Completely FREE Software - Visitor Information, page 1

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Howdy

Welcome to the Completely FREE Software site. We usually just call it CFS. This is a members-only site and the software listings (in the two sections marked Windows 9x/ME/XP and Win 3.1/DOS) can only be accessed by members. To find out more about becoming a member, please visit our members info page.

The CFS site is designed as a browsing site – we have lots of high quality programs to offer but, unless you spend some time looking around, you may miss that “killer app” you just can’t live without. Go looking for an unzipping tool and you may end up grabbing an office suite as well! Stranger things have happened. However, if you know the exact name of a program you can target the page that it’s on through our site search facility.

Site Searches

The CFS site search window appears on nearly every page and it looks like this:

Any Word All Words Exact Phrase

If you are looking for a single word (ie accounting) simply type that word in the window of the search egine and click on the “Search CFS” button. In the case of the example word accounting you might be better to use the word account so that you get references to all words commencing with those letters (ie account, accounting, accountant, etc).

To search for a two or three word phrase (like Internet Explorer) simply select the "Exact Phrase" radio button and it will find all references where both those words are together. If you select the "All Words" radio button you will get all references to the word internet and all references to the word explorer on the same page. Unlike Google and other major search engines, it does not place the results in order so that instances of both words together comes first – the order in our search engine is completly random.

TIP: Use the minimum number of words required to find the program you want (one word is best) but, if more than one word is used, use the "Exact Phrase" button or you will probably just get lots of results that won't help you.

With the CFS site search engine it doesn't matter if you use mixed case (all upper, all lower, or a mixture of upper and lower case). For example, "inTernet exPlorer" will get the same result as "internet explorer" or "INTERNET EXPLORER". However, it usually pays to restrict yourself to all lowercase keywords when using other search engines.

We suggest that you don’t use search words which are the same as the CFS category names (see the navigation section of any CFS page to see what are category names). If you are looking for a utility program just go to the Desktop Utilities category and browse from there. Likewise if you are looking for a game just go to the General Games category. Categories are used so you can browse for specific types of program.

TIP: When searching for a program:

copy your keyword(s) using Ctrl-C

when you go the page that you wish to check for that program, press Ctrl-F (find)

paste in your keyword(s) (Ctrl-V)

press the Enter button – you will go straight to the first instance of that keyword
Press F3 or click on Again to see any other places on that page that have the same keyword(s).

Navigation

Programs are listed under two major headings – Win9x/ME/XP and Win 3.1/DOS. These are both "members only" sections. (You can see all of the navigation sections on the left hand side of this page.)

The Win9x/ME/XP (for Windows 95 & 98, plus Windows ME or Millennium, plus Windows XP) section has eight categories, the 16-bit Win 3.1/DOS (for Windows 3.1x and Windows 3.11, plus DOS) section has five categories.

If you run a 32-bit operating system (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, XP or later) don’t forget to still check out the 16-bit section (Windows 3.1 and DOS programs).

Quite often the best program in a particular category can be found in the Win 3.1/DOS section rather than in the Win9x/ME/XP section. This is particularly true of games.

Select the category in the section you require and click on either the little image of the folder or on the name.

Even though the text might not be underlined and in blue (as is normal for hyperlinked text), it is actually hyperlinked to the first page in that category.

TIP: If you want to quickly get back to the News page you can click on the main CFS heading at the top of any page.

If you click on a category in the navigation section and nothing happens, it probably means that your browser is quite old (version 2 or earlier). We strongly suggest that you update to a modern browser as soon as possible. This is not the only site which requires a modern browser and you will be assured of better security, etc in the later browsers. In the meantime, here is a temporary work-around. The navigation section on the main News page, on the New Additions page, and on the first page of the Win9x/ME/XP Desktop Utilities page (and the demo page which is an exact copy of the Win9x/ME/XP Desktop Utilities page but can be accessed by non-members), are special pages which are capable of being used for navigation by even very old browsers. You can go to one of these pages, link to the category you want, and then use your Back button to return to the special navigation page when you’ve finished browsing. It is a clumsy way of navigating but at least you can get around the site.

Once you’ve reached the first page of a category (for example, Win9x/ME/XP General Games), in most cases you will see a green/yellow section which has the words “To Page:” and then some numbers. These are pages which contain the software listings for this category. The programs on page 1 are higher ranked than those on page 2, etc, even though many will share the same ‘Dove’ rating. There is a similar green/yellow box at the bottom of the page, usually with the words ‘Prev’ and ‘Next’ on either side of the numbers. This is just to help you to quickly move to the previous or to the next page.

[Continued on Page 2 – click on the “2” below or on the word “Next”]

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