My computer came with a preinstalled set of applications. The main ones are the operating system, browser and office productivity applications.
Applications can be purchased or downloaded for my computer. When I purchase an application such as Adobe Photoshop, I pay for a license to use it. This is often called proprietary sofware because it is protected by a patent and cannot be distributed for free or sold for profit.
A new form of software called Open Source is not copyrighted or patented. The source code, or the computer instructions created by the programmer, is freely available for examination, modification, distribution, and use. Many open source applications are availble to download from the Web. Yahoo has a complete list.
Shareware applications can be downloaded and used for a set time period. It is distributed as a free-trial version that will be activated when you pay for it. Often it is disabled after a period of time.
Freeware is free. It is distributed free for many reasons. Some of these are:
The developer wants to increase traffic to its website, the programmer is looking for feedback from willing beta testers, and some programmers distribute freeware to go against the status quo, such as the developer of Napster.
When I am downloading files and using web sites, my computer can receive unwanted software. Two such categories of software are Spyware and Adware.
I cannot catch a virus by just downloading an executable file, the file must be run or executed in order to activate the virus. That is why it is so important to have up to date virus protection on my computer.
FTP and HTTP are protocols that support file transfer.In the lab we use Filezilla to transfer our web page files to the server. FTP software lets us move a file from the client to the server, and vice versa. Other software tools are used to share software from one client to another client. One famous program for P2P sharing was Napster. Another one currently in use is BitTorrent. These programs manage large file transfers over the network from multiple client sources.BitTorrent has a tracker program that coordinates the file transfers between peer machine. Many think the future of large capacity file transfers is in a P2P method, rather than a client/server method.
File archive utilities are useful to bundle multiple files into one container for downloading or uploading. In the lab we download .zip files that contain many separate files in one package. It also can compress the files so it takes less time to transfer. Samples of archive utilities are: Winzip, ZipCentral, and Suffit Expander. These are free utilities and often bundled into the operating system.
Software to manage my hard drive, scan for system problems, repair the registry, fix damaged data disks are all necessary for power computing. The following are examples of maintenance tools that may be useful depending on your computer system.
Browsers can interpret html code and display data from a server. However they cannot handle the variety of multimedia that is distributed by many web sites. To enhance the browser and make it more powerful you will need:
All computer users should follow these guidelines if they want to keep the computer running efficiently.
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