Best free stuff online: Advice abounds

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In this story: Best health and medical sites Best career, finance and legal advice Best reference sites and do-it-yourself tips RELATED STORIES, SITES

March 28, 2000
Web posted at: 8:44 a.m. EST (1344 GMT)

by Glenn McDonald and Greg Holden

(IDG) -- Spanning the Web to bring you the finest in freebies, PC World lists the best sites for the resourceful, penny-pinching and downright cheap.

Today: The best health, career, finance, legal and do-it-yourself advice on the Web.

To your health: AllHealth

Ever found yourself in an emergency room on Bora Bora in dire need of your medical records? Now you can have access to this information no matter where you happen to be. AllHealth, formerly known as BetterHealth.com, will store your medical history online for retrieval from anywhere in the world. Information is encrypted for privacy, and AllHealth states that your data will never be shared with others.

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Medicine man: Ask Dr. Weil

Stop spending money on alternative health-care books by the renowned Dr. Andrew Weil (author of Spontaneous Healing and 8 Weeks to Optimum Health). Now you can ask the good doctor directly about the best natural methods for healing psoriasis or treating your colitis. The easy-to-navigate site features a question of the day, plus various community forums and an extensive, searchable database of archived Q&As. If you've lapsed on all those New Year's resolutions you made in January, consider signing up for Dr. Weil's eight-week natural health overhaul program. There's also a useful "herbal medicine chest" glossary at the site for those who can't tell their echinacea from their eucalyptus.

Survive and thrive: ThriveOnline

Part of the expanding Oxygen network's resources for women, Thrive Online is a well-designed women's health information hub that covers it all. You'll find daily health and fitness features, message boards, chat forums, and an Ask the Experts section. Other interactive tools include a Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator, pregnancy calculator, and various health and fitness questionnaires.

Classifieds, exponentially: CareerPath

CareerPath isn't exactly an unknown source of online job listings, but it has recently added new features that make it one of the best places on the Internet for employment searches. In addition to its hundreds of thousands of job listings culled daily from the classified sections of nearly 90 publications nationwide, CareerPath now offers a rŽsumŽ posting feature, as well as company profiles. In sheer numbers, it remains the biggest online job listing service.

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Tailored tuition: FastWeb

College applicants are used to getting a lot of unwanted mail solicitations. But who would mind receiving notices about scholarships and discounts tailored to their geographic location, interests, and background? FastWeb will match you up with both well-known and obscure scholarship programs that are based on such criteria as whether your great-grandfather fought in the Civil War or whether you were once a golf caddy.

Quotables: Money.net

Some sites offer delayed stock quotes for free but charge for real-time prices. Money.net, however, offers free real-time quotes on any stock that you specify in your personal portfolio. You'll have to register with the site to open a portfolio (don't be fooled by the ticker on the home page; those quotes are 20 minutes old). But Money.net's online form is far shorter than rival Datek Online's, and it doesn't ask detailed financial questions. The home page also gives you recent financial headlines and news on the day's most active stocks.

Power of attorney: FreeAdvice

Attorneys from over 25 law firms around the country have contributed to this site's extensive information on over 100 topics--including immigration, estate planning, and personal injury. The site also offers scheduled, real-time question-and-answer sessions with a lawyer and a good dictionary of legal terms. It's almost enough to make you forswear telling all those lawyer jokes in the future.

Paper chase: Legaldocs

Why pay a lawyer big bucks to prepare simple legal forms that you can fill out yourself? This site offers free forms, indexed by category, to help you with such tasks as creating a living will, renting property, or authorizing child care. Simply submit the requested data, and the site presents you with a completed form that you can print out or save as an electronic file. Other documents, such as real estate deeds and partnership agreements, are available for a fee.

Hail Britannica: Britannica.com

Go ahead and slam your front door on the encyclopedia salesman. Cross the multimedia CD-ROM off your shopping list, and forget about paying Microsoft Encarta $40 a year for its online reference work. Britannica.com is everything an online encyclopedia should be--plus it's free. A remarkable amalgamation of Internet search engine, encyclopedia, news service, and independent content provider, Britannica.com buries the competition when it comes to providing information on the Net. Type in a search and receive unabridged encyclopedia entries and current articles from more than 75 periodicals, as well as from books and relevant Web sites. No other reference work of comparable quality offers as much.

Learn your lesson: PC Show and Tell

You won't need naptime after viewing the brief, 1-minute video lessons on this site, but you will advance to the next grade in using software applications. PC Show and Tell offers some 6000 visual lessons on how to master such applications and Internet services as PowerPoint, Excel, Windows 98, and ICQ. Each video focuses on a specific task in an application, so you can jump quickly to a precise problem, such as learning how to add an outside text box to your Excel chart. You will need to download the free 500KB player from the site in order to view the videos.

Mystery solved: HowStuffWorks

Ever wonder why potatoes turn brown when you cut them? Are you trying to figure out how the light sabers in Star Wars work, or how a gas turbine operates? Then you could spend hours sifting through this interesting site. Illustrated with crisp photos and detailed diagrams, the well-organized articles explain the many mysteries of the world in simple, straightforward language.

Home repair helpers: DoItYourself

Your roof is leaking, your drain is clogged, and your toilet is overflowing. Roll up your sleeves, grab your mouse, and search this site's extensive database of tips, FAQs, and instructions on home repair. If you're stumped, the site features handy discussion forums where you can ask other do-it-yourselfers for advice. Or you can pose questions to professional contractors and home inspectors who moderate the discussions.

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