This week you can put away your wallet! Freebies! As your Guide, I have waded through the Internet archives and come up with some great free software. I have stayed away from crippleware and pre-releases or betas of commercial software or shareware: the programs I chose were written by the authors as freeware. If you use these programs, I'm sure the author(s) would appreciate an email expressing your thanks.

Here are the programs, listed in no particular order.

1. Zip and Unzip from Info-zip
   These utilities are so common we take them for granted, but it's worth noting their DOS predecessor, Pkzip, cost $47!

2. Netscape 2.02 for OS/2 from IBM and Netscape
   IBM isn't all bad! They wrote this special, full-featured version of Netscape, and gave it to OS/2 users. Thanks, Lou!

3. BootOS/2 by Ken Kahn
   IMO every OS/2 user should use this program to create a maintenance partition and/or emergency boot disks. A maintenance partition, (a small bootable partition containing a minimal OS/2 and possibly a WPS) is a life-saver when something happens to your main partition or when you need to perform some maintenance (hence its name) to it such as running CHKDSK.

4. PPPDial by Don Russell
   For those who, for whatever reason, don't want to invest in an alternate dialler, this freebie can transform the supplied DOIP, or even allow you to eliminate it altogether!

5. FAT32.IFS by H. Kelder
   For the growing number of users who have both OS/2 and Windows 9x on their systems, this little freebie could be a life-saver. It allows the OS/2 user to read and write the specially formatted Windows FAT32 partitions.

6. DCPY by Jason Shannon
   An oldie but goodie, this little program makes copying floppies a snap. Features PM interface, auto-detection, and more! Oh, did I mention it's also very fast?

7. Memsize by Rick Papo
   Another oldie but goodie, this program continuously displays an amazing array of information about your system's operations: no. of tasks, space left on each disk, real and virtual memory used, and of course how heavily your processor is loaded.

8. Ezirc
   Chat for free! Ezirc is a free, full-featured chat program that's easy to set up.

9. Xitami
   This new (to OS/2, at least) portable server looks too good to be omitted! It's multi-threaded and supports HTTP 1.0, ftp, cgi, server-side includes, logging, security, and a host of other features.

10. Sysbench
    So just how fast is your new killer machine compared to your neighbour's? Sysbench will answer that question for you. You can even post your score on the Internet for all to see!