The cows have come home. The new collection of “The Best of Tucows,” modestly labeled “The Greatest Collection of Internet Software Ever Assembled,” has everything a Web surfer could ask for, including the fact that you don’t even have to connect to the Internet to enjoy its benefits.
Tucows.com, one of the premier sites for shareware on the Internet, has put together Volume 4 of its CD collection, and the new discs are easy to use as well as loaded with goodies.
Shareware are programs that can be downloaded free from the Internet. Users try them, then pay a fee to register if they decide to use them regularly.
For starters, the CDs’ interface looks just like the Tucows Web site. The only difference is that as you read descriptions and see a program you’d like to download, you simply click on the download button and the program sails at the speed of your CD-ROM drive onto your hard disk.
You’ll appreciate that the next time you decide to change browsers. Instead of praying that no one will need to use the phone during that hours-long download of Internet Explorer 4.01, you can copy it from the CD without tying up the line.
In all, there is over a gigabyte of the very best Windows Internet programs and utilities. And if you worry about not having the latest versions of these programs, all of them provide links to a Web site, where you can venture out onto the Internet to actually download even later versions than those on the CDs.
Remember, most of these files are shareware, which means that, just as when you download them from the Internet, you can use the programs and even share them for a trial period–usually 30 days. If you decide to keep the program on your hard disk, you should send a check off to the software author. If you don’t keep the program, you don’t have to pay anything more than the cost of the download or the CD.
For a copy of the two-CD set of The Best of Tucows Vol. 4 for Windows, send $27 (including shipping) to Shareware, Box 17356, Long Beach, CA 90807. E-mail: sharemindspring.com.
