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Gizmo's Freeware / Tech Support Alert

No site does as good a job of helping you choose a freeware tool for a specific task than Gizmo's Freeware (otherwise known by us old-timers as Tech Support Alert). The site is simply unrivaled in terms of recommendations for freeware, and if you ever find yourself asking what the best free windows utility is for a given task, it's *the* site to visit. In each well-organized category, top alternatives are reviewed, rated, and ranked, and then discussed by all -- and reviews are frequently revisited and updated, which is a rarity. In addition, Gizmo Richards himself has also long been a friend to freeware authors, helping to shine the light on new freeware tools, and a friend to us from the early days, helping to tell people about DonationCoder and our software -- and I am extremely honored to have had some of my tools recommended on the site. I can't think of a better site to receive the first entry in our list of our Favorite Websites.

Mini-reviews on the forum

This page collects various reviews that have been posted by users on our forum. To browse a more complete and up-to-date collection of mini-reviews, check out the mini-review section of our forum here.

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May 2007 10

PhotoFiltre - excellent raster graphics editing tool

About two years ago I embarked upon a quest to find an alternative to Photoshop 6 that was affordable and would allow me to do more than just edit photographs.

This led me to PaintShop Pro 9 which I quite liked but felt that it started up slowly. When PSP X came out about four months later, I upgraded because the upgrade pricing was very reasonable and it was touted as being both much quicker to startup and less resource intensive than PSP 9 (and I was an idiot and opened my wallet without even downloading the trial first!). In practice, its startup was significantly slower and resource usage more intensive... I stayed away from PSP XI, having learned my lesson with the upgrade to X and noted the howls of protest from PSP sages that I encountered everywhere on the internet.

Despite this, I was thrilled when I won a full version in an online contest! However, although my initial installation incorporated the first patch, rather than improving upon X in the startup and resource utilizaiton departments, it is easily the worst of the three, taking over a minute and half to load! PSP 9, at 32 seconds to load, is positively QUICK in comparison.

Thus I found myself on another mission - to come up with a powerful alternative that wouldn’t cripple my aging notebook. Zaine’s excellent The Great Software List site led me to PhotoFiltre. It loads very quickly (13 seconds), has a simple, uncluttered GUI and does everything that I need it to do and then some. The free version (currently 6.27) is more than capable of replacing PaintShop Pro in my workflow, but I very quickly found myself springing for a license for the Studio version because I really wanted to support development.

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posted by Darwin

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