However, with a little bit of searching or just knowing where to look, you can still find an abundance of free or almost free utilities known as freeware and shareware.

Freeware, as defined by The New Hacker's Dictionary (http://www.jargonfile.org), is free software, often written by enthusiasts and distributed by users' groups, or via electronic mail, local bulletin boards, Usenet, or other electronic media.

Shareware is based on the same principal, except the author expects some small payment in return for use. Usually, the software is distributed at no charge and will expire after a period of time (ie. 30 days) or won't include full functionality. Often the save feature will be disabled. Then, if you decide you want to keep the program, you can purchase it for a small fee and download the full version.

Granted, you aren't likely to find a robust software suite like Microsoft Office, but you can find many tools to solve specific problems, assist with repetitive tasks, spice up your Web page or offer a little bit of entertainment with a simple game.

For example, at Hotwired's Web Monkey site (http://www.webmonkey.com) there is a multimedia section with tools for playing mp3s and other music or videos, authoring or developing your own content and tools for creating animations as well. Of course, they have a huge amount of other tools ranging from programming to accounting.

At Ziff Davis Network's Hotfiles (http://www.hotfiles.com), there is a shareware program that will convert your graphics to as many as 18 popular formats, including, gifs and jpegs for the Web. It even has a feature to set the image as wallpaper using tile, center, fit-to-screen and fit-to-desktop settings. ZDNet also has a site for Macintosh-only freeware and shareware: http://www.macdownload.com.

As with most freeware and shareware sites, CNet Central's site (http://www.cnet.com) has a huge section devoted to Web page utilities. I found free programs to create meta tags for your site, edit html code, submit your site to search engines and even one that will take your bookmark file and change it into an html links page.

CNet also has a Mac-only section and includes the ability to only display free programs.

If you want to get a little more advanced, the Java Boutique (http://www.javaboutique.com) has extensive Java Applets to add cool special effects to your site.

And, one step beyond that is one of my favorite sites, Matt's Script Archive (http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/), which has extensive cgi-scripts allowing you to add even more advanced features to your site. You may use these scripts at no charge.

Finally, at Program Files (http://www.programfiles.com), I found a great section with over 1490 games available online or for download. Don't expect anything too high tech for free, but it's a fun distraction. Personally, I found that the Pac Man clone brought back some old memories.

Keep in mind that these examples barely scratch the surface of what is available throughout the Internet. So, if you can think of something that you would like to do on your computer but don't have the software to make it happen, remember, there is a vast amount of shareware or freeware ready to download for nearly every situation.