There are tons of programs out there that do the same thing your paid or ad covered ones do for free. Or if you are a windows hater rebel who refuses to follow the crowd these are perfect for you. I challenge anyone who feels a free version can never be as good as a paid version of a program to give these alternatives a shot.
Pidgin
Most IM clients are already free but popular ones like aim are covered in annoying advertisements and always open up the aim homepage when they open. Pidgin has no ads, is much lighter on system resources and also handles a large number of clients so there is no need to have 5 different ones installed on your pc
AbiWord
A much more light weigh word processor with more features and less system use, it sounds too good to be true. Running Microsoft word takes around 30mb of RAM where AbiWord uses less than 6mb. One of the best features is as the window you are using it in is made smaller so you can multitask the text is made smaller so you never have to scroll left and right to see the whole document.
Gimp
Switching from Photoshop to gimp is very easy, most all of the same tools are there but just sorta tucked away in a new location. A few hours learning curve is worth the few hundred dollars you will save and there are some neat extra features that photoshop doesn’t have as well.
ThunderBird
There are probably a thousand reasons why you should not use Microsoft Outlook. Besides all the design flaws, low productivity, and exorbitant price it is a not so secret passage for viruses onto your PC. When worms and viruses are being created and embedded into image and attachments they are created to exploit wholes in Outlook to get into your machine. Thunderbird is much more secure and a smaller user base so less viruses are created for it.
Open Office
A free, open source complete office suite with all of the same features as Microsoft’s but with the better system performance that comes from open source engineering. Microsoft Office is pricey to start with but when you consider the costs of upgrading to the newest version every few years it’s outrageous. All Open Office updates are free and completely compatible with Microsoft Office.
FireFox
Firefox has grown so much in the last few years that it is practically main stream but it is still worth noting. If you are still using internet explorer hurry up and pull your head out of the ground and download it. Everything will explain itself in the five minutes to follow.
AVG Free
Tired of those annoying pop-up telling you that your Norton Antivirus subscription has ran out and it is time to pay to download the newest version. Well uninstall it and try out AVG Free. It has some of the largest virus definition files available and is actually more accurate at identifying viruses than Norton.
7zip
If you don’t like the way windows handles its own zip files or are tired of hitting the button that ask to find a program that can open this file on the internet try this file extractor that handles many different file types.
Foxit Firefox PDF Plug-in
Adobe reader takes forever and a day to load and uses a ton of resources. When you are trying to view a pdf on the web you have to wait for it to start. Foxit is a pdf plugin for firefox that allows you to quickly view pdf’s within the browser.
Ubuntu
When you are finally tired of all the over priced programs and ready to be done with it for good it is time for Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a Linux based Operating System. 98% of the software made for it is free and open source so you would actually have to hunt for a paid version of most programs
Popularity: 9% [?]