LINKS TO OTHER FREE SOFTWARE

WARNING - ADWARE! A lot of freeware programs are now being released as "Adware". These are programs that may display banner advertisements across the top of the program when it is running or may patch into your Internet browser. These programs do all sorts of things to your system without warning you and also do various other nasty thingsbehind your back when you are connected to the Internet. I strongly advise anyone who is currently using adware or who has ever in the past installed an adware program (even if you have since deleted it) to check out the Lavasoft's Ad Aware page and download the adware remover . Note: None of the following programs are adware as far as I know, but newer version may be. If you find that any are, please let me know immediately so that I can remove them from this page.

This one is an absolute "MUST HAVE" Email today is a vital business tool and you owe it to yourself to use the best. No one should be forced to use Outlook or Netscape Mail. They are bloated, unfriendly and downright dangerous. With the number of viruses, trojans, wiretaps etc written to exploit the many secruity holes in these programs, you owe it to yourself and to everyone else to use the absolutely best email program available at any price - 'cause it's completely free. I've used just about every email program out there (in Unix, DOS and Windows) at various times and know that nothing compares to Pegasus Mail (3.5Mb ). It is an extremely powerful, yet very easy to use email program with all of the features you could ever want and none of the bloat you get with the main commercial packages.

ANOTHER "MUST HAVE" If you are still using MS Internet Explorer, you are exposing yourself to constant security threats and not getting the WWW experience you should. Mozilla Firefox is a faster, safer browser with a much better user interface (4.5MB)

Security SECURE YOUR DATA. Do you have confidential/financially valuable information stored on your computer? Would you be embarrassed/arrested if you sent your PC in for repair and they saw what was on your Hard Disk? TrueCrypt (500Kb) lets you create an encrypted virtual disk on your computer. Store all of your private material there and no-one can see it unless they open the disk with your password. SECURE YOUR COMMUNICATIONS. Do you send all of your business correspondence on postcards? Why do the equivalent with your email. Do you need to put an unforgeable signature on your email to authorise something? A digital signature is much harder to forge than your real signature on a letter or cheque! PGP (8Mb) is the defacto standard for encrypting and/or digitally signing your electronic correspondence (and it integrates well with Pegasus Mail by using the QDPGP plug in for Pegasus (500Kb)). SECURE YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION Are you open to attack when you are on line. Can other people access your computer. Are you sure that you haven't got any Trojans sitting on your computer sending info out without your knowledge. Kerio Personal Firewall (1.5Mb) is "free for individuals using the Software at home on a single computer (Home Users)". It is an easy to configure firewall which provides essential security for any computer connected to the Internet, especially those with always-on DSL or cable modem connections. KPF protects you from malicious programs, like Spyware and Trojan horses, by allowing you to control your computer's Internet traffic and how applications access the Internet. It also lets you know when someone outside is probing your computer. You will be surprised at how often it happens.

Internet Utilities SEARCH EASIER. Having problems finding the info you want on the web. Do you go from search engine to search engine without success. Copernic 2000 (2.5Mb) will send out your search criteria to all of the top engines simultaneously and then consolidate the results from all of them into a ranked list. A very useful tool. AUTOMATE YOUR CONNECTION. With Netlaunch (100Kb) you can open and close programs automatically when you dial up the Internet. I have it set so that with just one mouse click I dial my, ISP, synchronize my PCs clock with Atomic Time, open Pegasus Mail and download my email. (or you can set it to do this automatically every x hours without any intervention!). It will also shut down your phone connection for you automatically if you leave yourself logged in by mistake when you finish browsing. Another useful utility is Rasdial95 written by Claudio Fahey, who seems to have disappeared from the Net. This utility provides the same functionality as WInNT's Rasdial for W95/98 users. The last version I have found is 1.2. This version includes /RetryCount, /RetryDelay and /Callback switches. Because I can't find a current site for the this utility, I have made version 1.2 avaiable here. Download RasDial95 (15Kb)

Editors Text. Do you need to do any serious text editing, find Wordpad not powerful enough but don't want all the bloat of MS Word. You need a really good text editor. There are two that I use all the time NoteTab which comes in several versions including the freeware Lite version and Crimson Editor . Which one I use depends on the specific task at hand.

Other If your desk and the case of your monitor are covered with post-it notes, you definitely need ATnotes by Thomas Ascher. ATnotes is a program which creates Post-it like notes on the Windows desktop. The user interface is provided through an icon in the taskbar and supports many different languages. You can hid notes, have them "always on top", attach alarms to them to make them pop-up at a future date or time and even have them run another program when they pop-up. This has become one of my most used applications! You can get it here ATnotes (524Kb). If you have a lot of installed fonts, they use up system resources even if you very rarely need most of them. It would be nice if you could easily view your fonts and instal and uninstal them as you need them, unfortunately, this is not easy directly through WIndows. A really good tool for this is The Font Thing (1.1Mb). For viewing graphic files, doing basic editing (cropping, annotating, changing format, adjusting colour etc), a really excellent tool is IrfanView (479Kb) Want to convert audio CDs to MP3 or WAV files and store them on disk? You need SIMPLE (SImple Mp3 PLayer and Encoder/decoder) (1Mb ). Then you can listen to them through your PC's speakers at any time even if you are using your CD-ROM for something else. If you hook up your PC sound card to your stereo system, you can put your CDs away in safe storage and not touch them again. You can store about 20 CDs per GB using MP3. I have come across two very good clock utilities. Both are highly recommended, which one is for your depends on your requirements. TClockEx (189Kb) is a neat little program that enhances the clock that is built into the Windows 95, 98, NT and 2000 taskbar. It lets you see the date as well as the time on the taskbar in one glance, and with any format you like. It can also display a range of other imformation about system resources etc and lets you pop up a small calendar on demand. A much larger application which is very good if you don't need the systems resources info but would like comprehensive World Time and Almanac information on tap is WorldTime (4.3Mb). It is a much bigger program but is the one I now keep running all the time. Another utility from the writer of WorldTime, which I also find very useful is Versaverter (855Kb). If you need to convert any unit of measure to any other unit, this Unit Converter will probably do it for you. A few other tools which are more specialised but which I find very handy: A useful tool which Unix users will be very familiar with is Grep. It searches files for lines containing a match to a pattern. It has all sorts of uses. You can get a good Windows port of Grep (198Kb) here. Two great lttle tools which I use, both by the same author are: IconShop (88Kb) A comprehensive Icon file manager. It maintain ICL libraries, extracts icons from EXE files, DLLs etc (including MacIntosh files) and convert BMP, GIF etc files to icons. ResThief (5Kb). This little gem will extract all the resources from an executabel file, not just icons. Another tool I find useful is Password Killer (18Kb). It shows you what is behind the ****s in password fields. Lets you see what you are typing into a Password field and also what is already stored in one. Great if you have set DUN to remember your password and have forgotten it yourself. Now you can see what it is before Windows dials up for you. It's also handy if you have saved login information for several sites in an FTP program and now can't remember the passwords. If you use Microsoft's Power Tools, you will be familiar with TweakUI. Tweak Revisited (652Kb) give you even more control over your desktop and lets you customise all sorts of things in Windows including replacing the WIndows screens at startup and shutdown, changing your Windows Registered Name and Company (great to correct those machines which come pre-installed with Windows where you are registered as "Preferred Customer" of "Reseller Name"). Add extra items to your right-click menus, clean up cookies and much more. If you are a real power freak, then an even more powerfull tool is XTeq Systems X-Setup If you are a sailor or fisherman and want detailed tidal information for just about anywhere in the world (and current information for many areas as well), an excellent tool is WXTide (1.38Mb)

Pricelessware "The Pricelessware list is a compilation of software collected through a yearly vote by the participants of the "alt.comp.freeware" newsgroup. It is a list of what people have voted as "the best of the best in Freeware". The software listed here is commonly referred to as "Pricelessware", a term given with great respect and thanks to the authors of these programs for giving us such wonderful quality freeware programs."

Stuart McLachlan, Port Moresby

Still want to use the command line in WIn95/98 but can't remember the syntax? The DOS help files from MS-DOS v6.x have everything you need. Get them here (430Kb) and just unzip the three files into any convenient directory