Useful Shareware and Freeware Sources and programs

[John Wagenseil]

There are a lot of excellent no cost or donationware programs available, some of which are even useful for paper modeling.

PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB, portable and cloud drives is a collection of "portable" programs for Windows computers. The programs do not install and other than the folder containing the program, they make no changes to your computer system, so if you have an old twitchy installation of Windows you will not create problems for yourself with DLL conflicts if you use these programs.
Irfanview is a great program for image viewing, it can open just about any image file format.
VLS player will play most media formats. It is a little clunkier than Windows Media player, but you will not encounter the missing codec warning very often.
There are also graphics programs and office suites, and system viewers and repair tools.
OpenOffice and LibreOffice are not 100% compatible with MSOffice: a complex MS document may look different in the open source programs than it does when opened by MSOffice (And a document created by MSOffice may be modified if saved with one of these programs. However I have used OpenOffice in the past to salvage documents that MS Office could not open) , and they do not have all the document navigation features that the MS program does. They are free (but the developers are willing to accept donations), and they do a good job of converting a document into PDF or html format.

FileHippo.com - Download Free Software is another good source of programs, the list ranges from freeware to commercial trial programs to payware.

Terracopy is a usefull program, it makes moving large files around easier than using MS Windows Copy/Cut.

Sandboxie is good for running a program in isolation so that they are less likely to damage your computer OS and other files.

There are a lot of PDF conversion programs. 7PDFmaker has a portable version, PDFcreator is a good program which does not put a commercial water mark on the PDFs it creates. PrimoPDF seems to be a good program. I have not yet found a freeware PDf program that will convert a web site to PDF the way AdobeAcrobat does.

PaintNet, Inkscape and Gimp are worth looking into if you want to create or modify images and find Corel and Adobe products budget breaking. The Gimp interface was considered clumsier and harder to use than the Adobe interface, the next version of Gimp is supposed to have a new interface.

Unless you have a business that requires high end polished software with a lot of extra features or require 100% compatibility with users of commercial software, in most cases open source programs will do the job for you.

And if you like and use one of these programs, don't forget to go to the software developers web page and make a donation.

[rmks2000]

Thanks for the list John. I can attest that many of the apps listed work well off of a USB flash drive and don't require a lot of space. A 4GB drive will be more than enough for your apps and files. I've got GIMP, Inkscape, and Sketchup on one drive and they only take up 172MB in size, but on my drive, the actual size (size on disk) is 303MB.

[Zathros]

I wonder how many people know you can search the web off of Firefox loaded on a Flash card? This can give you access to the web from a computer that might be otherwise restricted.. The are ways to stop that, but most i.T's do not disabled the USB hubs that way.

Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition | PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB, portable and cloud drives

Here is a site with some neat stuff.

45 Free Useful Thumb Drive Applications

[gillman]

I've been using software off PortableApps.com for about 4 years. The downside I've seen to using those apps vs. installed apps is start-up time. GIMP, for example, takes a long time to start up, longer if you've got a bunch of scripts and plug-ins.

But on the plus side, it's easy to set up different versions of Firefox for no proxy or for a particular proxy depending on how you're connecting at the moment.

For convenience, your settings stay the same no matter what computer you've plugged the thumb-drive into.

A big security plus, the apps on PortableApps.com tend to leave very little trace of having been run on the computer.

[codex34]

Pixia (free paint program): introducing Pixia and Phierha
Virus/website scanner: VirusTotal - Free Online Virus, Malware and URL Scanner

Going to take another look at Inkscape, need a decent free vector program, though last time I tried it, it didn't work too well.

[Chats]

Scale Calc. and Jepg to Pdf. Both exelent stand alone tools,
and free in our software section.

[Uyraell]

One note of WARNING:
Under NO circumstances download a "Portable App" named "Pixel Art 207" This thing exists to turn your computer into a zombie machine.

It rewrites the Owner and sets itself up as a second Admin. It then denies access so as to not be able to be deleted.
It can not be got rid of easily at all, as it establishes itself in root, system, and registry files.

How do I know this?
I got caught by it, and now have two computers I never use as a result. It is capable of transferring itself by a usb stick. I found that out the hard way too.

The Portable Apps are usually very very good, and extremely useful.

But the PA 207 does NOT show up on a virus scan, because it is somehow treated as legitimate.

Which is why I am warning forum friends here about it.

Kind and Respectful Regards, Uyraell.