Most Useful Free Software for a PC

In today’s day in age, computers are used for just about everything. With that in mind, there is software for just about everything you can think of. Sounds good, right? Not when you take the price tag into consideration. One piece of commercial software can cost as much as a cheap used car. So what’s the average person without a spare thousand bucks supposed to do? Turn to the wonderful, freaky-smart programmers who believe in free, opensource software.

Below is a list of the most useful [in my opinion, at least] free software for a PC, that functions on an equal or elevated status to their commercial, pricey counterparts.

OpenOffice.org
A very sophisticated program, it is officially capable of kicking the crud out of MS Word. This program in not only able to perform all the functions of MS Word (plus some), but it can also open and save .xls and .doc file types, to name a few.

AbiWord
(http://www.abisource.com)
Very close to OpenOffice.org. If OpenOffice.org doesn’t float your boat, then AbiWord will.

VLC Media Player
(http://www..videolan.org/vlc/)
A few media player, this program is a tiny super machine! This media player can do everything, include playing a DVD without requiring a DVD codec to be present on the system.

The GIMP
(http://www.gimp.org)
Lets face it—as cool as Photoshop is, for the average person it will cost two months of rent. The GIMP offers the perfect solution. Whilst it does contain a learning curve in comparison to Photoshop, no one can argue against its usefulness.

Audacity
(http://audacity.sourceforge.net/)
A swift sound recording and editing program, you can do anything from recording from a microphone to producing and editing a podcast.

CamStudio
(http://www.camstudio.org)
Who needs to spend hundreds of dollars for screen recording software with CamStuio around? Competing with the best of the best, CamStudio offers several recording and audio options to make your next video tutorial or computer presentation easy and professional..