My Freeware Favorites

I'm a cheap bastard at heart, and I hate feeding the Microsoft empire's coffers by paying for their overpriced, under-performing, buggy, inelegant and insecure bloatware. This is a compilation of useful freeware equivalents I've found:
Some URLs included, others googleable.


Office Applications:

Open Office
Free substitute for Microsoft Word.
Why pay $400 for the privilege of mangling your documents when you can write and edit to your heart's content for free? Can produce Word compatible files, and export pdf. From Sun Microsystems.

AbiWord
Small, effective word processor. Loads and runs a lot faster than Open Office, if all you want to do is write and edit a document.

Paint.net
Photo editing

Skype
Free VOIP.

Net Safety:

Zone Alarm
Free software firewall.

Ad Aware
Finds and deletes spyware

Browsers:
Internet Exploder is good for exactly one purpose - downloading an alternative browser. Should be the first thing you do on line when bringing up a new computer.

Firefox
Based on the open source version of Mozilla. An updated classic.

Sea Monkey
More open source Mozilla

Opera
Interesting alternative to Mozilla-based browsers.

Foxit Reader
Good, small pdf reader.
Adobe used to be a small, useful pdf reader. Lately it's turned into an obscene piece of bloatware. Try this instead.


Engineering:

b2 Spice
A reasonably good Spice distribution. Has a limited free version, good for small circuits

TI Spice:
Based on Tina, another good Spice distribution. This one is intended to be used to simulate circuits using T.I. products, but it has a complete set of features and component models, and there's nothing to stop you from having one token T.I. op amp on the side with all its pins grounded in order to fool it into working.

Tiny Cad
Good schematic entry program

7470
Emulates an HP GBIB plotter in Windows

PCB Artist
Schematic entry and PCB design

Dip Trace
Schematic entry and PCB design. Freeware version is limited, but usable

Graph
Equation graphing application.

Operating systems:
Ubuntu. If we're going free, why not go whole hog? Free distribution of Linux, and they will send you the install disks, unlike all the download only distributions. Just ignore the touchy-feely, feelgood, pc boilerplate about collective economics
http://www.ubuntu.com/

Sound Editing
Wavosaur
http://www.wavosaur.com/
.

Watch this Space

A place to post electronics related items that just don't fit with my professional activities, or just aren't important enough to justify a full-on peer review publication.