Free alternatives to Windows application

The software that comes preinstalled on Windows PCs is often not the best or (in the case of preloaded trial software) cheapest you could be using.

This is a list of the best free alternatives to common Windows software. Despite my free software advocacy, I have selected the best in field for each category for day-to-day ease of use and of course it has to be free to download and use. I have given a screenshot and some benefits for each.

Right click on the images and click 'View Image' (Firefox) or paste their URL into the address bar (IE, others)

Word Processor

OpenOffice.org Writer

Replaces:

Microsoft Office Word

Benefits:

- Free software
- Looks and feels exactly like Microsoft Word
- Supports .doc, .pdf and many other formats

Download.


Spreadsheet Editor

OpenOffice.org Calc

Replaces:

Microsoft Office Excel

Benefits:

- Free software
- Looks and feels exactly like Microsoft Excel
- Supports .xls and many other formats

Download.

Presentation Editor

OpenOffice.org Impress

Replaces:

Microsoft Office Powerpoint

Benefits:

- Free software
- Looks and feels exactly like Microsoft Powerpoint
- Supports .ppt and many other formats

Download.

Web Browser

Mozilla Firefox

Replaces:

Windows Internet Explorer

Benefits:

- More secure than Internet Explorer
- Fully customisable theme
- Free, powerful plugins like Adblock, Fasterfox, NoScript and IETab
- Excellent support of web standards
- Inline search bar and spell checking
- Free software

Download.

E-Mail Client

Mozilla Thunderbird

Replaces:

Windows Mail / Outlook Express / Microsoft Office Outlook

Benefits:

- Built-in spam filter
- Fully customisable theme
- Free, powerful plugins
- Excellent support of web standards
- Get the features of Outlook for free
- Free software

Download.

Media Player

MPlayer

Replaces:

Windows Media Player

Benefits:

- Support for more file formats than Windows Media Player without additional codecs
- Free software

Download.

CD Burner

InfraRecorder

Replaces:

Nero

Benefits:
- Many more options presented in an intuitive way and full progress reports through the burning process
- Free software

Download.

Operating System

Ubuntu Linux

Replaces:

Microsoft Windows

Benefits:
- Free software
- Much more secure than Windows
- Prepackaged with all of the above programs or equally good equivalents, also for free
- Comes as LiveCD: run the full version from a CD without affecting your hard-drive
- Package manager allows one-click full install and uninstall of over 20,000 free programs and games as well as constant automatic updaes of everything on your computer with new features and fixes
- Totally customizable interface and system
- Six-month release cycle
- 3D effects preinstalled
- All of this including 3D desktop at full speed on systems barely able to run Windows XP (256MB RAM, integrated graphics, Pentium III CPU)

Download.

PDF files:
Foxit Reader (Credit to Richard Rahl for pointing this out)

Replaces: Adobe Reader (formerly known as Acrobat Reader)

Benefits:
- faster
- some extra tools that are not in Adobe Reader, but only in it's bigger brother (Adobe Acrobat). However, some of them only work in the paid version of Foxit Reader. But all that makes

Foxit Reader replace Adobe Reader, is 100% free. (sorry for the bad construction of this sentence)



ImgBurn

ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! (thank you, Rootworm)

It has several 'Modes', each one for performing a different task:

- Read - Read a disc to an image file
- Build - Create an image file from files on your computer or network - or you can write the files directly to a disc
- Write - Write an image file to a disc
- Verify - Check a disc is 100% readable. Optionally, you can also have ImgBurn compare it against a given image file to ensure the actual data is correct
- Discovery Used in combination with DVDInfoPro, you can check the quality of the burns your drive is producing

Lots off credit to Game_boy. Not a member here to my knowledge....