This page is a list of free software that I use on my computer. I made this list to help spread the word about these free programs that I am using. Feedback on the helpfulness of this page would be appreciated.

Photo Editing

• GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It's pretty much like photoshop.
• Picasa is a photo-editing program put out by Google. It is a lot easier to use than GIMP.

Anti-Virus

• AVG Free Edition is a free anti-virus put out by Grisoft. If you don't follow the link I gave you be sure to note that www.grisoft.com will lead you to place to get a trial version or pay version of AVG. They keep their free version in at a separate address "free.grisoft.com". I once did a manual update of my Free AVG using the update for the pay-version on accident and it really messed up my version of AVG. (It was a headache!)

Office Productivity Suite

• Open Office is a free office suite (it's like Microsoft Office) that is free. It is considerably uglier, but it is free. But it does have some feature that MS Office doesn't have for example, the word processor in Open Office can save to PDF's.

  Personally, I just use the word processor and spreadsheet software. They can both read and write into the Microsoft Office formats. I did notice a bug once with the ability to save into Microsoft formats but that was back in 2004, and I haven't noticed anything since.

Firefox Extensions

For those of you that don't know, Firefox is a web browser that is hand's down better than Internet Explorer. If you don't use it already, you should switch. In addition here are links to the pages on the keyboard shortcuts and mouse shortcuts in Firefox. If find the shortcuts "open new tab" (ctrl+t), "jump to location bar" which is where you enter the url (alt+d), and "find in page" (ctrl+f) to be most useful.

• Noia 2.0 is a Firefox skin that I use. Skins change the appearance of your browser. There are other good ones.
• miniT (drag+indicator) is an extension that allows you to drag your tabs around to reorder them.
• Session Saver is an extension that saves the state of the browser when the you quit or the browser.
• All-in-one Gestures adds the ability to do "mouse gestures", "rocker navigation", and "scroll wheel navigation and page scrolling". Basically it is using the mouse to go back and forward in your history instead of clicking the back button. It is fairly intuitive. To use "mouse gestures", hold right mouse button and slide mouse left to go back. (Hold right mouse button and slide mouse right to go forward.)