Five best software’s money can’t buy #1: WordWeb

There is no much of a choice when it comes to free dictionary software's. Creators of wordweb recognized this fact and introduced a very powerful dictionary and thesaurus solution to the market. Wordweb is a ‘no big-deal’ software. Its very simple to use and after installation you don’t even realize it is running in your system. The software have hot key support(which is CTRL+ALT+W by default which you can change to anything you desire) which you can use to activate the software by selecting a word from the document you are reading, wordweb will display definition of that word instantly. The software interface can be brought by clicking on the icon in system tray. If you find a more meaningful word in the list of synonyms put together by the word web you can hit replace button and the word will get substituted at the place where the selection is. In addition to displaying meaning of a word wordweb can be used to learn the pronunciation of a word, this is done by clicking the speaker button, and the word is rendered back to you by a human voice. WordWeb's feature set gets extended once it detects an active internet connection. Two extra tabs appears which will display Wikipedia and wikitionary entry for the word selected.

Five best software’s money can’t buy #2: TeamViewer

If you are a professional working in some company you may hate Teamviewer because your boss can make you login to your office system from your PC at home and get you working. TeamViewer is the culprit here.TeamViewer is free software that helps you to control a remote computer which may be located in your office even in another country.

After you download the teamviewer packagefrom their site, you are ready to go. You dont need to install it in your computer. The installer is capable of running the software without installation.

All the computers taking part in the communication need to have teamviewer installed in them. The person sitting in the computer which is accepting the connection from his peers need to distribute the access code and password generated by his teamviewer software. Peers use these credentials to connect to the system. Once the control is granted a peer can use your system as their own keyboard and mouse. Almost all of your system except printers(which requires VPN connection) can be explored by the controller. You have the authority to disconnect the session any time you wish. The communication channel is secured by RSA private/public key exchange. Teamviewer do comes with innate ability to initiate chat sessions.

Five best software’s money can’t buy #3: Google Chrome

Google knew they need to introduce something strong but not heavy to shake a market which is dominated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Google Chrome introduced in mid 2008 taking on the shortcomings of the Internet Explorer and Firefox. Google engineer’s primary focus was to design a browser which won’t crash while giving fastest response to the user. Google succeeded in it. Chrome one of the very few browsers which won’t make you retype an 2 page email at the same time gives you high performance output which firefox and Internet Explorer can’t offer.

Google claims that the chrome will make your browsing sessions safe by built-in malware and phishing support. Additionally, the autoupdates ensures the software have all the needed security updates.

Another notable feature of the browser is the integrated language tools which will translate a page from a foreign language to your native language.

The support for Google cloud printing means you can send jobs to your home or office printer from anywhere in the world. The only thing you need to do is to sign up for the Google cloud printing by using the button available in the options page of the browser. Chrome will automatically detect the available local printers and add it to the google cloud. Next time when you have some web content to print from a remote computer you just need to make sure you are logged into the google cloud services to get the printers list from the google servers and choose the right printer from the printer settings page of the chrome. The print intstruction will be sent to that print over wire.

The following features are on offer by chrome.

1) Incognito browsing

2) Access go Google WebStore and downloadable offline games and themes.

3) Google search integrate to address bar

4) snapshot of the most visited websites.

5) 90% of application screen is used to display web page.

6) it is fast

7) Download manager integrated with the browser.

It is not simple to tweak the configuration settings of the browser and the absence of dropdown button in the address bar is headache.

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Five best software’s money can’t buy # 4 : KMPlayer

I still remember the days when I download a video from the internet; there is a high probability of video not working due to the absence of the right codec. I will end up downloading different codec’s and installing it on my pc to get the video playing. The KM player brought an end to it. After you install the 15MB package you virtually will not have any non-playable movie clips in your computer.

The software’s interface is not user friendly but you won’t typically have difficulty in doing the basic activities like video and audio playback. All the features other than basic start/stop/pause and volume controls are accessed from a right click context - menu. Software boasts advanced features like bookmarking a frame so that you can come back to that it at a later point of time; The support for the subtitle is also available, you can either drag the subtitles to the program or it will automatically detect the .srt files if it is available in the same folder where the movie file resides. Most of the advanced features are useless to a normal user who would expect the basic audio/video playing capabilities from a media player; however there is enough room for a geeky spectator who likes to tweak the video playback.

The following features make this player stand out from the herd

- play back of damaged or incomplete media files

- Live video streaming from URL

- Multi-language support

- Strong user base and active forum

- Good picture quality and playback

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Five best software’s money can’t buy #5: Skype

Skype developer’s relentless pursuit for quality and attention to detail made Skype the most dearly video conferencing tool among cybercitizen’s. Even though there are substitutions available for skype,none of them are as refined as skype is. Every time Skype Communications releases a new version the software becomes more robust and powerful.

To keep the user base (which ranges from corporate to home users) addicted Skype has made every attempts to provide a very rich feature set. Group video chat, Instant Messaging with history and lookup feature is core strengths of the software. Skype have some nifty features like editing a sent message, removing a sent message, etc. Their emoticons convey true emotions in a cute way.

Another useful characteristic of Skype is that your chat history is available even if you login into skype using a new computer. Skype will automatically transfer your chat history to the new computer you logged in. Even if you go offline in middle of a group conversation Skype will store those unread messages from other members of the group and loads it next time you log in. The powerful search tool comes with the Skype allows you to search inside a long chat history.

The build quality deserves five stars. I never saw the Skype crashing or causing serious performance degradation to overall system. Skype is committed in releasing updates which includes bug fixes and new features regularly. Skype's voice quality is good even though the voice and video won't go hand in hand in low speed networks.

Recently skype ,inc has expanded its portfolio to the handheld devices also. It released products for symbian, iOS and Android. Skype was not able to maintain the build quality in the handheld devices platform.

Skype's paid voice plans are also quite popular among users. Its popularity made companies like Belkin to create Skype handsets.

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Five best software’s money can’t buy.

Software market is growing at a rapid pace, thousands of tiles are getting added to the already large portfolio of windows software’s. All of them claim to make to your life simpler. In a world where the consumer is pampered with choices, selecting the best software is often of a problem. People will work using software without knowing the existence of more powerful and easier alternatives.

In next series of posts I am going to list five best free software's which will make you think their creators are crazy to give it you for free. I am going to break the discussion into five posts as it will serve the purpose of brevity. Please keep in mind this is not a prioritized list and every software reviewed here is good at their own strengths.