We all know how a college student manages their expenses, they do not have extra money to buy subscriptions for premium software for their project, college work, hobby. So, to help college students like you we have prepared Technobroz List of Best Free Software for college students in 2024.
In this list, we have listed down software from music artists to a software programmer. This software in the free version will lack some features but from a learning perspective, this listed software will be more than best for college students. The listed free software for your computer that is actually great is in various categories.
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| Technobroz List of Best Free Software for College Students in 2024 |
7 Amazing Free Software you need to know if you are a college Student.
- Greenshot
- Audacity
- Visual Studio Code
- Shotcut
- Defraggler
- Unchecky
- Stellarium
1. Greenshot
Greenshot is a free and open-source screenshot program. To say that the screenshot functionality built into most operating systems is limited would be an understatement. Greenshot allows you to capture a full screen an open window or even capture a region of your screen and once it takes a screenshot gives you a ton of options.
Greenshot is completely free for Windows and might be easier for some of you. the last stable release for Greenshot was several years ago. It still works great on Windows 10 and 11 so, as the saying goes "If it ain't broke don't fix it". They also have a version for Mac OS that costs $1.99 but quite honestly it's not as good as the Windows version.
How much does Greenshot for Mac cost?
Greenshot for Mac costs you $1.99 only.
2. Audacity
Audacity is a free open-source digital audio editor that was launched in the year 2000. Since its release, it has been downloaded more than 100 million times. Audacity is one of the most popular free software you can get. So, I will only spend a little bit of time on it since most of you have used it and there are literally hundreds of tutorials online.
To get started, You can go to file and then open to select your audio file or you can just drag and drop from a folder on your computer.
Audacity provides a ton of tools to edit your files and there are a lot of built-in effects that you can choose from. If you're new to Audacity. If you select help, there's a quick help guide and a full manual that you can use where you'll find the most help is on YouTube with so many great tutorials that you should check out. You can get Audacity for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
How to split audio in Audacity?
3. Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code is an amazing free text editor from Microsoft designed which is specifically for editing the source code of computer programs. This code editor has built-in support for JavaScript, typescript, node.js, and many other languages.
If you are facing difficulties while using Visual Studio Code and you need support for additional languages they make it easy to add them into Visual Studio code. Visual Studio Code is available on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
How to install another language in Visual Studio Code?
When you have the program open, select the extensions tab on the left. You could either try to find your language from this long list or you can type it right in the search bar and then select install then just wait for it to finish. When it's done it's going to ask you to reload the page so select reload to activate. Thats it.
4. Shotcut
If you're looking for an easy-to-use video editor then Shotcut may be for you. It's free open source and it's been in development since 2004. It supports 4K resolutions and just about every video format. It also has several audio features including cross-fading. Shotcut is a video editor I used to use when I was a college student.
It's missing some of the features of the paid video editors but it is quick and easy to use. Even though this is an easy-to-use video editor, there is a light learning curve so if you need additional help. They do have a lot of video tutorials on their site and also on YouTube. Shotcut is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
5. Defraggler
Defraggler is my preferred defragging tool for computers with hard disk drives and it's far superior to the Windows built-in defrag tool. Defraggler takes the fragmented files on your computer and reassembles them to speed up your PC.
How to use Defraggler?
It's simple enough to use, first you select your drive. If you want you can Benchmark your drive by selecting Benchmark drive you could select analyze to see. If your drive does need to be defragged when you're ready to get started. Just select defrag depending on the size of your drive. It could take hours to complete the process.
Defraggler does have an option to optimize solid-state drives but I wouldn't bother using it since it has very little benefit for an SSD.
6. Unchecky
Many times while installing software these installers try to bundle in unwanted programs. It doesn't occur as much as it used to but it's still annoying. Unchecky is great it'll automatically uncheck those offers unrelated to the software you're installing. So you're not as likely to miss one of those checkboxes for unwanted software. Also, it'll warn you if you're about to allow unwanted programs to install.
Unchecky is a great little program that runs in the background that just might save you from installing unwanted programs.
7. Stellarium
Stellarium is a free and open-source planetarium. Since only a few of you would be interested in something like this. Unlike its competitors, Stellarium uses less of your system resources when it's running.
It's used at planetariums and has cataloged more than 600,000 Stars. This is not the easiest software to use. They offer a user's guide updated in 2023 which is only 474 pages long that can be downloaded from their site. If this is something you're interested in it's available for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Conclusion
I hope our list of the best free software for college students in 2024 was helpful to you. If you are a student in high school or college then you would like our recommendation. The recommended free software is as good as the premium competitive software that you can find on the internet.
