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Read More About: UtilitiesSitesWeb Services

Best Free Stuff Online

As e-commerce takes hold and more Web sites begin charging for content that used to cost you nothing, good free stuff is getting harder and harder to find. For our third annual guide, we scoured the Internet, tossed aside the dreck, and found worthwhile downloads.

Wednesday, April 01, 1998 12:00 AM PST
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Best Places to Find Drivers

Where the Drivers Are

This is the place to start the great driver hunt. You won't actually get any drivers at Shareware95; instead, you will find links to just about any vendor's Web site, and you can download the driver you want from there. For good measure, Shareware95 throws in contact information for each company's tech support. www.shareware95.com/drivers

Drivers Ed

Someone, thankfully, is actually keeping track of the latest available drivers. It's not a pretty site, but at Frank Condron's World O' Windows you can look up a vendor and find out which drivers are available and what their function is, with links for downloading the files needed. Each page is dated, so you can tell whether you're reading the most current information. www.conitech.com/windows

Just Where Are My Drivers?

A better-looking site than Frank Condron's, Drivers HeadQuarters isn't kept nearly as up-to-date (or at least wasn't when we last visited it). So what's it got that World O' Windows lacks? Drivers Detective. This free, easy-to-use utility can tell you exactly what drivers you've got installed. www.drivershq.com

Back Door to Microsoft

Want to see which bug fixes and updates are available for Word 97, or any other Microsoft product? Don't click your way through the Web site--go directly to the source: Microsoft's FTP server. Follow the link to 'index.txt' for a list of all files, with descriptions. You'll find the files by clicking the MSLFILES/ link. ftp.microsoft.com/softlib


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