Best Free Software for Home and Office

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, you can have the best technology in your computer but if they do not work together, you might as well be staring at an oven toaster. To have a good personal computer that you can depend upon needs a good mix of software and hardware. Once you have a good machine on your hands, the next thing to do is make sure you have the best software utilities that can do the things you need to be done. There is a lot of free software that you can download in almost any category, in fact hundreds. The trick is finding those that work for you. Here are our top picks of the best free software commonly used at home and office.

Online Safety

AVG Free Anti-Virus - AVG is very good at keeping viruses and spyware at bay, while offering malware removal, link and email scans, resident shield and identity protection. The trick in making sure it does its job well is to keep it updated to the latest version.

Microsoft Security Essentials – apart from the basic malware protection, Microsoft Security has added protection for network based attacks, although not top of the line, it still shields computer from attacks and works very well with Windows based systems.

Archiving

7-Zip – perhaps the ultimate archiving tool any Windows user will ever need. Although the interface is simple enough, 7-zip can compress files into .ZIP, .Tar and more. It has the ability to compress and extract an amazing amount of data, if you don’t mind the rustic look.

PeaZip – the digital nomad’s best friend, this software is available for Windows, Linux and Portable. It can archive and extract folders with one right-click and support can also be added for new archive file types as they come.

VoIP/Conferencing

Camfrog – this free conferencing software is available for Windows and Mac as well as for mobile devices like iPhone. With Camfrog it is easy to set up a web conference via private video/audio chat and regular text chat.

ooVoo – this service and software offers no frills web cam chat, text chat group of 6 people or less and users can also send a minute long video message to other ooVoo users. Sending large files is also easy with the first 5MB free.

Fun and Recreation

Blumind – putting thoughts into paper has never been this easy, it allows users to put their ideas into flowcharts, and it combines similar ideas into a diagram tool. This is great for home based and small businesses or even school projects. The original version is in Chinese, but can be translated into various languages.

Celestia – this is excellent software for astronomy enthusiasts or to teach kids about the solar system. This planetarium software displays about 100 thousand stars and solar systems in 3D. Free downloads are available for Windows, Linux, Mac and Portable

Kindle – read your favorite books anywhere in any platform, Kindle software are free for download and available for Mac, Windows, Web and Mobile.

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