New Computer? Get Started Here

Recently received a new computer, but don’t know where to get started. Look no further for the most essential programs that are needed on a computer, and they are all free. All links lead to Cnet Downloads.

Browsers

• Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox made tabbed browsing mainstream and redefined the browser wars. The easiest browser on the market to customize, the huge user-developed plug-in database makes it supremely powerful, but that’s not the only reason to use it.

Even the built-in pop-up blocker, antiphishing protections, and enhanced extension security aren’t enough of a reason for using Firefox. Being one of the fastest browsers on the market? Aren’t they all? But add together all those things under one roof, and you’ve got a full-featured, safe browsing experience with a nearly infinite level of customization.

• Chrome

Chrome is Google’s attempt to make the Web browser disappear and to focus on the applications and pages users are viewing, rather than on the border with its tools. Some of Chrome’s basic underpinnings are quite novel, but people will recognize other features, as they exist in other open-source Web browsers on the market today.

Chrome is blazingly fast and is easily the quickest browser available. Chrome’s interface is a drastic departure from other browsers. Instead of the traditional toolbar, Chrome puts its tabs on top.Detached tabs can be dragged and dropped into the browser, and tabs can be rearranged at any time. By isolating each tab’s processes, when one site crashes, the other tabs do not.

Chrome made some major improvements toward the end of 2009, and skins are now available. Extensions are limited to the developer’s version, but they’re expected soon, too. Only time and benchmarking tests will tell if they slow the browser down, but Chrome’s rising popularity is undeniable.

• Opera

Although not as popular as Firefox or Chrome,Opera is nothing less than an excellent alternative. The program is known for striving to be the fastest, smallest, and most full-featured browser available. Even if sometimes it doesn’t hit all of those marks, Opera has developed a dedicated following of both desktop and mobile users. Of course, Opera covers the basics with tabbed browsing, mouse-over previews, a customizable search bar, advanced bookmarking tools, and simple integration with e-mail and chat clients. Mouse-gesture support, keyboard shortcuts, and drag-and-drop functionality round out the essentials.

Out of the box, Opera has just about all you need, and its extras are equally strong. Integrated theme support, desktop widgets, the Wand autofill/saved password utility, torrent support, the new browser-server API platform called Unite, and anti-malware protection courtesy of Haute Secure make it a favorite. Throw in always-on access to your bookmarks and other personal settings via Opera Link, and Opera has what it takes to unseat even the biggest-name browsers. You just need to hear it sing.

Email Clients

• Mozilla Thunderbird

My only recommendation for a freeware e-mail client, Mozilla Thunderbird combines smart browsing with sharp innovations aimed at both Web-mail clients and industry standards like Microsoft Outlook. Basics like junk-mail filters, HTML support, multiple identities, and POP, IMAP, and Microsoft Exchange server support load fast and are bolstered by S/MMIE, digital signing, message encryption, and a phishing detector. Interface tweaks maximize message viewing–a necessity in an e-mail reader.

Back and forward browser-style buttons, customizable tags, and colors make it a cinch to keep things organized, even across folders. Gmail support is as simple as entering your e-mail and password; searches can be saved as folders; and Thunderbird supports extensions like Firefox, allowing for serious enhancement tweaks, including everything from calendar and schedulingsupport to PGP encryption.

If your computer comes with Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail, there’s nothing wrong with using them. However, Thunderbird is the only client that brings the utility of Firefox extensions and the developer’s community behind them to secure e-mailing.

Office

• Open Office

A credible rival to MS Office, OpenOffice.org includes powerful applications for making text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, diagrams, databases, and HTML and XML documents. It handles complex equations and multipart documents as easily as simple letters and faxes.

Even advanced Office users will find the templates, collaborative features, macros, and programming language familiar. Extensible and open source, it lets you both import and save documents in formats as diverse as MS Office formats, PDF, HTML, WordPerfect, XML, and others. However, the default is to save files in the open-standard Oasis OpenDocument XML format for maximum compatibility with other applications.

Multilingual and cross-platform, OpenOffice.org is a compelling option for anyone in search of an alternative office suite.

• AbiWord

OpenOffice can be too much for many users, so we suggest AbiWord when you’re looking for just the word processor without the massive suite behind it. It has a quick learning curve with an interface similar to those in Word and WordPerfect, and is compatible with both MS Word 2007 and OpenOffice.org 3.

All the basics are here, including highlight, notation, and a bevy of common formatting tools. Although we did miss a grammar-checker, AbiWord has a multilingual spell-checker. A huge plus is the ability to open and save Microsoft Word documents, though the program also has its own proprietary file format. You can download plug-ins at the publisher’s site to import and export a wide variety of other formats, including OpenDocument Format.

• Foxit Reader

Foxit Reader is everything that Adobe Reader isn’t: lightweight, effective as a Web browser complement, and streamlined. Foxit’s main purpose is to read PDFs, but it also has annotation tools. The interface mimics Adobe’s, so you won’t have to change your reading habits. Text readability is nearly the same, and the 5MB Foxit starts surprisingly fast compared with Adobe. It’s a nice touch that it opens PDFs from the Internet in their own Foxit window, instead of sucking resources from within the browser. It also takes up much less room and takes no where near as long to install.

Hyperlink clicking is now functional, as is multimedia support, printing highlighted-only sections, and tabbed PDF reading, so you can read multiple PDFs simultaneously and with ease.

Image Editors

• GIMP

The volunteer developers of The GIMP have developed a polished, user-friendly, and open-source image editor. Although the separated palette windows may disturb users who prefer traditional layouts, your comfort level should grow as you discover how pain-free the program is.

Comparable to Photoshop, GIMP’s features include channels, layers and masks, filters and effects, tabbed palettes, editable text tools, color operations such as levels, scalable brushes, revised selection tools, full-screen editing, printing, red eye removal, perspective clone, lens distortion, and more. It even has regex-based pattern matching for power users, but also like Photoshop, it might be much more powerful than what you need.

• Paint.NET

If all you want is a quick image retouch, The GIMP is overkill. Paint.NET, on the other hand, is an open-source editor with all the essentials, including tools to crop, rotate, resize images, adjust colors, and create collages. It supports common image formats but not high-resolution raw files.

There are enough basic and intermediate effects and features to keep image-tweakers happy, though the red-eye removal tool is notably weak, so those images may require manual attention. The pleasing interface boasts semitransparent windows for ease of use. Unlike most free image editors, Paint.NET supports layers and has an actions manager.

• Gadwin PrintScreen

With sophisticated features at no cost, it’s hard to reach higher than Gadwin PrintScreen. An attractive, easily navigated interface opens up a customization wonderland for users to decide default settings for shortcut key associations, capture preferences, and output.

For our purposes, the clicking and dragging region is the clear choice. Misjudge your region’s dimensions and Gadwin PrintScreen lets you readjust them without having to start over, something many commercial competitors don’t do. Setting the app to automatically open each screen capture in your favorite viewer or editor makes up for the program’s lack of built-in image editor, still achieving a seamless screen capture experience from start to finish that grabs and delivers shots just where you want them. We’ve found it works seamlessly with both The GIMP and Paint.NET for smooth screen-to-edit transitions.

Music

• Apple Itunes

iTunes is hardly the most graceful jukebox for Windows, but despite the persistent bloat problems, occasional stability issues, and a static interface, it’s hard to ignore what Apple’s jukebox can do. The Genius sidebar makes recommendations based on what other iTunes listeners like, and the Genius playlist is a “smart” list where you choose a song, and then it fills out the rest of the playlist using the same algorithm as the sidebar. Both require an iTunes Store account.

The essentials are more or less covered, including enhanced video abilities, ringtone editing for the iPhone, new ways to view your library, iPod integration, smart playlists, CD burning, label printing, the ability to rip files in multiple formats (except WMA), and network sharing. Along with the Album, Cover Flow, and Grid view options, which let you flip through CDs and movies visually, iTunes 9 comes with a number of feature enhancements mostly to improve upon the way you interact with iTunes, your devices, and the iTunes Store. You now can selectively sync specific artists or playlists, or sync your photos by specific albums or faces. Rounding out the feature set are parental controls and a smart-shuffle option. The podcast-catching is functional, but isn’t as advanced as in other players. iTunes 9 offers a laundry list of useful features, with the benefits outweighing the costs.

• Spotify

Spotify is a new way to enjoy music. Simply download and install, before you know it you’ll be singing along to the genre, artist or song of your choice. With Spotify you are never far away from the song you want.

There are no restrictions in terms of what you can listen to or when. Forget about the hassle of waiting for files to download and fill up your hard drive before you get round to organising them. Spotify is instant, fun and simple.

Security

• Avira

Consistently at or near the top of independent efficacy testers, Avira’s AntiVir remains one of the best freeware security solutions around. Its scans are flexible, allowing the user to fully scan both internal and external hard drives, run a preloaded scan–for rootkits, for example–or customize a scan. The latest version introduces antispyware protections, scanning tech that can crack open “locked” files, improved internal security to prevent AntiVir’s files from being maliciously altered, and one-click threat removal–no more baby-sitting.

• AVG Anti Virus

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition is an anti-virus protection tool available free of charge to home users. Rapid virus database updates are available for the lifetime of the product, thereby providing the high level of detection capability.
The new 9.0 edition is faster, safer and easier to use. AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition gives you free rock solid protection for your basic security needs. The combined anti-virus/anti-spyware scanner in AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition runs up to 50% faster than earlier versions and doesn’t get in your way. AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition also delivers new anti-phishing detection techniques, which can quickly and accurately determine whether or not a web page is hosting a phishing attack. Additionally, version 9.0 comes with basic anti-rootkit protection to ensure protection against sophisticated hidden threats.

Communications

• AIM (AOL Instant Messenger)

AIM connects you with your friends and family instantly. The new Lifestream feature lets you stay on top of what your AIM buddies are doing by allowing you to add a variety of accounts such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. With AIM, you can follow your friends, post photos and status messages to stay connected in real time. With a great new look and feel, it’s faster and lighter than ever. AIM is available on Windows and Mac, your favorite mobile phones like iPhone and Windows mobile, or try it out on the web using AIM Express.

• Skype

Although there are other options available for VoIP, Skype gets our recommendation for video chat because of its popularity and excellent video compression. Skype 4 has been reworked, stripped down to its core competency of delivering high-quality audio and video calls over the Internet. The improved sound and video quality were notable in our tests, the result of Skype 4.0′s sound engine and bandwidth manager.

New in this version is screen sharing, which initiates a video call and broadcasts a recording of your screen–either a portion or the full screen–to one other viewer. You can’t simultaneously see a video of your buddy and their desktop, image quality decreases during screen sharing, and the one viewer limitation prohibits using it as a replacement for collaborative Web conferencing. For international callers, this program is a no-brainer solution for slashing those long-distance bills.