(From top) Firefox, VLC multimedia player, Open Office and iTunes are a must for PCs

Thunderbird does for you what Outlook or Outlook Express did. And it does it even better. It is a potent email client with a very effective junk mail filter

Will you buy a car without an AC? Or plant flowers in your garden without a spade? Most likely your answer will be no. Just as you cannot imagine a house without beds or chairs, computers, too, can be rendered pretty useless if you do not have the right software to go with them. In the computer world, however, you have an advantage — you can get your tools and appliances for free. Here are some of the must-have programs for your PC.

Let’s start with an alternative to Microsoft Office. I am sure most of you have a pirated version of the software. Why go through all the hassle of getting a cracked version when you can get the original replacement for it for free? Open Office is a very good alternative and the only cost is what you will incur to download it. With a word processor and spreadsheet, Open Office now includes a graphic design program and a database. It doesn’t have email and contacts, but there are many other utilities that will take care of the lacunae. Open Office is available at www.openoffice.org.

Google Docs & Spreadsheet

Those of you who need just the word processor and spreadsheet, there is an even better option. This is Google Docs and Spreadsheet. You must have a Gmail account to access this service. The best part of this online program is that you can save all your documents on the internet and quickly collaborate with others in editing your work. You do not have to send attachments back and forth any longer. Just give a person access to view the documents or edit them. If you want, you can download documents to your desktop as Word, Open Office, RTF, PDF, HTML or zip files.

With Google Spreadsheet, you can import and export .xls, .csv, and .ods formatted data. Like Excel, you can use formatting and formula editing in spreadsheets so you can calculate results and make your data look the way you want them to.

Firefox and Thunderbird

Internet Explorer comes with Windows, but most of us have serious problems with malware and spyware while using it. Firefox is a much better browser and offers you additional security online and has a host of features like tabbed browsing and dynamic bookmarks. You can extend the capability of Firefox by downloading small tools called extensions. These include IE Tab, where the browser behaves as if it were Internet Explorer. The browser also blocks annoying pop up advertisements.

Thunderbird does for you what Outlook or Outlook Express did. And it does it even better. It is a potent email client with a very effective junk mail filter. You can also import your contacts and emails from Outlook and Outlook Express. Firefox and Thunderbird are available at www.mozilla.com.

SightSpeed

Most of us are into chatting and video calling in a big way. Forget Yahoo and MSN, SightSpeed’s video calls are the best. And it is free. You can make an unlimited number of computer-to-computer video calls, voice calls, text chat and even send video emails. Along with SightSpeed (www.sightspeed.com), you must also have Skype in your computer. Over 100 million people the world over are using this to make PC-to-PC calls. The application is available at www.skype.com.

iTunes

If you have an iPod, you must have iTunes. If a song plays on iTunes, it will definitely play on your portable MP3 player. We in India cannot use iTunes to its fullest extent as we cannot buy music from Apple’s store. However, since the program links directly to the store, you can pick up podcasts and some songs for free and very easily too. You can then transfer these to your MP3 player. You can also sort your music by album, artist, year and genre very quickly using iTunes. Get the latest version from www.apple.com/itunes.

VLC

Very often you will come across videos that do not play on your Windows Media Player. A very good replacement for the Windows Media Player is the VLC multimedia player. It works across platforms and plays almost every format. No more annoying dialog boxes telling you that the file cannot be played and you have to download a codec to make it work. Just as VLC supports all video formats, Foobar plays almost any audio format known to man. Its interface is simple and its uses a minimum of memory. Pick up VLC from www.videolan.org and Foobar from www.foobar2000.org.

The Gimp

Photoshop is an image editing program and is a big memory hog. Also it is very expensive, although cracked versions are freely available. Often you need to touch up and resize photographs taken with your digital camera. A very good program to use is The Gimp (GNU’s Image Manipulation Program). Although it is not as powerful as even Photoshop Elements, it does a good job. The Gimp can be got from www.gimp.org.

Google/Yahoo Desktop

The computer you have will get crowded pretty soon with your files. When you need swift access to them, you will be stumped. Windows’ own file search facility is quite pathetic. Get Google’s or Yahoo’s Desktop Search and you will be able to find your files in a jiffy. Once you download either of the two utilities, it will index all your files and emails. With a little bit of registry tweak, you can make the Google application search even your network drives. Depending on your choice, go to desktop.google.com or desktop.yahoo.com.

Apart from these, you must get good anti virus (free.grisoft.com) and anti spyware (www.lavasoft.de) programs. Also, get a good picture viewer like Picassa (picassa.google.com) to organise your snaps. Files you download from the Internet are often compressed. You need a decompression software. Get 7-Zip instead of Winzip to do this job. Winzip does not support the .rar format, but 7-Zip does.

Send in your computer related problems to askdoss@abpmail.com.
This column will appear every fortnight.