Product of the day | Top Internet Freebies
Here at Hanlor I think we are too good to you lot, especially with today’s Product of the day, or should we say Products! Today we bring you the list of the ultimate freebies for your PC, to keep you safe and secure and to give you that bit of artistic flair. We use, or have used all these products so they come complete with the Hanlor seal of approval™. On with the show:
We start with the fantastic trio of products available from Mozilla, The oddly named Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird.
Firefox’s is Mozilla’s very own web browser, a direct rival to Microsoft Internet Explorer. Firefox was revolutionary when it was released at the time and now it has progressed to V2.0. There are many many reasons why you should use Firefox instead of IE but I don’t want to sound like a geek so in short, its cleaner, its faster, its more secure, it can be easily customized and its much more reliable. Plus if that wasn’t enough the Hanlor team write the pages especially so it all works beautifully in Firefox, while IE has a tendency to break everything we do. I have been using Firefox since the beginning and not a day goes by without it amazing me in some way or another. Download now from www.mozilla.com/firefox/.
Thunderbird is Mozilla answer to the frankly awful Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. With a far better interface, built in junk filters and much more customization than you could ever want in a Email interface Thunderbird has it all. Get it now from www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/
Finally onto the little known Sunbird. A project still in its early stages this software aims to organize your life by offering calendar facilities and the ability to organize appointments with colleagues and friends. You’ll never miss a meeting again with Sunbird, available from http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/
Don’t forget Mozilla are creating new applications all the time, I’ve just seen the new release of their mobile browser and it looks superb. This may be another one worth a download….
We now move onto keeping your computer safe. Sadly using the Internet is a danger, with dodgy companies and individuals at every turn trying to gain access to your computer and your personal information. To be almost completely safe you need three pieces of important software, a firewall, a virus checker and an spyware monitor. They may sound scary but once you’ve installed these programs they can be left to their own devices and can happily protect your computer in the background without your input.
Firewall: The simple job of the firewall is to stop attacks and attempts to gain access to your files. Once set up you will have to allow your normal programs (internet/email/games etc) to have access but from then on your computer will stop unauthorized access to your account keeping your computer safe from harm. For this job we recommend Ashampoo, of all the free firewalls this is the easiest to set up and most secure. I’ve used it for years without problem.
Anti-Virus: Should something nasty already be on your computer, or just in case the very small chance your firewall fails then an Anti-virus program is a must. If a Firewall is the prevention then Anti-virus is the cure. The Anti-virus programs simply scan your PC for nasties then delete them with minimum fuss. All you need to do is update the software regularly to keep tabs on new viruses and apart from this it will pretty much run itself. For this task we recommend AVG by Grisoft. Grisoft are one of the leading forces in Virus protection and their free offering is the best out there for free.
Spyware: Spyware is a real nasty, it can install itself to your computer and transmit all kinds of stuff to the outside world, your card details, your name and address, even your viewing habits and what websites you visit. A lot of this is innocent software doing research for companies but there are some malicious nasties out there you need to be aware of. Like your Anti-virus you need to update and run your spyware regularly, just to keep your computer safe. Lavasoft created the original anti-spyware software many years ago, and it is their free offering Ad-Aware that we recommend to you.
Now we have you using a decent browser and keeping your computer safe, its time to showcase some of the ‘non-vital’ freebies you can get for your PC, stuff to entertain you, software to burn CD’s and to tinker with pictures and photos.
CD Burning: Most computers these days come with a CD Burner or have the ability built into one of the drives,.although the vast majority of the time you don’t get any software with it. In this case you will more than likely end up paying for software, or using Windows Media Players which only does music, and doesn’t even do that superbly. Well not anymore, we at Hanlor use CDBurnerXP (available from http://www.cdburnerxp.se/), which does a superb job, has a low error rate (which means you wont get any CD’s that don’t work) and is most important of all, it’s free! Use it to create backups of important documents, or even better use it to create a CD full of brilliant driving tunes! PS: If you need some help creating the ultimate driving CD stay tuned for a feature coming up soon!
Onto Photo editing. Everyone has a digital camera these days, be it from a big massive professional SLR to a little compact camera to the ones featured on mobile phones. A few years ago with camera and film if your photo came out too dark or came out with a streak across the middle or with a batch of red eye you were frankly stuck with it. These days in the world of digital all you need to do is download some software to correct the mistakes and make all your photos beautiful (well, almost). Of course with this being the free software bonaza all we are about to show you is free.
Once you’ve taken the photos on your camera, you find you need to amend them in some way. Well most cameras have software included free to do the work, if your doesn’t then take a look at the GIMP. Gimp doesn’t stand for what you think it might do (for those with a rude mind) it actually stands for GNU Image Mutilation Program. I have no idea what GNU means but the rest means you can tinker and play with your photos to your hearts content, you normally have to pay in the region of £200 for software like this (such as Photoshop) but the GIMP does it all for free. Get it from http://www.gimp.org/ . Once you have made your photos look all pretty but find they are too big then take a look at PixResizer.It is the best resizer out there, better than those you have to pay for. It resizes practically any image to a different size without causing unnecessary stretching or damaging. Most of the photos on the site have had the PixResizer treatment and have come out brilliantly, get it here. Once you have a collection of brilliant photos you can use Picasa (yet another miracle piece of software from the guys at Google!) to keep all your photos in check.
That’s all you get for this installment. If thats not a hint to a later post with more freebies I don’t know what is! I hope you have fun with these suggestions and please feel free to suggest your own for improvement in the second installment, where I’ll hopefully discuss IRC clients, Office software and some more hardcore programming kit. Also keep an eye out for this article appearing as a full feature on the site in the next couple of days.
Until then, happy (and safe!) surfing!
LoU says:
September 17th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
you’ve put on line 15:
Hanlor team write the pages especially so it all WOKS beautifully in Firefox
think you need to change it to works
xxx
James says:
September 18th, 2007 at 12:08 am
If I had a wok I’d hit you with it