Home » Partners & Parents » Websites for Kids » Where to Find Shareware and Something Extra

Where to Find Shareware and Something Extra

© Wayne Dawe

(Note: The Internet is a dynamic place and web sites can come and go quite quickly. This is one of my older and some of the links may not work anymore. If you find that this is the case I invite you to look at some of my more recent articles. My links section has my favorite links from past articles and is checked regularly for non working links. Wayne)

This weekend I went to a computer show with money burning a hole in my pocket. I was looking for software and had decided to buy a game for myself, a game for the kids and something to help them learn adding and subracting. We got our games - Zork Nemesis for me and Incredible Toon Machine for them. The Incredible Toon Machine is a game form Sierra that requires players to build a Rube Goldberg-type machine to do something to one of the characters. It's a puzzle-based game suitable for ages 6 and up. I bought it because the kids have been playing a demo version for a few weeks and liked it a lot. Unfortunately, with the math game I wasn't so lucky. I installed it and it proceeded to overwrite the newer version of QuickTime that I had installed on my system with an older version, change some of the file associations I had already set up, refuse to run with more than 256 colours and finally, render the display on the screen unusable for some bizarre reason. The CD is going in the garbage. I wouldn't want to inflict it on anyone.

How can you learn from my mistakes? Well, since I still needed a math game for the kids, but now being a bit gun-shy about loading shrink-wrapped software, I went off looking for some suitable shareware. So this week we get links to shareware math games with a few extra math links thrown in for good measure.

While I was hunting for shareware math software I came across a great shareware resource: ZDNet Software Library. ZDNet Software library (also known as www.hotfiles.com) differs from those other great shareware sites - www.shareware.comand www.happypuppy.com - in that the software on ZDNet is neatly compartmentalized by category. This site also has a really easy to use but sophisticated search engine and describes both the rating for each package as well as the cost to register. Five minutes after I arrived there I had downloaded three packages for evaluation (don't forget that I have a cable modem so it may take dial-up users longer). Stay tuned for my comments on the

The copyright of the article Where to Find Shareware and Something Extra in Websites for Kids is owned by Wayne Dawe. Permission to republish Where to Find Shareware and Something Extra in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.