4-Shared File Sharing

DO NOT USE

I withdraw my recommendation of this site

See post dated 7-21-12

4-Shareddotcom is a great free site that acts like a hard drive on your computer.  Registration is free, simple, and takes only seconds and there is no need to enter your credit card details. Your Free account and all your files will be removed from 4shared only if you do not log in the account for 180 days.

You can store just about any file on the site that you store on your computer and you can make the files either public or private.  This is good if you want to share a file with a friend for example.  Just upload it to 4-Shared then send them the link and they can download the file.

The space limit is a whopping 15 GB per account. Currently 4shared sets a 2048 MB size limitation per file. Your files must not exceed the limit, otherwise they will be rejected but if the size of the file is more than 2048 MB, you can split the file into smaller parts and upload them separately using the multi-upload feature.  How big is 15 GB?  I currently have about 50 books in pdf format stored in my account and have used only 1% of my free space!

Another nice feature is you can do a search on the site for books, videos, music, games or photos and see if what you are looking for has been made available to the public by others.  That’s not to say all downloads are legal, that is another question I am not qualified to answer, but if you are looking for file storage of file sharing, then this is probably the best site available.

AVG Anti-virus Freeware

Anti-virus software is absolutely essential for your computer and while I use Norton, you can get freeware that will protect you under certain circumstances.  AVG Anti-Virus FREE 2012 is perfect if you use your PC only for surfing, searching or social networking because it will protect you while surfing.

However, and this is important, if you are sharing and downloading files, watching YouTube, sending e-mails of shopping and banking, it will not offer the necessary protection.

If you also use your PC for banking or shopping you need the protection of AVG Firewall offered in AVG Internet Security 2012 to keep hackers out which will cost you about $55.  Personally, for that price I would rather buy Norton which offers a wider variety of packages ranging from $40 to $80.  But if you want free then AVG is an excellent choice.  DOWNLOAD AVG Free

OpenOffice

If you have purchased a new computer you are aware that it does not come with the ubiquitous Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint and Publisher.  For them, you will have to pay a few hundred dollars extra.  You don’t need to!

You can download, for free of course, an alternative to Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.  This software can open and save documents in Word and Excel formats and is totally free.

OpenOffice is an open-source office productivity software suite whose main components are for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases.  OpenOffice is available for a number of different computer operating systems, is distributed as free software and is written using its own GUI toolkit. It supports the ISO/IEC standard Open Document Format (ODF) for data interchange as its default file format, as well as Microsoft Office formats among others. As of June 2011^[update], OpenOffice.org supports over 120 languages.

It takes 15-20 minutes to download and about 5-10 minutes to install and you’re ready to go.

Download HERE