Mediaboss Marketing

MICROSOFT revealed this week that its much-heralded free upgrade to Windows 10 will not apply to Enterprise edition users.

Now, we're not going to be too hard on ol' Microsoft for this. After all, it's a commercial company and it needs to make money somewhere to keep Ballmer in basketball teams and Gates in poowater in their old ages.

But it got us thinking - how many other supposedly free things are there in tech that in fact have a big old price tag attached? Here's our top five.

1. Microsoft Office 365 OK, this is not going to be one of those 'pick on Microsoft' articles like we used to do, but really? A monthly subscription to use an office suite? As a business model, it's still a bit ... well, odd.

There are loads of free, full functioning office suites out there, maintained and run by volunteers. We often report on OpenOffice and LibreOffice but there's also Kingston Office, and we're sure a whole bunch more that you can recommend.

2. Bundleware Bundleware is the pits. If you don't know the term, it refers to when you download a supposedly free program and because no-one reads the terms and conditions, it automatically downloads a trial to a driver manager, a system optimiser and some very suspect art package.

The author of the software gets paid for putting it there - that is, after all, how it ends up being free. But it relies on people not knowing they've done it and it's a pain.

We do, however, have a solution. It's called Unchecky. It runs in the background and automatically unchecks all the tick boxes, so by default, you won't install anything you shouldn't.

Unless the question is: 'Would you not like us not to install this piece of software?' In which case, we're not even sure what you do there. Call a philosopher maybe?

3. Completely free (trial)You finally find the program that does exactly what you want it to, check the site all over, and there's not even a whisper of pricing. Must be freeware. Wrong!

See more here:
Windows 10: Five other 'free' tech products with a price-tag