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Free Resources - Suggested by Channel Computing

Please remember that few things in life are truly free, and many of the businesses providing free software in the internet are really trying to lure you in as a customer, and then make some money out of you later on.

Typically they will try to get you to 'upgrade' to a more fully functioned version, or your free use will expire and the billing will start. If you integrate a free application too fully into your life or your business (eg. storing all your business contacts 'for free' online), then as they say, "They've got you by the short-and-curlies"! Please remember this while using and downloading all free software. Finally remember that without a broadband connection these downloads could take virtually for ever, its probably not worth bothering with most of them if you use dial up.

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The list on 'free stuff' are all reputable providers with some quite amazing free offers of really useful stuff, most of which we have tried before or use ourselves. So enjoy it for free while you can, be cautious about 'upgrading' (and very cautious with your credit card), and please let us know about your experiences using our contact page.

On-line collaboration Tools

There are quite a number of tools around that help a team get together and collaborate on a project.

This one is an interesting one, and should you have a number of people all trying to work together, share information, and get a document, proposal, project plan or similar together, then Colaab might be just the thing: Try it here: http://colaab.com

Opensource image editor - The Gimp

the gimp logo The Gimp is the other good quality image editing option, this one you download and install on your machine.

Being an opensource programme licensed under the GNU there is no charge for use, have a look at their site and download here: http://www.gimp.org/

Online Image Editors - Pixlr

Not got a subscription to the major image editing programmes such as Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator etc?
Want to edit images to a professional level?
Bored with MS Paint and its limited functionality?

Well here are two programmes that give you image editing at a more reasonable price - free in fact.

Pixlr is an on-line tool, looks quite advanced and has most of the functionality you are likely to need:

http://www.pixlr.com/editor/ Have a try and let us know how you get on.

Free AntiVirus - from Avast

Avast Anti Virus Another good free Antivirus product is from Avast.

Equally easy to download and install, this program seems to slow your computer less than AVG for example, but we have heard of instances of some viruses getting through it, so there might be a trade-off there. However this is definitely worth a try and another very high quality product.

And you can download it from here: Avast Web Site

Free AntiVirus from AVG

AVG anti Virus Here we take a quick look at some of the best Anti Virus options on the internet today.

AVG is a favourite, with a high quality product, a perfectly adequate free option which you can upgrade if you want. Thiings to watch out for include scheduling the daily scan so it doesn't happen when you're busy, and making sure you update the virus definitions regularly, so catch the worst and latest malware on the internet. This is very easy to use and download, and with the price set at nothing, you really can't do much better.

Download from: http://free.avg.com, and remember they always direct you to "upgrade" to a paid version, so read each step carefully if you want to use the free one.

Open Office

Open office is the open source (free) alternative to the ubiquitous but quite expensive Microsoft Office. One of the lynch pins of the growing opensource movement, it provides you with all the normal desktop (word processing, spreadsheet, etc) applications that you would expect, but at no cost.

On the downside some of the fancier integations of Microsoft's offering are not available to the user of Open Office, but for those looking for extensive integrations, Add-Ins,

You can download Open Office for free here.

Mozilla Firefox Web Browser

The 'traditional' alternative to Microsoft has been Mozilla Firefox, and its continued growth has seen it pass 20 percent of the market by many accounts. Firefox still has a lot of features that are not yet available in Googl'e new Chrome browser, including the many useful extensions including the Google Toolbar. It also offers (for free of course - its open source) potentially faster browsing the Internet explorer, and a host of features that make it definitely worth a look.

You can download Firefox for free here.

Google Chrome Browser

The Beta only arrived this week (first week in September 2008), but already Googles entry into the web browser wars has caused a storm. Chrome is quite different to the main incumbents Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5/6/7/8, or Mozilla Firefox (Currently at version 3.01).

Firstly there is no search box, and where the URL (page address) lives in the browsers we're used to, there is now something called an "Omnibox" which functions both to display the URl of the page, and also as a search box, where you can type your phrase for a conventional (Google) search result.

The browser does seem to be very fast however, but it does suffer in some eyes from the lack of add-ons. For example as a web marketeer we like to use the Google Toolbar (in Internet explorer or Firefox) to see the page rank of any page we're viewing. Nothing like this is available thus far with Chrome.

There are a couple of other bugs - I noticed today that our blogger account (owned by Google) formats posts wrongly when edited using Chrome. However Chrome is fast, slick, innovative, brand new, and most importantly free. You can download your own copy of Chrome here.

Channel Computing Limited