Christmas is coming and with the present state of the economy people are looking into getting some of their old hardware cleaned up and reused. The used / refurbished laptop market is booming! The problems that we in the IT industry keep having are the same as usual. The biggest roadblock on a reload is that no on knows where their software / license keys went. Luckily, for O/S reloads that's not as bad as it used to be. Most manufacturers have been integrating the OEM keys into the BIOS! So now all we need is a good ISO or flash drive with whatever O/S your unit came with and we're good to go (Windows 8/10 units only - I've never seen a PC with 7 have this)! The other huge benefit is Microsoft letting Windows 7/8 users go to 10 for free. This is great and now we have an O/S, but what about the software we need to actually use it? Here's a list of our picks for free software to replace those lost / nonexistent packages:
Our Choice for the Best Free Antivirus:
Yup you guessed it - Bitdefender
Our reasoning was as follows:
Low Resource footprint
One of the highest detection rates
Free - no bloatware
The only thing I didn't like about it was the non optional free registration. It's a PITA for IT people installing it for customers.
OK, so you have your shiny new and no cost antivirus - you're safe right? Wrong. No Antivirus / Malware suite is 100% flawless. There a re a lot of Zero day threats and browser hijacks that make it impossible to catch everything. To help combat that we've been adding this: Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit Protection for web browsers. This works alongside your antivirus to help keep your computer clean and malware free.
Another option that deserves honorable mention is the Comodo security suite. It's free for private / commercial use (yes you heard that right - it's even free for businesses!), it works very well (it's a little too picky if anything - think old school zone alarm picky), & it doesn't plaster you with harassment to upgrade to the paid version. In our tests. Bitdefender had lower resource utilization and a more accurate detection rate. But, Comodo has a firewall built-in and a number of other security features not found in most of the other free packages.
Our Choice for a Productivity Suite:
LibreOffice
or
OpenOffice.org
So, What's the difference? The answer is not much. LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice. They are very similar and function very much the same. They are both great packages and really it's a matter of preference. I liked the installer / less bloated feel to LibreOffice vs OpenOffice. They are both very good free alternatives for M$ Office.
Photo Editing / Organization:
Picasa
This is a great no-frills app to organize, edit, & share your photos. The interface is clean and it has a great feature set.
Browser:
This is a huge debate and is entirely a matter of preference. I'm leaning toward Edge and Firefox ATM. I was a die hard Chrome fanboy, but this last update effectively nerfing Squid proxy authentication was the last straw. In our tests Edge was the fastest, followed by Chrome, then Firefox. The major pitfall for Edge is the lack of addons. Both Chrome and Firefox have them in droves. Our favorites are: LastPass, Adblock/Adguard, & WOT.
Gaming:
Steam & Origin
They both have free games (origin gives away about 6-8 per year) & have great interfaces, but I tend to lean toward Steam. They have a huge content library and with sites like Humble Bundle & Bundle Stars selling keys for a little bit of nothing; it makes it easy to amass a huge game library.
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