Description: This well regarded office suite consists of a word processor, spreadsheet, photo editor and photo album. The 602PC Suite is compatible with MS Office files. It even emulates the look and feel of MS Office by using similar toolbars and menus making it easy to learn by users familiar with MS Office (who isn't). A paid version that adds many features including a thesaurus, PDF and RTF (Rich Text File) export, mail merge, text-to-speech capabilities and barcode support among other things is available for $39.95.

Description: A word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program make up this increasingly popular open source office suite. Since OpenOffice's source code serves as a base for Sun's no-longer-free StarOffice, both products are similar. However, StarOffice's extra $75.95 buys you a database component (Adabas D), extra fonts, templates, clip art and file filters.

Description: Acid Xpress is a stripped down version of Acid Pro, Sony's (formerly Sonic Foundry's) award-winning loop-based music creation tool. While Acid Xpress limits you to 10 tracks and omits useful features such as audio effects, it retains enough of its big brother power, including Acid Pro’s intuitive interface, to get you started on the road to creating music. Check out ACIDplanet for free loops for use with Acid.

Description: Audacity is an open source audio editor. It supports import and export of WAV, AIFF and Ogg Vorbis files. Audacity includes several built-in effects, but you can add additional effects through the use of LADSPA plug-ins. In addition, several add-ons are also available that add the ability to handle VST effects as well as export MP3 files.

Description: Anyone with a digital camera knows that photos pile up pretty quickly. Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 Starter Edition allows you to easily organize your photos by adding keyword tags to your photos. In addition, it allows you to fix your photos with just click or two. The Starter Edition has a number of limitations compared to the full version including the inability to catalog anything other than BMP, JPEG and TIFF files.

Description: IrfanView is an image viewer that can open pretty much any image format. It has a few editing features and utitilies like lossless jpeg rotating but stick to something like The Gimp for heavy-duty editing.

Description: The Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an image editor that was originally developed as a Photoshop replacement for UNIX. Since then, it has been ported to Windows (and OS/2). While The Gimp successfully mimics Photoshop's power (at least when dealing with RGB images, CMYK support is seriously lacking), it also mimics Photoshop's confusing floating palette interface. While some people like the customizability, I personally find the mutiple windows confusing, especially when they don't dock to anything. Still, to get Photoshop power for free makes The Gimp a must have for those on a budget.

Version Reviewed: GimpWin 1.2.3

Description: TMPGEnc allows you to create MPEG-1 files from AVI files. It also included handy tools to losslessly split MPEG files and Multiplex/De-multiplex Audio and Video streams.

Description: Cuts only editor and video capture utility.

Description: WinMorph is a morphing and warping software. Available as a standalone program or a plugin for Adobe Premiere (above 6.0), Vegas Video and Wax.

Description: WS_FTP LE is easy to use FTP program that is available free to government employees, noncommercial home users, and students and staff of educational institutions. Corporate users or those who do not qualify for free use of WS_FTP LE must use WS_FTP Pro.

Description: Easy to use software firewall

Description: Console based anti-virus program that is free for personal use.

Description: PC port of the command-line based gnu compiler.

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