Recently I upgraded my home PC and I thought, well, how about loading it with only freeware/open source software (On top of Windows XP)? So I started looking around and found some excellent freeware, along with a lot of trash. It took some work to evaluate all the applications but in the end, it was worth it.I have nothing against Micro$oft or any other ISV making money though. It was just that I was on a tight budget and I wanted to see whether it was really possible to live without commercial software. Here is what I have settled on in the end.
Audio:
Nothing beats good ol' Winamp (classic) here for playing songs. For cataloging my music collection, I use MPEG Audio Collection. It is very lightweight and can read all types of audio files. It uses Windows default player (winamp here) to play music. Apple's iTunes is also good but it's very resource intensive, especially if you choose to normalize the volume. I use both MAC and iTunes as they serve two different purposes. With MPEG Audio Collection, you can catalog all your CDs and search for the songs without needing the original CD. On the other hand, iTunes does not allow you to play songs based on the folders (location) but you can do that in MPEG Audio Collection.
What good is winamp without some music for it to play and again I turned to freeware. There are more sources of legal free music on the internet than we know or care about and that's where irate comes in. When you run this program for the first time, it will download 10 tracks at random from different sources. You listen to each song and rate it on a scale of 0 to 10. Say you rate country songs higher than Blues. Then the program will start downloading more of country songs. With a little bit of training, the program can give you a hit ratio of 70% or more. And these are not streams or samples or pirated songs. These are free-as-in-beer full songs. And you can just right click on an artist's name and visit their website.
I use CDex for CD ripping and mp3Trim for occasional mp3 editing.
Video:
Even though I got a copy of PowerDVD when I bought my DVD-ROM drive, I don't use it as I am planning to use only freeware. But this is one area where I was disappointed. I could not find any good DVD players which are also freeware. The best I could find was VideoLan. Its interface is not as eye-candy as PowerDVD but it does play every imaginable file format, even those files that other softwares refuse to play. It's very lightweight and highly customizable. Don't be put off by its interface.
For video editing and capturing, the most popular freeware application is VirtualDub. For casual use, Windows Movie Maker 2 is a good choice.
CD/DVD writing:
I had always used Nero for this but CD Burner XP Pro is an excellent piece of software. It's hard to believe that something like this is free! It works with IDE, USB, IEEE1384, SCSI CD/DVD recorders, can create bootable discs, iso files, audio CDs etc. And best of all, it has a very powerful CD ripper, featuring ogg and wma, in addition to mp3. It has made me forget Nero and that's saying a lot.
For viewing image file, I use CDmage. It supports more than 25 formats, including .nrg, .ccd, .iso, and does an amazing variety of things.
Productivity:
The first application that comes to mind in this category is OpenOffice. It should serve you well for almost all of your needs. In case you get a complex layout file that was created in MS Office and OpenOffice is unable to render it properly, you can always download the free viewers for Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Visio from Microsoft site. I tried Abiword also but I did not like its interface that much. And since you'd be installing OpenOffice anyway, there is no need for any other word processor.
I use Keynote for note taking. It is very lightweight and has a nice tabbed interface. You can also use free version of Treepad but it does not support images.
Internet Browsing:
There are two choices for browsing the internet. Firefox and MyIE2. I do not prefer firefox that much because of its memory leak problems. Use it for 10 minutes and it would start taking 60-70 MB of RAM. But it's very secure and comes with a built-in pop up blocker. It is recommended only if you have atleast 256 MB of RAM. Otherwise it's better to use MyIE2 which is a shell around IE. It also supports tabbed browsing and has many more features than firefox.
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