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A site that lets you try before you buy
By DAVE GUSSOW You try on clothes before buying them. You test drive a car. Some grocery stores let you sample products. And you can do the same with a lot of software. The try-before-you-buy method has been around the Internet a long time, offering users access to thousands of software titles, from games to business applications to utilities that can help make your computer run better. Yet some people, particularly newer users, are leery. Maybe that's not surprising as users become more aware of security and virus risks. Downloading -- copying a program to your computer's hard drive -- also appears to be a mystery to some users. "We get a lot of user mail from people who have questions about how to download and often how to use their applications," said Kelly Green, director of CNET's Download.com. Download.com is one of the largest libraries for downloads, with more than 35,000 titles available. And the Web has many others, including Tucows (www.tucows.com), VersionTracker (www.versiontracker.com), Pass the Shareware (www.passtheshareware.com) and Completely Free Software (www.completelyfreesoftware.com). Going to widely-known branded sites should take some of the uneasiness away, and we talked to Green about some tips and tricks to make downloading more enjoyable and less frightening. Download.com tests all the software before it is posted on the site. Download.com checks for everything from stability to taste. Adult material is out, as are games with too much violence. Warnings are issued if site editors think something is acceptable but may be too edgy for some. Green said she could not release figures on how many titles are rejected. The site requires software developers to check submissions for viruses, then does its own scan on most titles. Even with all that, the first thing Green recommends is that people who want to download software have a current antivirus program on their computers. To make things easier, she recommends that people create a download directory ahead of time so they have a destination folder to store the programs. In addition, many programs are compressed to save space and speed downloads. Once on the computer, the user needs an "unzip" or other utility to decompress and install it. A popular one is WinZip, available with other programs at Download.com. So if you don't have it, you probably should make it your first download. Software is listed by categories, such as MP3 and Audio, Internet and Games. The site's visitors range from information technology professionals to consumers. To make it easy for beginners, Green suggests starting with titles from a list of editor's picks, which she calls "some of the most useful and compelling downloads." The site also posts consumer reviews of the downloads, noting the percentage of favorable comments. "If you look through those reviews, you see people respond to others," she said. "It's really a community. It's how they can have their opinion heard." For example, more than 8-million users downloaded the new version of the Morpheus file-sharing software in the first week it was available, scrambling to try what has become one of the replacements for Napster. Most people liked it, and said so in postings. Those who didn't like Morpheus vented. "That's the beauty of Download.com," Green said. "You can try everything for free," and if you don't like it, you can uninstall it. Even though 8-million users downloaded Morpheus in a week, Green says it didn't slow down her site, which links to download servers run by the software developers or companies. While Morpheus is free, other titles are not. Download sites can be broken down into several categories: Freeware is exactly what the name says. It's free to download and use. Shareware usually is available for a trial period before you have to decide whether to buy it, with prices generally low (from a few dollars to maybe $50). Some shareware has a time limit and will stop working if the user doesn't pay to get a registration code. Some programs give the user a certain number of uses before it will stop working. But some developers are trusting souls, using the honor system (and sometimes popup windows to remind users they should be feeling guilty). A lot of people don't keep their end of the unenforceable bargain and don't pay. Green said that only hurts the effort to provide more options for users. "A lot of our publishers are not big commercial companies, but smaller operations who really rely on the money, rely on the shareware fees," Green said. Then there are demo products, often from widely-known companies that want to give people a taste of their products before they buy, or give them something free in hopes that they will buy something else. Adobe, for example, gives away its Acrobat Reader, the leading method to display facsimiles of documents over the Web. Its goal is to entice people to buy a more advanced version of Adobe Acrobat and to look at its other programs. A game company might offer a version that doesn't have the complete functions of the full product or limits the number of times it can be played. Current favorites among products include media players for popular audio and video functions such as Windows Media Player and RealPlayer; software to block Web popup ads; and instant messaging applications. But there's a lot more available. Happy hunting. - Dave Gussow can be reached at gussow@sptimes.com or (727) 445-4228.
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