Best Free Windows Downloads of 2008

Lifehacker just published its best free Windows downloads for 2008 and I have to admit that I’m not impressed with all of their choices.

First up is Firefox 3. Yes, agree with that, but the rarely talked about Opera has been doing a lot more and a lot better than Mozilla’s furry friend for a lot longer. Needless to say, anything is better than Internet Explorer, especially in the revelations about security vulnerabilities in all versions of Microsoft’s web browser.

The Lifehacker crew then mentions Windows Vista Service Pack 1 as their next free download. Hmmm. I still recommend an upgrade from Vista to XP.

Next on their list is Mojo, a program that lets you download music from your friends’ iTunes libraries over the Internet. they also give a mention to OurTunes. Both sound like good old-fashioned music sharing to me. It’s probably safe from the probing fingers of the RIAA but it still sounds illegal. And, those bands you love? Well they don’t make a penny from it, do they?

A free PDF to Word document converter, does exactly what it says on the box. This isn’t printing to a PDF, this is the reverse process, but they don’t say whether it does OCR on image-text PDFs, although Extract does do that job.

They mention CCleaner, aka Crap Cleaner, next. It’s a useful tool, but when I found that iSysCleanerPro could clear out more than half a gigabyte more crap than CC, I made the switch. Be warned though, both programs delete prefetch data, which isn’t a good idea. You should, nevertheless, check out Recuva (pronounced “recover”) from the makers of CC. It’s a very useful utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer.

Antivirus comes next and until recently, I’d have gone with ESET’s NOD32, which good-old Leo Laporte (Theeeeeeee Tech Guy) recommends. But, they’re one of his sponsors and NOT32 costs money, so I agree with Lifehacker on their choice of AVG. Despite, a couple of recent glitches (link scanning and a false positive on an important Windows file) AVG does still seem to be the best choice for antivirus.

The Lifehacker team then recommends HotspotShield, an old Sciencetext favorite. Unfortunately, while Hotspot is still very useful for anonymizing your Wifi connection when you’re out and about and can pass through filters that block non-US users (e.g. those used by Hulu and Pandora), they slapped on download limits, which make it next to useless if you’re doing a lot of watching. AlwaysVPN is the Sciencetext alternative choice.

Next choices up are Quick Media Converter (fine), DExposE2, which adds some Mac functionality to Windows (why would you?), and Dropbox, which lets you almost instantaneously sync files across the Internet (I guess it does what it says on the tin, eh?)

Another pointless program (let me know if you disagree) is Executor, which is an alternative for Launchy. Both remind me of the ancient Dashboard application I used to use on Windows 3.1 almost twenty years ago.

Finally, there’s Sharepod, which apparently frees your iPod from iTunes. Well, anything that unshackles a gadget from a monopoly is useful, but I’m yet to find such an app that will still handle podcasts properly, so I’m sticking with iTunes for the time being.