chad

Posts By chad

FileZilla

This week on Open Source Spotlight, I’d like to talk about a program that gets downloaded more than 6000 times a day, and that’s just from its official mirror. This program’s website has more than 20,000 pageviews (that’s pageviews, not hits) everyday. And this program is the recommended program in its field by major...

Shareaza P2P

Welcome back to the fastest-growing open source column on this website – Open Source Spotlight! This week, the free as in freedom and free-of-charge Windows app of choice is Shareaza. Shareaza is a peer-to-peer (P2P) client that allows users to download any file found on several popular P2P networks. Shareaza is free and does not...

Miranda IM

One of the main goals in this column is to give the reader information about free (and legal) ways to make a Windows PC do all the things that a computer is supposed to do. The featured open source project for this week is designed to make accomplishing one of the tasks on the previous list a breeze. This week’s program is Miranda Instant Messenger.Miranda...

7-zip

This week I’d like to highlight a utility that makes working with large files or compressed files a breeze – 7-Zip. I’m sure everyone is familiar with the concept of compressing files. This is where one takes a file, or a group of files, and, using software like the one I’ll be highlighting this week, creates a new file that is...

AbiWord

This week’s featured project is AbiWord. As the name suggests, AbiWord is a word processing program similar to Microsoft Word and WordPerfect. A little history, AbiWord is part of a larger project known as AbiSource, which was begun by the SourceGear Corporation. The goal of AbiSource is the development of a cross-platform, Open Source office...

Audacity

Welcome to a new column on PCMech where we will highlight and review a free, open-source application for Windows every week. We call it the Open Source Spotlight. Open Source Software, sometimes called Free Software, or Free-Open Source Software (FOSS) or Free-Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is a great way to add tons of functionality to your computer without...