That sealed the deal so I downloaded and installed it and now I’m a firm believer in Comodo Firewall Pro. 

It uses about the same amount of resources as Sygate and Zone Labs, so no surprises there, and I was very satisfied with the simple and straight forward GUI they provide.  Now I can say with Confidence that this is the best Firewall on the market, and it’s freeware and that makes it a crucial part of our ‘best of breed’ suite of products.   You can download it at the link below!

http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/

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As a side note, that report by MatouSec also provided a table that included link’s to all the firewall companies it reviewed.

XP Antispy is a must have program for anyone running Windows XP. There are all kinds of things in Windows XP that you don’t necessarily want to run. This program allows you to shut off a lot of the unnecessary services that XP is running. It basically puts a GUI around the administrative chore of shutting down the services that might be a problem. The GUI tells you what it is doing and provides some great information about the services so you can make the right choice on whether or not it’s necessary for each service to run in your environment. Everyone running Windows XP should install and run this product because it tightens up your security and saves you a lot of resources.

After you download and install, plan on spending about a half hour reading each item carefully. You can normally take the developers advice about turning off or leaving on the service. There are some things on the list that he suggests you not shut off in certain situations so it is a good idea not to go down the list checking off the boxes. There is a menu item that lets to turn the list back to ‘default’ if you need to.

http://xp-antispy.org/index.php?option=com_remository&func=sellang&iso=en

Digg has come up with some new front ends to their service. It looks like Intel sponsored one of the interfaces, which is the type of business activity they do a lot of. So I decided to download the Flash object and run it on my PC. I’ve never scene a such a CPU intensive object! It had my AMD Athlon 3500+ maxed out consistently! Maybe they have something in there that makes AMD processors look bad ;). Just kidding, I haven’t even tried it on an Intel machine but I’m sure that Flash object will max out most of today’s desktop machines. The good news is that there is a great solution to that problem. Just log onto Digg’s site and let their processors do the work. There is no difference in the quality or look of the object and Digg has 3 more ‘views’ of their data.

This is truly the best way I’ve seen for staying up on the day’s news. You can view it through some really great visual interfaces and you’re only 2 clicks away from the actual story. Of course, the information you are getting is Digg data. Therefore, it is based on their ‘rating’ of the stories but Digg is as good a measure as anything else out there today. So with all things considered, this is a great way to get the news and you don’t even have to download anything. Just go to Digg’s site and pick which interface is the best for you. You can follow the link below to their website and start interacting with today’s news data right away!

http://labs.digg.com/arc/

Friends, I am still a fan of launchy however, I was surprised to find out that Launchy and each of its plugins draws a ‘critical security threat’ and each must stay connected to the internet to work! Why in the world would a program launcher need to stay connected to the internet? Your guess is as good as mine. So one word of advice… Minimize the problem by double checking the plugin folder to make sure that no modules exist in that folder. You can delete everything in the plugin folder… It looks like there may be room for improvement on the program launcher front after all. I was very surprised the application was doing this. And when I shut it down via my firewall, I couldn’t get my firewall to accept my browser any longer. I ended up having to uninstall and re-install my firewall. A fine waste of an afternoon that was. So heads up! I’m still using it but I am certainly looking for something that accomplishes the same thing without connecting to the internet.
I’ve worked with so many program launchers over the years and I’ve seen the task approached a number of different ways but when it gets right down to getting access to my programs quickly, Launchy is the best possible solution. Instead of having to work to update your shortcuts every time you add new software or change the list of things you want to run, you point launchy at a directory and it does the rest. So setting up and maintaining Launchy is truly a snap.

When you want to run an application you just tap ‘alt+space bar’ (at the same time) and small search window will appear. You start typing in the application that you want to work with and you see the file name fill in the search window and then you hit enter and Launchy disappears again until you need it. Launchy also employs some intelligence so it knows what programs you run regularly and gives them priority over the .exe files that you rarely use.

To wrap things up… Launchy is extremely lean on resources to run, it is unbelievably slim on set up and maintenance, and it is as smart as a program launcher can be. Which leads me to believe that there will never be a need to run another program launcher (well… as long as we use keyboards) because the task of launching programs can’t be completed any more efficiently than Launchy does it.

This is your ‘1 click’ download link for Launchy.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=132975&package_id=146049

I recommend downloading the skins too. After you download just unzip them and put them in the ’skins’ file where Launchy is installed… probably c:\program files\Launchy\skins You can download the Skins and get other product information from Launchy’s main page at this link.

http://www.launchy.net/#download

Tiny Res Meter

This is the only desktop monitoring tool that I use now. It’s small and it provides all the information you need. I have looked at dozens of products in this category.  There are all levels of products and some provide very detailed information but, when it comes to monitoring your resources without sucking up all your resources, this is the best product I’ve found.

http://perso.accelance.net/~pesoft/trm/us_trm.html