Useful Free Software for Windows 10

Everyone can use a good office suite and over the years there has been several which have been outstanding not only because they were free, but because they were proficient.  There are several free office suites available, but the best one is LibreOffice. It is compatible with Microsoft Office and there are some people who even use it professionally. It has just about the same types of software contained in the Microsoft Office Suite which one might pay hundreds of dollars for. There are six programs in the suite, Writer, Math, Calc, Base, Draw and Impress. Why is this great office suite free? Its free, because it is maintained by a large base of people dedicated to not only keeping it that way, they also want to make it the best.

If we are talking about free art software it is important to keep in mind what you are going to use it for, before you select the one which best suits you. A very good program is Krita. It is professional quality and was created by artists. The software is good for anyone who wants to draw, but it was especially designed for comic book artists. For those with more traditional interests they might like Artweaver Free. It is a good art program which accepts input not only from a mouse, but also from a stylus, or from a touch screen. The brush effects are great.

As I said before, I really don’t believe free anti-malware is worth the price. The price being putting your computer at risk. The free ones just don’t have enough features to fully protect your computer. When people ask me what I recommend it is Bitdefender Total Security. You can actually get it on sale if you shop around for about 50% off. Barring paying, I guess I would go with either Avast, AVG or Bitdefender. Remember the free versions of these software programs do not contain many of the bonus features that make them much better in the commercial versions.

I used to recommend free website creation software, but there are so many software programs which are available for free when you pay for a website that this doesn’t matter much anymore. Creating a website has become much easier over the years.

This is always a need for a good photo program and one of the very best still is free. The name of the software is Infanview and I have been recommending it for many years and the author has accepted a couple of my recommendations in past years such as adding basic drawing tools. This software is not only useful for photos or in fact any pictures, it also views movies and accepts different inputs. It can handle a picture with almost any extension and the author just keeps updating it. This software is so good if you had to pay for it, it would still be well worth the price. It can even do batch updating and has an incredible advanced settings screen. I still use it as my main photo program even though I have commercial ones on my computer. I always seen to go back to it.

Sometime someone wants to copy files and folders and they feel the built-in copy program in Windows is just too slow. Terracopy solves this program for many. While the built in copy program isn’t to bad with large files if you are just copying them to another location where they never were, Terracopy is faster if there is an older version of you folder with files in it and you want to copy a more recent version over it. Richcopy is another free copy program by Microsoft, but I prefer Terracopy.

There is no other piece of software like Google Earth. It is incredible and an enormous amount of work has been put into it. I have the professional version which is available for free. With it you can go to any location on the planet earth and even see your house if you punch in your complete address. The Google team were not satisfied with this so they added Google Mars and Google Moon to it. This enables us to see locations in both these places. This is a must have.

Everyone needs a good backup up program and you can get it for free. The name of it is AOMEI Backupper. This allows you to backup your data on all your drives several different ways including you Windows system. You can have the software also check the validity of the backup after it is created. You can also create partition backups and file syncs. You can restore everything of course. You can even clone your entire system to a disk or SSD drive and clone partitions. It also comes with a suite of handy utilities.

If you want to transfer files or folders to a website there is a great free program available to do that. I have been using versions of it for over ten years. Its name is Core and it works nicely transferring almost every type of file using the FTP process. Just highlight the files and folders to be transferred from the left pane and drag them into the right pane after selecting you site and directory where you want them transferred to.  You can also delete files from your website very easily by deleting them in the right pane.

Lastly it is important to keep your software up to date and a great free piece of software which can do this is FILEHIPPO. Just start it up and it will check the software on your computer and see if there are any updates for them. If it finds them it will list the link to update your software. One word of caution some updates might be Beta, but these will be listed with a red tag.

There is quite a bit of useful free software available. A word of caution, if you download it, get it from a site you trust like CNet or other famous ones.