evaluation

[WrigleyF]

What's a good way to evaluate a certain software program without installing it?

[suwunk]

Read existing Reviews/Evaluations from other people. It's far more efficient to first learn about a program's strengths and weaknesses from a few reviews than to try to discern that information just from project websites. The simplest way to find these reviews is to use a search engine (Google,Bing,Yahoo,etc) and search for an article containing the names of all the software candidates.