Best of Breed - The Best Freeware for Windows

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.

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.

I’m trying to give you only 1 product per category to maintain my ‘best of breed’ commitment to you but sometimes it makes sense to ease up on the rules a little so you get the benefit of a realistic solution. In a previous post I had recommended Zotero for storing information that you find on the Internet and I stand by that decision but when you only have a phone number that you want to keep or a url or something small like that, it doesn’t make sense to pull up an interface to store it. That is the niche’ that Clippings fills and it does so in the best way possible. When you have s short amount of text you want to keep you highlight it and drag it to an icon on your statusbar (toolbar on the bottom of your Firefox browser) and drop it there. Clippings will bring up a quick window that asks you if you want to store it under a heading. You decide yes or no by typing the heading, hit OK and you’re done. To retrieve the information just double click on the icon and you can either search for the text or look at all your headings. It’s truly a snap with Clippings. By the way, I just emptied out thousands of bits of text, so that is why the picture shows that I only have 7 entries in there. I use Clippings all the time and it does make sense to empty out once in a while.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1347

I’ve tested a great number of solutions for grabbing streaming video on the Internet and downloading it to your PC and the one that works the best is UnPlug. There are all kinds of solutions posted on the Firefox page but over time UnPlug has delivered the best solution. It is compatible with just about every form of video on the Internet and the developer keeps the code up with the new releases of Firefox.

When you see a video you want you just click on the fish and it opens a new tab and lists all the videos found on that page. Then you choose the one you want and you’re done. Works like a charm almost every time, which is a good deal more often than most of the other extensions in this category do.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2254

PDF Download takes the sting out of clicking on a PDF document to view. It allows you to view the PDF document in HTML so it loads immediately. It’s a vast improvement over waiting for a PDF reader to load every time you click on a link to a PDF document. Another of life’s little hassles eliminated!

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&category=Popular&numpg=10&id=636

Zotero is a Firefox extension that will be of great value to you if you are maintaining a blog or doing research on the web or any reason that involves storing web pages. Zotero provides you with an interface that lets you store web pages, in a variety of formats, and retrieve them with a variety of tools. The trick to making it the ‘run away’ winner in the ‘best of breed’ category is based on three important variables.

• Convenience - Zotero places an icon (it’s actually the word Zotero) on the bottom of your browser in the status bar. When you click on the icon, the bottom of your browser rises up about 3 inches and you see the Zotero interface. So the program is right on hand and ready any time you are.

• Storage- Zotero gives you several ways to store the page you are looking at. You can link to the page, save the item as (I’m assuming) an html page so when you pull it up it will look just like it did when you viewed it, you can take a snapshot of the page (stores it in an image format), and you can write a note about the page that gets stored along with the rest of the information.

• Retrieval- So once you have all this information stored away you need a way to get to it. While you were going through the process of saving all these links, web pages, snapshots, and notes, you’ve been creating a filing system. So you can navigate to the files just like you wouldanything you’ve stored on your hard drive. Zotero also provides a search engine. So if you’ve created a huge archive and the file system is just the tip of the iceberg, you can run a search and retrieve the information. There is even a way to index your files for optimized searching. You also have the ability to ‘tag’ the entry so you can look things up that way as well. Zotero doesn’t just list the files like you would see them on your hard drive, although you can ask Zotero to open the database file where they are stored, everything is bundled up nicely and delivered through their interface. You retrieve the item you’ve saved and then on the right side of the interface there are buttons and tabs that let you pull up the snapshot, notes, or associated files… In general, everything is bundled up very nicely and it’s a lot prettier than weeding through the files on your system.

To sum things up, Zotero does a great job of helping you store information and then making it available when you need it. It’s a big task, much more complicated than most extensions, and Zotero does it better than anything else I’ve worked with. So install it in your Firefox browser today. I’ve put a link that will take you right to Zotero below.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3504

ps - In case you are wondering where the name comes from, this is a picture of Zotero, I thought he was a guy on a horse with a sword, but that was a long time ago…