free office suite - OpenOffice
OpenOffice is a complete office suite OpenOffice designed to rival the very expensive Microsoft Office family of programs. With a word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation maker and drawing utility, it might not be as refined as its more expensive counterpart, but it’ll get all your work done with relative ease. Read more
Freeware - vlc media player
Quite often, we must have come across scenarios where our PC refuses to play your favorite music or video disc. It just says ‘required codec missing’, leaving you pulling your hair in frustration. This won’t happen again—there exists an application fully loaded with the maximum number of multimedia codecs available on this planet. VLC Media Player, which is a multi-platform freeware, is the answer to all the codec troubles you face. Read more
Freeware for photo editing tools
Paint. Net is a slimmed down version of Photoshop. The feature list cannot be compared to it. The interface is as
minimalist as any graphics application can be. There are no user customizable toolbar arrays. However, it has floating palettes for all the important functions such as layers, color wheels, and tool palette. Each and every tool and palette toggle can be operated with keyboard shortcuts, a lot of which makes complete sense.
Best Freeware for audio editors
Audacity is considered to be one of the best audio editors. It manages to achieve this due to the loads of excellent features it integrates while maintaining the toolbar and work space uncluttered. It can record and play sounds and import and export WAy, MP3, OGG, and AIFFfiIes and also supports 32-bit floating-point audio. Basic effects such as reverb, delay, and compression are also included. Another eye-catching feature is the Beat Analyzer, which helps you hold the beats per minute of a phrase. Read more
7 Freeware for college student - IrfanView
Irfanview has been one of the most loved free image viewing and converting software around. It has managed to achieve this due its speed and compactness while managing to retain a blend of both simplicity and functionality. It supports quite a large number of graphic file formats, from the most commonly used JPEG, BMP, and GIF formats to the rarely used SGI and PSD.
Irfanview has support for audio file formats such as MP3, OGG, and WMA and video formats such as WMV, MOV, and AVI. But the only minus point being that separate plug-ins need to be installed to avail these features.
lrfanview is a perfect replacement for the Windows Paint tool because it can perform much better than the latter. Various effects that are integrated in it include blur, emboss, oil paint, edge detection, sepia, and pixellise. While the enhance colors option allows you to adjust the RGB levels along with brightness and contrast. This option allows you to simultaneously view the original and the rendered image. Also, there are the sharpening and resolution adjustments.
The Image effects option is worth a mention, it has a collection of some cool effects that can be directly applied to an image with the click of a button. The Swap color option allows you to transform the image into various combinations of ROB. Irfanview is also quite good at editing images with its cut/crop, rdsizing, color depth variations option.
If you click an interesting photograph and want to share it with friends, then just connect your digital camera to your computer, import the image, adjust the image according your preference, and e-mail it to your friends. Irfanview is capable of doing all of this and much more and takes up very less system resources.
7 Freeware for college student - Pidgin
Imagine a life without friends. It would be just impossible to live without them. The best way to keep in touch with them is through an instant messenger. But then all your friends might not be using the same instant messaging service. So, chatting with all of them simultaneously becomes a hassle as you will need to juggle between different windows. Another drawback is that you will need to install different messenger applications so that you can use different services.
The solution to the problem of chatting with multiple users who use different instant messengers is to use a multi-
messenger. Pidgin is one such messenger that allows you to login using your multiple accounts. It supports 14 messaging services that also include the popular messengers such as Google Talk, Yahoo, MSN, and AIM.
7 Freeware for college student - IZArc
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when Windows warns you of low disk space? Is it something like ‘Wow! It’s time to get a hard drive’ or ‘Oh! No, what do I keep and what do I delete’? If your response is the latter, then help is at hand, you need to use a file archiving application. File archive managers such as Winzip and Winace are quite popular but these are shareware. If it is freeware you are looking for, then try lZArc.
lZArc supports a number of file archive formats that include ZIP, ACE, and RAR. lZArc is quite user-friendly and at the same time packs a reasonable amount of functionalities as well. If you have an archived file of a certain format and need to convert it to some other format, then you can use lZArc to do that as well. However, the number of formats it can convert files into is limited, although it can extract files that are archived in different formats.
