I love freeware. I don’t have a lot of $ yet, so I can’t pay for many programs yet. However, I have found many programs that replace the need to buy anything. Here are some of my favorites:
Paint
Paint.Net. This is an absolutely fabulous program. It is a great photo editor. It may not be as powerful as photoshop, but it is definitely close, and plug-ins made by users increase its potential. I have made some pretty cool things with Paint.Net, including the header. Paint.Net is also very user-friendly. When I was just starting graphic design, I tried GIMP. I turned it on (which took forever on my old computer) and saw all of these buttons and menus and stuff. So I tried Paint.Net and something about it made it much more user-friendly than GIMP, despite being able to do the same things. I am pretty sure there is a new release coming soon, that will be awesome!
Messenger
Trillian. Trillian is a instant messenger program that includes Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, and AIM. For me (I have AIM and MSN) it gets the job done. It allows me to keep an eye on my contacts in one window. I have a friend who introduced me to it, and we will alternate between IM clients in the same conversation (in other words, we have 2 conversations at once).
Cleaning and Defragging Hard Disk
CCleaner and Defraggler. These two programs are both by the same developer, Piriform. I use them both regularly and they are both great. My computer is a lot faster after cleaning and defragging. Although windows has utilities to do these tasks for you, these two programs are much better at them. It is amazing how much junk you store up on your computer in about a week that you can clean out. When I first got defraggler (I had already been using CCleaner for a few months) I defragged my hard drive 4 or 5 times in a row in order to get it better. I noticed my computer was significantly faster.
Calendar
Sunbird. This is a great free calendar program. It is nice because you can have multiple calendars (i.e, one for family stuff, one for work stuff etc.), and there are great add-ons out there for it. I use it because of its user freindliness. User freindliness is one of the main things I look for in a program and this one has it.
Clean Desktop
Rocketdock- Great icon dock, it is free, has a lot of features, and helps you clean-up your desktop in a cool way. It features drag and drop functionality, supports .ico and .png files as icons, and a lot more.
Editor
Notepad++- Very nice program for coding. I use it to make my (basic) python programs. It features a ton of file formats and color codes different things once you specify the language you are typing. It also allows you to have multiple files open in the same window, which is handy for modding things.
I probably forgot a few becaues I am so used to these programs I take them for granted.
