Norton Security Scan

 

Frankly, this is not much more than advertising for Norton. It scans your PC and detects if there are any security problems (including viruses) but then it doesn’t actually fix anything. No doubt there’s a prominent link to go ahead and purchase Norton’s Anti-Virus software if something is detected. By the way, AVG Anti-Virus Free is a fully functional free virus scanner. Check out our guide to it here.

Picasa

 

Picasa is photo organizing software, fully equipped to manage photo edit, share and publish. Picasa is also an online sharing service (a bit like Flickr) where you can share your photo library on the Internet. It will also import pictures directly from your digital camera or external drives then arrange them as thumbnails. There’s also direct linkage to attach a photo to your email, print single or multiple photos and add photos to blogs or photo sharing sites. Picasa also has some simple but useful editing features like cropping, magnify, brighten and red eye removal.

RealPlayer

 

RealPlayer is a popular media player but it consumes a lot of your system resources and the nonstop advertisements can be really annoying. However, for online videos or web radio stations, it is great.

Skype

 

I mentioned before that from my experience, people either use Skype or Google Talk. Google Pack actually has them both. Skype of course enables you to make calls and communicate with other people around the world, mostly for free. With Skype you can make PC to PC calls as well as PC to phone calls and from phone to PC calls etc. PC to PC is free whilst PC to phone or vice versa requires the purchase of Skype credit – still by far cheaper than the cost of making calls from a regular phone.

Spyware Doctor Starter Edition

 

There are a lot of free anti-spyware software packages but how can you tell if they are any good? If the Google name is accompanied with it you’d expect that it’s from a trustworthy source. Although Spyware Doctor is itself popular software, its association with Google Pack has made it more popular. It is available in a pro version but when it comes in Google Pack it’s the free version. It detects and removes spyware, adware, Trojan horses and key loggers. It’s also equipped with Smarter Updates and scan scheduling.