Computing for the Bewildered. By Bill Hayles SOFTWARE - Part 2 Hello again. Before I start, may I make it clear that I'm retired, and I'm not looking for work! I'm flattered that you should ask me, but I'm not available. However, I run a mailing list where I, and others, are happy to answer any computer related questions. To join, send a blank e-mail to computerchat@billnot.com with SUBSCRIBE as the subject. And the other question I keep being asked - why Billnot? Because my name is Bill, not William; as a youngster, I was called Billnotwilliam, shortened to Billnot, which has been my nickname ever since. Last time, I looked at the different types of licence available for software - commercial, shareware and freeware, and I promised that this time I'd look at how you could acquire cheap and free software from the Internet. Let's look at what you'll need - technical terms, what it means and what you need to use it. FTP FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and is the main, and best method, for transferring files from one location to another, especially over the Internet. Your web browser probably has FTP support built-in, and you may already have realised it without really realising it, but it is basic. It will be perfectly acceptable for the occasional download, but you'll soon realise the limitations and want to use a specialist FTP client. In the spirit of this article, although I'm going to mention the well-known shareware product CuteFTP, I'm going to recommend the free FileZilla, which I use myself. FTP is also the method by which web pages are uploaded onto web sites; in this case, access will be protected by a user name and password so that you, for example, can't upload the pages on my website. Public archives, such as are the theme of this article, are called anonymous sites, and don't require a password. Your FTP software will sort all that out for you, just read the famous manual if you're not sure. A big advantage of FTP is that it allows you to search through public archives quickly and cleanly. Most FTP clients come pre-configured to access a wide range of archives, such as those maintained by Microsoft amongst others. If you know what you're looking for, these are invaluable. However, they are not beginners' tools, so I'm going to leave them alone today. HTTP This you already have! It stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, and is the way web pages are brought to you from the host where they are located and onto your screen. Because it's universal, most software sites have HTTP as well as FTP downloads. Until you install your FTP client, you'll be using HTTP . Archives,and ZIP Software is usually made available for download in a single file, where everything you need is compressed to make the download quicker. The download will is usually a self-extracting archive, an executable with an extension of *.exe, but is sometimes a "zip" file with the extension *.zip. Whatever format the archive takes, you will need to extract and install it before you can install the software, so it's best to create a special directory (folder) to contain them. I call mine, most unimaginatively, downloads. When asked where you want to save the download to, specify the preferred area on your computer. To handle ZIP files, you will need WinZip (or if you don't want to spend money, FreeZip). Searching. OK, so far, I've explained the technicalities, but I still haven't said how to find the software you want. I've said we'll need FreeZip for ZIP archives; how do I get hold of it? I connect to the Internet, and type the following address into Internet Explorer (or whatever browser you use): http://download.com. You'll get taken to the front page of one of the largest software download centres in the world, which has literally thousands of shareware and freeware software for download (and some commercial software for purchase, if you wish). In the search bar, type FreeZip. The top result of the search will be FreeZip, and the brief description of what it does - create and extract ZIP files, the operating systems for which it works, basically Windows, its size, 3.45Mb, and the license - Free!. Click on the line that says "Download now". A pop-up box will appear, saying "you are downloading the file zipfull.exe from www.braxio.com. What do you want to do? Open the file or save to disk?" Select "Save to disk". Another box pops-up, saying "Save as", asking you whereabouts on your hard disk you want the file saved. Navigate to, and select the download directory you created earlier, click "OK" and let the download proceed (if you have a slow connection, now's the time to put the kettle on). You may note in passing that the file we're downloading has a *.exe extension - it's self-extracting - so that we don't have a chicken-and-egg situation! Once the download has finished, you can disconnect from the internet. Installing your software What we now need to do is to install FreeZip. The procedure for installing from any self-extracting file is much the same. Go to "My Computer", open C drive (or whatever drive you created your downloads directory, if not C drive), navigate to your download directory (or whatever you called it, and, no, I can't spoon feed you on this bit as I don't know what you called it or where you created it - I was hoping you'd remember that!). There, you will find zipfull.exe, the file you downloaded from download.com. Double click on it, and the Wise Installation Wizard will start. It will ask a few questions - the default answers will do just fine - and it will then install. It will place a link to itself in your start menu under programs - FreeZip. That was easy, wasn't it! Earlier, I said that FileZilla was a good, free, FTP client. That's also available from download.com - look for it, download it and install it in the same way. If the file you download has the extension *.zip, after you've downloaded it, you need to start FreeZip (or WinZip), choose open, navigate to the file you've downloaded and select it. FreeZip will display the contents of the zip, including a file called setup.exe (or, just occasionally, some ther name, but still a *.exe). Double click setup.exe from inside FreeZip, and the setup routine of your software will start. Where can I get the software from? Download.com, http://download.com, as we have used above, is a very good starting point. There's also Tucows, http://tucows.com and any number of smaller sites; a search of Google revealed over 38.000. Part of the fun is searching out and finding the free gems for yourselves, and I'm not going to spoil it for you. If you have found a favourite freeware program, why not let me know - if I get enough, I may publish a "CB Freebie Readers' Guide to Free Software". That's it for this time, but I'd like to let you know about my computer classes at the Javea Oasis Centre which will be restarting at the beginning of October. Absolute beginners sessions will be on Friday afternoons from 1430 to 1630, and intermediate on Saturdays from 1030 to 1230. Watch for more details in the September 27th edition of "The CB Freebie". My Costa Blanca Expats Internet Group can be found at http://groups.costablancaexpats.net. My main website is at http://billnot.com, details of my classes are at http://cftb.net, and the Costa Blanca Expats website is http://costablancaexpats.net. If you have been, thanks for reading this.