What you need to know about downloading free software
There aren’t many computer applications today that you cannot get for free somewhere on the Internet. In the early days of the Internet, the only free things were documents, trivial games, and some light-weight browsers, which usually locked you into a particular ISP vendor. Today, you can get what were once expensive applications for nearly nothing at all, or for free.
Whether the application is accounting, graphics and painting, media players, a variety of calculators, financial planning, word processing or an array of other solutions, including full software and database systems, you can get it for free! Free software should be your first consideration when you’re looking for software to solve some data or information processing problem.
Downloading free software naturally starts with finding free software to download. Search on the subject and include the words free, software and downloads. Somewhere, on the first few pages of the results, you should find the software you’re looking for. Downloading free software entails some risks. Since it is software you are downloading, it is probably an executable, a program that will run on your machine and execute computer instructions. What those instructions are, you have no way of knowing. Some malicious programmers like to combine their software with viruses that may damage your system, wipe out your files, or hijack your personal information and send it to some server for illegal use. This is why it is a good idea to perform a search on the company and the software itself, for any posting on the net warning you of any dangers others have encountered downloading free software from the company that has made the software you’ve chosen.
When downloading free software, the vendor may put you through a survey first. They are offering the free software in order to gather marketing information on you. If they ask you for an email, then ask you what your interests are, you can be sure you’ll be receiving a variety of unsolicited emails, offering you deals on products or services that correspond to the interests you’ve claimed on these surveys. Some people find this irritating, but others are willing to pay the price of deleting those emails en masse, for the privilege of downloading free software to solve your immediate software needs.
When downloading free software, you will normally by asked to accept a licensing agreement. Most free software, also called freeware, comes with a general licensing agreement that commits you to using the software for yourself only and to not distribute the software yourself, which frees the vendor from any liability. Some software offered for free may be only partially functional, requiring you to pay for the rest. If the working functions are all you really need, don’t bother buying the entire thing. The vendor is trying to get you to try out the software in the hopes you’ll be pleased enough to buy the rest. This is fair enough. If you don’t like the software, you can always get rid of it.
Downloading free software is easy enough, and the benefits of free software can save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars in costs. Before buying that expensive and well advertised package, try downloading free software instead.
