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Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 1

Icy North

I'm hoping somebody else can explain what Black Friday's all about in their journal - it whooshed past me.

Anyway, on the theme of bargains, here's a list of the best freeware apps currently available for your Windows device:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/27/product_round_up_ten_pc_apps/

It's listed over 5 pages. The top ten are:

smiley - modsmiley - spaceAd-Aware (antivirus), from Lavasoft
smiley - modsmiley - spaceClassic Shell (Classic Windows navigation)
smiley - modsmiley - spaceDuplicati (cloud backup manager)
smiley - modsmiley - spaceEraser (destroys sensitive data)
smiley - modsmiley - spaceMalwarebytes Anti-Malware
smiley - modsmiley - spaceNotepad++ (text editor with knobs on)
smiley - modsmiley - spacePeaZip (file zipper)
smiley - modsmiley - spaceProcess Explorer (process mapper/manager)
smiley - modsmiley - spaceSecunia PSI (update manager)
smiley - modsmiley - spaceVLC (video player)

I won't post the download links separately, but they're all there if you navigate through the pages.

If you click on the Comments button, you'll find many more reader suggestions.

Hope you find this useful smiley - smiley


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 2

Florida Sailor All is well with the world

Since you asked, Black Friday is the traditional start of the Christmas (or Holiday as the PC keep saying) shopping season in the US. Our Thanksgiving holiday is always the fourth Thursday in November, this is a Federal Holiday and is celebrated on the same day by all the States. Because there is only day before the start of the weekend many employers have decided to give that Friday as an additional day off work.

The name comes from the fact that the large number large number of people shopping on this day allowed the stores to show a profit after purchacing all the inventory for the upcoming season of selling. In accounting a positive entry in the books is written in black ink while a negative number is in red ink.

Many of the big stores are actually opening on Thanksgiving afternoon. Most stores hold big
'Black Friday' Sales usually offer a few large items a ridiculously low prices , but only have one or two in stock.


You will also hear about 'Cyber Monday' which used to be the start of on-line shopping, the name dates back to the days when many people only had Internet access at work.

Hope this helps explain.

F smiley - dolphin S


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 3

Florida Sailor All is well with the world

We do have an Entry in the Guide A31367711 that gives a bit more detail.

F smiley - dolphin S


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 4

Bluebottle

Despite the name, not one of those Northern Ireland things from the 70s after all.

I went to a supermarket at lunchtime, hoping to see groups of grannies fighting each other to the death over the last toasted waffle maker (reduced in price to exactly how much it'll cost on Boxing Day) as promised by the newspapers, but disappointingly it wasn't even that busy.

The closest I've seen to that sort of frenzy must be pregnant women at an NCTJ sale. Lesson learned: pregnant women are vicious.

<BB<


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 5

Icy North

Thanks for the explanation, FS smiley - ok

Now I thought Thanksgiving was a holiday that gave thanks for the deliverance of the American settlers from the evil clutches of their British former masters. smiley - smiley


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 6

Bluebottle

(smiley - doh I meant to write NCT, the National Childbirth Trust, not NCTJ, the National Council for the Training of Journalists. Work habits...)

<BB<


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 7

Beatrice

I had to endure it in Belfast city centre. Not for myself - a friend who lives south of the border could not find a particular item that Santa was supposed to procure, and we traced one to an Argos in town. Reserved it online, though that in itself was a bit of an ordeal, with restrictions on access to the website. I duly traipsed down town (OK, I took the bus), where the traffic was maybe a little heavier than average, and there was a "FULL" sign on the Victoria Square car park.

There were 18 people ahead of me in the queue at Argos, but my items were available, at the promised discount, and also with a free £10 gift voucher. The wait for the goods to appear was also bearable, less than 10 minutes, and the serving chaps were chatty and jolly (I was number 664, and they were joking with the customer who was 2 ahead of that....).

While I was near city hall, I swang past the Christmas market and had a mulled cider.

So, to sum up. The crowds weren't too awful, the bargains were to be had, and I had a rather pleasant hot beverage.


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 8

Dmitri Gheorgheni, Post Editor

Icy: 'Now I thought Thanksgiving was a holiday that gave thanks for the deliverance of the American settlers from the evil clutches of their British former masters.'

Ahem. Not to disappoint you, but Thanksgiving has nothing to do with the British at all. It's not always about you, as Elektra remarks...

You might find Abraham Lincoln's proclamation enlightening. He declared a national day of thanksgiving (for Yankees only) in 1864:

http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/thanks.htm

They were mainly thanking God for their survival in the Civil War at the time, although the local custom of celebrating Thanksgiving - basically, Harvest Home - goes all the way back to the 17th Century.


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 9

Icy North

Thanks Dmitri smiley - ok

I wasn't being entirely serious smiley - biggrin


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 10

Dmitri Gheorgheni, Post Editor

smiley - snork I know. Neither was I. smiley - winkeye

Best Thanksgiving song comes from small children, on the dangerous lives of poultry:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNCcCSyrNfg


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 11

2legs - Hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side...

So black Friday isn't the day columbus discovered the IPhone? smiley - dohsmiley - run


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 12

2legs - Hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side...

and, back to the OP, and the software.... Malwarebytes is brillient, cleared a few things on my ancient PC (still on XP, I know I'm evil), which nothing else wanted to get rid of (spibott, addaware avast, AVG all missed it) smiley - alienfrown


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 13

Dmitri Gheorgheni, Post Editor

You know, I never had malware problems on XP.

But I only got Windows 8 in August. And the computer's already been in the shop for an extermination run...smiley - winkeye


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 14

Florida Sailor All is well with the world

Me too! I even went as far as to pay for McAfee, and I am trying not to run both laptops at the same time (I bought a second one to take to England)because they insist on sharing files.

F smiley - dolphin S


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 15

2legs - Hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side...

McAfee!Oh no! that used to be terrible... at least on XP smiley - blush I must upgrade some of my windows stuff one day... though I'm rather tempted to take my main PC offline (disconnected from the net), and just use it, with XP and the recording software, for music stuff/recording, and maybe get a new laptop/netbook thinggy at some point when whatever rplaces win 8 turns out to be better than 8 (hopefully) smiley - zen


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 16

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

My family had Thanksgiving dinner a day late because of long-lasting power outages from the Wednesday storm. My sister-in-law was unable to roast the turkey in her electric range. We ultimately postponed the dinner by a day and had it at my sister's house. My sister did not lose her power.


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 17

Amy Pawloski, aka 'paper lady'--'Mufflewhump'?!? click here to find out... (ACE)

[Amy P]


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 18

SashaQ - happysad

It is an excellent question, Icy, and thanks for the explanation, FS - I had wondered about Black Friday, too, and now I know smiley - ok


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 19

Gnomon - time to move on

I think it is interesting that most of the top apps are to help the device itself to work. They don't do anything much in themselves. They are all functions that I would expect the device to be able to do itself, such as moving files around, playing music or videos and protecting itself from attack.

The sort of app I like is the one which allows your phone, tablet or whatever to do something it can't normally do. For example, I recently downloaded a free app which shows a piano keyboard of two octaves. You can select which intonation you want for the keyboard, such as equal tempered (the standard in the modern West), just intoation (the one that we are told everybody sings in naturally) or mean tone (used by some Baroque organs). It allow custom intonations to be entered which is just what I need for my current investigation of Turkish and Arabic music.

This is not something I would expect my phone to be able to do by default out of the box. I'm sure that there are equally specialised apps available in lots of other fields.

The designer of this app clearly didn't have a great command of English. He named his product "HarmoDire".smiley - smiley


Icy Naj 28 - Free, Gratis and For Nothing

Post 20

Icy North

That's not a product name - that's a grave warning!


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