Software Recommendations

There is a huge amount of free software available on the Internet, of very variable quality.  The best is as good as any top quality commercial offering, the worst is well worth avoiding.  All the software we recommend, both free and commercial, is well respected by computing professionals, and in most cases we have significant experience of using it.

Note that in keeping with our philosophy, we do not have any financial interest in making any of our recommendations - they are based purely on merit.

Database
It is a common mistake, encouraged by the likes of Microsoft, to think that creating a computerised database application is anything other than difficult and time-consuming.  If you are sure your application is simple, it almost certainly doesn't need proper database software - we recommend using any spreadsheet program, of which the best is probably Microsoft Excel.  The free OpenOffice equivalent Calc will also do the job.  You could also use either the spreadsheet or the flat-file database application in the Microsoft Works suite.

If your application is more complicated than a simple list, for most users our recommendation is do not use general purpose database software if you can help it!  If you want to catalogue a collection or perform some other typical database task - do not try to reinvent the wheel, search the Internet for a suitable application that someone else has already made, try it out (most give a 30-day trial period or similar), and if it works for you, buy it.

For web-based applications, you need to be a competent database-savvy amateur programmer or using one or more professional-quality tools such as Dreamweaver at a fairly advanced level to produce a decent database-driven site.  You will almost certainly need to buy a book or two as well...  You have been warned!

Office Suite
An office suite is a collection of applications generally covering most or all of: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, e-mail, drawing and databases.  For recommendations for each of these individually, read the other entries in this section.

There is really only one serious contender for the title of best value office suite: OpenOffice.org - it is as good as most versions of the market leader (Microsoft Office) for most purposes, it is actually better in some ways (e.g it is standards-based and can create PDFs), and it is completely free.  In addition, it's word processor can read and write Word files, it's spreadsheet can read and write Excel files and so on.  Few people will have any difficulty using it if they are familiar with the Microsoft equivalent, and they are unlikely to have any compatibility problems either.  A pretty good deal. 

OpenOffice.org is a top quality Open Source project funded mainly by Sun Microsystems (creators of Java), in deliberate and direct competition with Microsoft.  IBM also supports the project.  There are tutorials on various aspects of the OpenOffice.org suite at OOoAuthors.org and at Tutorials for OpenOffice.

For anyone who feels they must use Micosoft Office, we suggest Office 2000 or Office XP (aka 2002), both of which are cheaper and less bloated than the more recent versions, with fewer annoyances and an arguably nicer look and feel.

PDF Creator
Most people associate PDFs with Acrobat, but in fact there are lots of other PDF creation tools, all sharing the common attribute that they are cheaper than Acrobat, in fact usually much cheaper, and some are free.

Our first recommendation is not free, but it is good, and at around £55 it is not ridiculously overpriced, unlike the cheapest version of Acrobat.  We recommend (and use ourselves) Jaws PDF Creator from Global Graphics.  You can download a trial version at www.jawspdf.com/download/index.html.

For a free PDF creator, try PrimoPDF from activePDF.  We have found it works reliably as a printer driver to create simple PDFs, but it does not have the nice features of Jaws PDF such as the ability to create a bookmark tree from the headings in a Word document.  Also, it is not as configurable.  However the current version (3.1) does support password protection (encryption) and can append pages to a file.

Presentation Creator
Just as with word processors, Microsoft's PowerPoint from its Office suite is the dominant product, but as with Word, it costs money.  The OpenOffice.org equivalent, called Impress, is very similar to PowerPoint, and has two distinct advantages - it can create both Flash and PDF versions of your presentation.

Spreadsheet
Microsoft's Excel, part of it's Office suite, is the undisputed market leader, in our opinion deservedly so, and the success of the original design is shown by how little the basic product has changed over the last 15 years.  (Microsoft bought it in, in case you think we've gone soft).  However, Excel costs serious money and the recent versions (Excel 2002 onwards) will not run on Windows 95, 98 or Me.  Most people would do just as well with the completely free Excel-clone called Calc, from the OpenOffice.org suite, so that is our recommendation - NB Calc in version 2 of OpenOffice is significantly better than 1, so worth the download if you've got broadband.

Word Processor
Microsoft Word is by far the most-used word processor in the English-speaking world, and it is good, but for many people's requirements it is overkill.  Also, the later versions (Word 2002 onwards) will not run on Windows 95, 98 or Me.  Word also costs money, although it can be acquired fairly cheaply if you don't need the latest version or the rest of the Office suite.  Incidentally the cheapest way to buy Word is as part of the "Works Suite" package, which usually costs less than Word on its own.

For anyone who doesn't need the complexity or want the expense of Word, AbiWord is an excellent alternative for straightforward word processing, and it also happens to be free, cross-platform and multi-lingual.  For a free word processor in the same heavyweight league as Word, OpenOffice.org's Writer is the obvious choice.  Writer even has a major feature that Word doesn't have - it can save your document in PDF (Acrobat) format!

Audio Editor
Our recommendation in this category is aimed at people who want to be able to manipulate raw WAV or MP3 files in order to create, for example, a CD of a live recording or the backing soundtrack for a home video.  It is not aimed at serious amateur composers or budding DJs.

We recommend Audacity, a good example of how free Open Source software can be just as good as commercial software.  It does one basic task, editing audio files, and does it extremely well, in a straightforward, easy-to-use package.

Audio Player
WinAmp is one of the most widely used audio players and is one of our favourites.  We recommend the older version 2.91 for its simplicity, speed of loading and minimal impact on whatever else you are doing.  The controls are rather small though.

Graphics Viewer/Convertor
Windows XP's Explorer has built-in picture viewing facilities, but there are far better ways of perusing and modifying your photo collections.  Our recommended free solution is IrfanView (named after its creator, Irfan Skiljan).

There is no faster way of scrolling through a folder full of photos than using IrfanView and simply rolling the mouse wheel.  However IrfanView's main claim to fame is its ability to convert between virtually any two graphics formats, applying all kinds of processing if required, in batches if you want.  Even if you use other software for your creative editing, we'd recommend installing IrfanView as your default viewer for its speed and agility.

MP3 Creator
A new program called winLAME by Michael Fink is a free, no-frills, easy-to-use combined CD ripper and MP3 encoder which also uses the freedb.org song title database to automatically name tracks.

winLAME "just works", with no fuss, and is our recommended tool for creating MP3s from your CD collection, unless you are a purist looking to archive at the highest quality, in which case you would want specialist ripping and encoding software.

Photo Editor
IrfanView (see above) is not intended to be a graphics editor in the creative sense; for this we recommend Adobe Photoshop Elements.  This is a version of Photoshop, the top-end professional product, specifically aimed at amateur photographers rather than professionals, and priced at a fraction of the price in order to compete with all the lesser offerings in a rather crowded market.  "Elements" is much more user-friendly than its bigger brother, having lots of easy-to-use functions for improving photographs, and it has a sophisticated album facility.

Although at around £70 it is on the expensive side compared to its competitors, it is still good value for the quality.  There is a 30-day free trial version of the current product (version 4.0), but it is a 364MB download - not for the faint-hearted (or dial-up users)!  Earlier versions are sometimes given away free on magazine cover disks, and worth looking out for.

If you are also interested in video editing, note that we also recommend its stable-mate Premiere Elements, and the two can be bought together for little more than the price of one - a fantastic bargain if you can make use of both.

Video Editor
Like photo editing, video editing is currently very popular and so it is a very crowded software market.  Despite this, we have a definite favourite, and as with photo editing our recommendation is a consumer, i.e. cut-down, cut-price, offering of a top-end professional product, and from the same publisher.

Adobe's Premiere Elements is seriously good in the editing department, and very importantly in a genre that really stresses your computer, it is stable.  Its main drawbacks are that it will not install on anything other than a Pentium 4 family or AMD 64 family or better (so, sadly not Athlons), and its DVD menu creation facility is rather weak, and its learning curve is somewhat steeper than some.  The effort you put in will pay off, however.

For newcomers to video editing, be aware that it is probably the only area apart from state-of-the-art gaming where you really do need a better-than-entry-level PC, and the faster the better.  If you intend to get into video-editing, think in terms of a 3GHz processor, preferably one of the newer dual-core ones, at least 1GB of Memory (RAM), preferably 2 or 3GB, and 100s of GBs of fast hard disk space, preferably on more than one disk.  You will be able to manage with less, but performance will suffer, especially if you are using a package as sophisticated as Premiere Elements.

Video Player
By far our favourite is Media Player Classic, so called because it looks like the early versions of Microsoft's Media Player.  As with audio, simplicity is the key - the minimalist controls make it very easy to use, but under that plain façade is a very sophisticated, highly configurable and extensible engine that can play virtually any video or audio format, including RealAudio, QuickTime and even DVDs.  It also starts up very quickly and it allows you to speed up, slow down or even reverse the action.  Better still, it's free!

Media Player Classic uses whatever audio and video codecs are installed on your system.  If you want to take advantage of the many media streaming services on the Internet, such as live radio, but you don't like intrusive commercial software such as RealPlayer, try Real Alternative - a free no-frills RealPlayer codec, that installs perfectly into Firefox (as well as Internet Explorer) for hassle-free Internet radio.

Anti-Spyware
The problem with choosing an anti-spyware product is that many of the so-called anti-spywares are themselves spyware or adware, typically doing a free "detection" scan but actually introducing malware or generating false positives in the hope that you will be duped into purchasing the removal component.

Our recommendation is Spybot Search and Destroy.  It is one of the best-known products and it is free and yet it generally performs amongst the best, outperforming many commercial rivals.

We have produced a tutorial showing how to install Spybot and perform the basic tasks of updating and scanning.  There is also plenty of help on the Spybot website for those wanting to know more such as how to change the configuration options.

Anti-Virus
The very highly-rated AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition, which is free for personal use and includes unlimited and frequent updates, is every bit as effective as the commercial retail market leader, Norton Anti-Virus, which costs about £40 per computer for the first year plus yearly subscriptions for updates.

We have produced a tutorial showing how to install AVG and perform the basic tasks of updating and scanning - all very straightforward.

Personal Firewall
Your firewall is arguably the most important piece of software in your system.  There are a number of good software firewalls, a couple of them are free, and of these we recommend Sygate Personal Firewall 5.5.  It is not the easiest to use, but there is no such thing as a "fit and forget" firewall that does not compromise your security and privacy in some way; having to answer the occasional question is no hardship compared to the problems a fully automatic firewall can cause, especially if it is "retro-fitted", i.e. not installed from new.

We have produced a tutorial showing how to install and use Sygate.  For the more adventurous we also show how to configure it for use on a typical home network such as you would have with a shared broadband router.

Despite being widely acclaimed and winning numerous awards, all of Sygate's personal firewall products were dropped by new company owners Symantec, presumably because they were too strongly competitive with Symantec's own expensive products.  However firewall software that works does not need to be regularly updated, unlike anti-virus software, so this need not be a problem and we are happy to continue recommending and installing the free version of Sygate Personal Firewall 5.5.  We don't recommend the last version, 5.6, because it has at least one serious bug that we know about, whereas v5.5 has proved to be extremely reliable on Windows 98, 2000 and XP.

E-mail Client
Mozilla Thunderbird 1.x

Almost everybody has heard of Outlook, the e-mail client in Microsoft Office, and Outlook Express, the e-mail client that comes free with Windows.  The former is rarely used outside of corporate environments (because there's little point and it is expensive), the latter is widely used on home computers simply because it is there.  However, there is a whole world of choice of e-mail software.

We have to admit that, from a user's point of view, Outlook Express is good.  Unfortunately, from a virus-writer's point of view it is excellent.  In most cases Outlook Express in its default configuration will run virus scripts, open virus executables and download Web bugs without so much as a by-your-leave, and for good measure it will give the virus writer full access to your list of contacts as well.

If Outlook Express is the problem, Thunderbird is the solution.  The designers sensibly used the straightforward, user-friendly "look and feel" of Outlook Express, but created Thunderbird from the ground up to be safe, which are two of the main reasons we recommend it.  The third reason is that it is completely free, coming from the same open-source stable as the number two browser, Firefox (see below).

Web Browser
Mozilla Firefox 2.x

Probably if you are reading this you realise that Internet Explorer is not the only way to browse Web sites.  We recommend to most people to use Firefox.  As well as being almost certainly the most standards-compliant (i.e. accurate) browser and a very safe browser (immune to most of the nasties that attack Internet Explorer), it is also one of the nicest to use, even without adding any of the hundreds of free 'extensions' that you can add to customise it to your taste.

Web Design
Choice of Web design software tends to be very much a personal preference, particularly in terms of the balance between coding and button-clicking.  You can probably even use your word processor for simple Web pages with a minimum of effort - Word, AbiWord and Textease are all capable of outputting HTML versions of documents.  However, even beginners will probably find this approach too simplistic and limiting because they will want to include some sort of navigation facility.

lets If you want to create something that looks and behaves like a normal website, using 'dragging and dropping' and graphical design rather than hand-crafted HTML, then you need proper Web design software.  Most Web design packages will do some hand-holding and most include a number of templates for various types of sites and pages, providing a useful starting point for your own creation, but sometimes they are not at all intuitive.

Arguably the best Web designer, certainly the most well-known, is Dreamweaver.  Our advice is don't even consider it unless you are prepared for a very steep learning curve - it is complete overkill for small, amateur sites, and very expensive as well.  Instead, try Evrsoft's 1st Page 2000.  For free software, 1st Page 2000 is surprisingly comprehensive; it has Beginner, Intermediate and Expert modes to cover a broad spectrum of expertise and preference.  Something else we like about 1st Page is that it can create XHTML standards-compliant pages, unlike much of the competition.  There is a newer version which we haven't tried, but it is very affordable at around £35 so it is certainly worth downloading the free trial if you like the approach of the older version.

Modern, well-designed websites make extensive use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so you might like to consider using a graphical style sheet editor alongside your page editor.  Even Dreamweaver has the facility to use an external style sheet editor such as TopStyle Pro or Style Master in place of its built-in tools, and we would strongly recommend serious amateurs to look at both these products, and their cut-down free versions.

A final note - even if, like most amateurs and many 'professionals', you exclusively use graphical Web design software to do the dirty work, you will probably find that it pays to learn the basics of HTML, and maybe even a bit of CSS, in the same way that a bit of physics and psychology will help you become a better driver even though they aren't mentioned in the Highway Code.