Your Home Computer Guide

You can find free software on the internet to do nearly anything. From cool free screensavers to free games to free antivirus software and just about anything else you can think of.

I learned a hard lesson several years ago. I’ve always liked car racing games (yes, that should tell you something about the way I drive) so I went to my favorite search engine and typed in “free car racing game”. Today nearly 5 million results turned up when I did that search! Anyway, back then I went to the first sight I found and downloaded and installed the game.

Besides the fact that the game was lousy I got a lot more than I bargained for with that so-called “free” game. The next day my wife and daughter were on the computer and using the internet when my wife asked, “Bert, why are there pornography folders in our Bookmarks?”.  Yikes!

So after a lot of unnecessary communication with my wife and some research I realized that free software is often packaged with Adware, Spyware and Viruses. So I paid for some anti-adware/virus software and found several other malware (malicious software) programs had been installed as well. So my free program ended up costing me in my relationships, my pocketbook and my time!

After that experience you’re probably thinking I’d never install any free software ever again… but the truth is I love free software! Although most of the free programs you download off the internet are either malicious or worthless the small percent of excellent programs is well worth finding and using.

In fact, on my home PC I use free software for my:

• Antivirus
• Antispyware
• Firewall
• Internet Filter
• Picture Editor
• Internet Web Browser
• Media Player
• CD Ripper
• etc….

The best tip I can give you today is to only download free software from a reliable source! In fact, I’d recommend only downloading free software from download.com. They have thousands of free and shareware (free for a limited time, then you pay for it) programs and guarantee that you won’t be getting any malware included. Even download.com has some worthless software though so I’d also suggest looking for programs with a lot of reviews and either a 4 or 5 star user rating.

Regards,

-Bert

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Safety, Security, Software, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.