10 Useful Small Softwares for Free Download
September 10th, 2009 Guest post by Ishan.
Download Size: 35 MB! Does this line make you think twice before downloading a software? These days, many softwares have grown large and people on slow internet connections have to spend a lot of time to download them. For example, OpenOffice.org is a good alternative to MS Office but it is 300 MB + in size! It will take around 6-7 hours on a normal dial-up connection to download it.
Free Small Light Software
In this post, I will introduce you to 10 softwares that are small, lightweight (in terms of download size as well as system requirements) and Free!
- XMPlay Audio Player: XMPlay does not have fancy skins like Winamp! It does not support loads of audio formats. So, why am I mentioning it here? Because of its download size! It’s just a 305 KB (Yes, that’s “KB”). There is no setup, just unzip and play. It can remember last played song, playlists and equalizer settings. It also supports plugins and skins that you can get from official site. Download XMPlay.
- Opera: Opera is not just a browser, it’s a complete web suite. In just 6.6 MB download, you get a full fledged Web Browser, Mail Client, RSS Feed Reader, Chat Client, Download Manager, Notes Manager, Opera Link (Online Synchronizing Tool for Bookmarks, Notes and Speed Dial) and a lot more. For slow connections, Opera 10 also has Turbo feature. It can speed up loading of web pages by compressing the images and scripts. Download Opera.
- Free Download Manager: As name suggests, FDM is a Free Download Manager! It uses multiple connections to download files faster and has support for BitTorrent, YouTube video downloading and FTP. Download size is 6.39 MB.Download FDM.
- Miranda IM – Miranda is a multi protocol chat client that supports most major services like GTalk, Yahoo! Chat and MSN among many others. You can extend it easily with add-ons. Download size is 2 MB. Download Miranda
- AbiWord: AbiWord is a small and lightweight text processor. It is a good alternative to Microsoft Word and supports .doc (MS Word) and .odf (Open Office) formats among many others. The download size is 5.6 MB. Download AbiWord.
- IrfanView: IrfanView is a light image editor that is only 1.3 MB download. You can easily convert images to different formats, perform basic fixes to photographs and crop and resize them. Download IrfanView.
- BlogDesk: BlogDesk is a free offline blog editor that supports most major blog platforms (except Blogger.com). It also supports basic image editing. For more, you can read BlogDesk review by me. Download BlogDesk.
- Foxit PDF Reader: Foxit Reader is a great alternative to Adobe Reader. It also uses less resources. Download Size is 5 MB. Download Foxit Reader.
- CCleaner: CCleaner helps in keeping your computer clean by removing useless Registery Keys. It also lets you manage Start Up programs. It is just 3.2 MB download. Download CCleaner.
- IOBit Smart Defrag: This software automatically defragments regularly used files when your computer is idle. You can also manually defrag your files and folders. Download Size is 2.98 MB. Download IOBit Smart Defrag.
These were 10 small softwares that can help you a lot. If you have any suggestions or similar softwares that can be easily downloaded on slow connections – Please tell us through comments.
Guest post by Ishan Sharma, who blogs about blogging tips and resources on Blogging With Success blog. If you liked this post, check out 101 Free Tools And Resources for Bloggers on his blog. You can also write a guest article and share your favorite software.
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How about Launchy?
It’s a great tool as well. But it may not be as useful as the other mentioned here.
REBOL is an absolutely amazing small development tool that’s about a 1/2 meg download. See http://musiclessonz.com/rebol.html or http://musiclessonz.com/rebol_tutorial.html .
Please don’t call dial-up connection “normal”. I guess we are past that age now where broadband is more normal.
Apologies for that. But I was talking about softwares, not internet connections!
Opera 10 Turbo is simply amazing for bloggers like me who most of the time are connected @ speeds similar to dial-up. My research of offline blog editors shows that Windows Live Writer is King and unlike Blogdesk, it supports Blogger.com.
Does abiword by any chance have the OpenOffice functionality of exporting docs as pdf files?
With regards to download managers, Orbit Downloader weighs less then 2.5MB and is free unlike the Free Download Manager. Unfortunately it doesn’t have the FTP function.
IOBit Smart Defrag kept throwing up error messages and I ended up uninstalling it. I’m using Uniblue Disk Rescue now as I got a link to one of their promo offers and thus downloaded it for free. Works pretty well.
Well, Abiword has a plugin and can easily export the files to PDF. Also, Free Download manager is not paid.
Well my favorite from the above mentioned software is Opera. As i am using Opera Browser every where. On my laptop, on my PC and on my cellphone as well. Thanks buddy for the rest of the software, which i will be going to check shortly
My favorite is also Opera. It’s light, it’s stable and it’s reliable!
it’s a wonderful place for download……….. thanks