Top 10 List 2006: Free Software

Improve your quality of life with free downloads

By Charlie White

There's a lot of extremely useful software available for free on the web, and we're here to help you sort out which ones can help you the most. So here it is, our latest Top 10 List of software that's freely available on the Web. A couple of these applications are free trials, but most of them are completely free for the taking. Best of all, all of them will improve your quality of life, and some of them can give more of your life back to you by making short work of once-laborious tasks. Click on each paragraph heading to download the software.

1. BitTorrent
This simple application allows you to seek out and find applications, television shows, movies, pictures and more.  The way the file sharing application works is instead of going to a single site to download a file, the file is spread out among thousands of users around the world, and because everyone is sharing the file, the downloads are generally faster and more reliable. Yes, BitTorrent can be used to download illegal movies, music and more, but when used legally it will make the downloads of huge files much better. In fact, Warner Brothers recently announced a plan to distribute film and TV content using BitTorrent, becoming the first major studio to provide legal video content in this way. Expect copycat studios to follow.

2. ElephantDrive: Unlimited Online Storage
ElephantDrive is a website that offers that offers unlimited online storage for any of your data. The company touts military-grade encryption, and lets you access your files from anywhere, letting you designate some as private and giving your friends access to the rest. The best part of this is that while it's in beta testing, it's absolutely free. But this sounds too good to be true -- what's the catch? The company says all it wants from you is your feedback. Until the boom is lowered, his might be the best deal going. Expect a monthly fee when the beta testing is over; here's hoping it will be reasonably priced.

3. Open Office
Microsoft Office has become the de facto application for doing any type of writing, spreadsheet, presentations and more.  But who wants to spend $500?  Open Office is a free open-source application that allows you to create text documents, spreadsheets, multimedia presentations, and database management. What?s more, all of these files are compatible with MS Office, and can read and write to the most popular formats.  Currently it is in version 2.0 but new features are coming out all the time.  Open Office is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris and many other platforms.  

4. Diet Power
This is a 15-day free trial of Diet Power software, the application that lets you count calories with tremendous precision. When you first start out, set your diet goal, and then it will adjust the amount of calories you're allowed to eat each day in order to meet that goal. You enter your weight into it every morning, and then it calculates what your metabolism is for that day. It knows when your metabolism has slowed down or sped up according to how much you weigh and how many calories you've entered into the program, and I'm here to tell you, it works beautifully. I've been using it for a few years now, and it's been very successful in helping me count calories.

You can also enter a huge variety of exercises, and it shows you how many calories you burn there, too, figuring in your weight and the amount of time you spent with each exercise. Then it gives you credit for those exercises, letting you eat more. You can also enter in factors such as your body fat percentage and your BMI, and it can show you graphs including those data as well.

This is a great tool for losing weight, it is an excellent motivator, too, showing you graphs of your progress. Beyond that, it also tells you how good (or bad) your nutrition is, counting every nutrient you consumed, and comparing that against recommended daily requirements of each one of those nutrients. The program gives you a daily nutrition score according to not only how many fats, proteins and carbohydrates you've eaten, but how many of all the other nutrients you've eaten, too. Overall, this is the best way to lose weight I've ever seen.

5. Google Desktop 
This free software keeps getting better and better. It lets you search your PC very quickly for e-mail, text, files, anything. It gives you a toolbar alongside your screen, which you can also remove if you don't want it. In the newest version, there are Google widgets, which are a lot like the widgets on the Mac, where you can put on your desktop constantly updating weather reports, all kinds of clocks, word of the day, network news, the possibilities are limitless. Overall, this is a great piece of software that doesn't take up too many system resources and gives you instant search of your entire PC or the Web.