MEDIA
• With an alphabet soup of media file formats floating around, it’s tough to figure out what you need to play the video you downloaded last.
VLC is probably the only multimedia player that can play virtually any video or audio file. Apart from being able to grapple with various popular and unpopular formats, it also handles DVDs, VCDs and various streaming protocols without sending you back to the Net to search for external codecs.
• eed to convert video for your portable media player or squeeze that humongous file into a more lightweight, portable format? Download the humbly-named, though very capable, all-in-one video converting tool, Any Video Converter.
• If editing, tweaking, tuning audio files is what you want to do, the easy-to-use Audacity is simply the best free audio editor around.
• on’t think that only an expensive program such as Adobe Photoshop can manipulate images so magically. Get GIMP, a close equivalent. It may not be as sophisticated as the world’s favourite application, but it’s robust and competent. If you want a more Photoshop-like feel, get GIMP shop.
• Lastly, to find, organize, manage, tweak and share your collection of images, there is nothing on planet earth as slick as Picasa.
SECURITY
Even as the news of pop culture phenomenon Michael Jackson’s death ricocheted around the world, developers at Google and Yahoo were panicking.
The reason? They thought that the sudden upsurge in traffic was a virus attack. If technology behemoths such as these can fear attacks on their servers, you surely need to be doubly certain of your security options.
• If you are looking for a good antivirus to keep gremlins at bay, download the AVG Free Edition.
• You need further protection in the form of Spybot—Search and Destroy. This is a great free tool for detecting and removing all sorts of spyware that find their way into computers.
• Also get Ad-Aware, a tool for the detection of, and protection against, malicious intruders such as spyware, trojans, rootkits, hijackers and keyloggers, among others.
• You can’t ignore Secunia Personal Software Inspector. This tracks security vulnerabilities in well-known applications and monitors your PC for known exploits. When found, PSI points you to a security patch.
• Now, this one is for all of us who use multiple passwords for our different accounts. You can save yourself the trouble of remembering all these passwords by installing KeePass. An iron-clad, little master key, cubby hole safe, it caches all your passwords in one place very securely encrypted.
OFFICE PRODUCTIVITY
• Instead of cajoling your vendor to install a pirated copy of Microsoft Office on your PC, download OpenOffice. This almost equally competent, multi-platform, multilingual office suite gives you word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and database management for free.