What are the programs you can’t live without on your system? Tipmonkies has a quick rundown on some applications, and welcomes input from others as to their list.
What are the programs you can’t live without on your system? Tipmonkies has a quick rundown on some applications, and welcomes input from others as to their list.
http://www.pricelessware.org
On my Mac OS X box, I install the following:
BitTorrent, BookDog*, Cocktail*, Cog, ExifRenamer, GraphicConverter*, MacMame, OmniOutliner*, StuffIt Expander,
SubEthaEdit*, ViewIt*, Vuescan*, XinePlayer.
And compiled from source: PostgreSQL, GNU Readline, Lame, Flac, and id3v2 (command line tag editor).
*Shareware, which I paid for.
Antivirus (when using internet)
I thought it would be interesting to see what the “hip and happenin'” software for Windows was these days, opened up the article and saw the first two were antivirus and antispyware programs. That was enough.
What a joke…
– Browser (Opera or Firefox)
– Graphics editor (Xara)
– Web Editor (Dreamweaver)
– Picture Viewer (XnView)
– Microsoft Word and Powerpoint Viewer
– Spreadsheet (Spread32)
Zone Alarm SS
iTunes
Nero
Acrobat (how could he forget this one?)
Firefox
Photoshop/photopaint/paint.NET
Office
CAD
xpsp1/updates/drivers
firefox
office 2003
nero 6
dvdarchitect
dvarchive
videolan
quicktime 6 pro
adobe reader
winrar
bit torrent
dreamweaver mx
flash mx
photoshop 7
trillian
filezilla client and server
audio apps:
flac
shorten32/md5
foobar 2000 (special edition)
soundforge 7
vegas 4
wavelab 5
waves gold plugins
cdwave
wavmerge
Video Lan Client – Video
Gaim – IM
Firefox – browser
Thunderbird – email
PDFCreator – PDF printer
WinRAR – compression
Acrobat Reader – PDF Viewer
WinSCP – SFTP Client
Putty – SSH client
iTunes – audio player
Gimp 2 – Image editor
Picasa 2 – Image library
Python – scripting
GPG – encryption
GPGshell – key management
My recommendations:
avast! Home Edition (free) instead of Norton AV single user ($45)
AdAware instead of SpyBot
CDBurner XP Pro (free) instead of NeroNero ($70)
XnView AND The GIMP instead of Picasa
MSN Messenger AND Yahoo Messenger intead of Trillian ($25)
Thunderbird instead of Outlook
OpenOffice (free) instead of MS Office ($369)
1. AVG (seems light on resources)
2. Spybot
3. AdAware (they co-exist without a hitch and catch things the other misses)
4. Firefox
5. iTunes
6. Registry editor/cleaner. (This varies but usually RegEdit.)
7. VLC
8. MegaCodec Pack
9. Nero (Ultra came with my burner! Plus I would/have pay for this software!)
10. VNC
Notice that there isn’t any firewall listed. I use my old Dell for a gateway running a hardened FreeBSD, not that it takes much to harden it.
I run an AV app MAYBE once a month on my windows 2k machines.. If that often.. They have yet to find anything.. I dont know how people manage to get 50 million viruses.
– Opera
– Miranda IM
– Kega Fusion
– foobar2000
– Mp3Tag
– Illustrator
– Photoshop
– Winrar
– Nero
– Irfanview
– Notepad2
avast! Home edition
Kerio Personal Firewall
To let me forget it’s Windows
RegscrubXP – Registry cleaner
CCleaner – “Crap Cleaner”
x-setup or Tweakui – tweak windows
AVG anti virus
Firefox
Thunderbird
Open Office
Dreamweaver
Photoshop
Nero Burning Rom
Quicktime
Acrobat Reader
Paperport
PGP Desktop
Bit Tornado
WS FTP LE
emacs–ECB, ERC, Gnus
subversion
<everything else is mere details>
Before connecting the Windows machine to the internet. I install:
A software firewall { Zone Alarm }
Antivirus { AVG }
Spyware killers { Ad-aware and Spybot }
Then I try downloading service packs for Windows.
After that I look for software that has version for many different platforms. This way most of my data files can be used on many different platforms. No need to have duplicate data in proprietary file formats.
Number 1: AntiVirus, Number 2: SpyBot
Can’t be, I’m living without such stuff for years, needless to mention that I use an “alternative” Operating System.
Is this what you get if you shell out 94.99 Bucks to the worlds most wealthy software company? It’s just unbelievable. What are their engineers doing? Can’t be that the OpenBSD Project with their limited manpower and money can produce a moderatly secure OS, and a multi-billion-dollar company can’t do it?
Ridiculous!
AVG Free edition for antivirus
http://free.grisoft.com/
Kerio Personal Edition or Zone Alarm basic for firewall
http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/company/products/znalm/freeDo…
http://www.kerio.com/us/kpf_download.html
Mozilla Firefox for a browser
http://www.getfirefox.com/
7-Zip for archive handling
http://www.7-zip.org/
Mozilla Thunderbird for email, miles better than OE, and, for most home users, better than full blown Outlook.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
The GIMP for web graphics, photo manip, etc.
http://gimp-win.sf.net/
Axcrypt for secure file shredding
http://axcrypt.sourceforge.net/
TightVNC for remote desktop
http://www.tightvnc.com/
SciTe for source code editing
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
Metapad for simple text editing
http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/
Nvu for WYSIWYG web editing, if required, not essential by any stretch.
http://www.nvu.com/
GAIM for Instant messaging on various networks
http://gaim.sourceforge.net/
there are a number of others, but those are, mostly, my essentials.
Photoshop CS2
MS Office XP 2003
Opera 8.01
TopStyle
Dreamweaver MX 2004
Backup Magic
TextPad
WinRAR
ACDSee
Acrobat CS
WinFAX Pro
TuneUp Utilities
MSN Messenger 7
Adaware
Nero
Norton Antivirus 2005
RealOne Player
Flash MX 2004
-avg free
-spybot
-firefox(with flashgot and adblock)
-thunderbird
-tugzip
-burnatonce
-miranda
-freedownloadmanager
-samurize
-toolbox
-kost-it
-powerpro
and a whole lot of games
Linux needs a real alternate to AutoCAD. It has everything else this ChE needs to get his job done.
Can’t be that the OpenBSD Project with their limited manpower and money can produce a moderatly secure OS, and a multi-billion-dollar company can’t do it?
Ok, OpenBSD is great, BUT:
– Very very few people use it for the desktop
– It ships with old software
– It doesn’t ship with much software
– Virus writters and spyware writters target more popular OSes than marginal OSes.
No doubt it is more secure! One has to decide. I prefer viruses and more choices and possibilities.
AVG Antivirus
Zone Alarm
Trillian
Acrobat Reader
Firefox
Nero
MS Office 2003
Quicktime Alternative
VideoLan
7-Zip
Azureus
Ares
WinBoard
Sun Java JDK
JDeveloper
Netbeans
gVim
Ad-aware
sorry, what is this news about? a guy who tells me that he doesent use open office because it doesent have outlook, then tells me that he uses thunderbird, but not realy, because he uses gmail… ???
Next time i make a list of all applications i use i will write a letter to osnews, im sure they will post it
Upon seeing their #1 recommendation of NAV for virus protection, I gave the remaing article only the most cursory of glances.
NAV has gotten worse and worse over the last 4-5 years. With the 2005 edition of their software, Symantec has jumped the shark, releasing what, for a lot of people, is a broken and unuseable piece of garbageware.
To get a sense of how bad things have gotten, go to Amazon and do a search for Norton Anti-Virus 2005. As of about 2 weeks ago, ~120-130 people had given the product an overall 2/5. The first 4-5 pages of reviews have ttles along the lines of “AVOID AT ALL COSTS”. Most of the reviewers are average users, so their skills are limited to be generous. However, I can tell you fro personal experience that problems with this software are NOT a function of technical ability. In any case, most of their customers are of the non-techncal sort.
I could get into the details of exacty WHY NAV is something not to be touched with a 10 foot pole, but my post is already long enough as it is. It is suffice to say that NAV is fundementally fuxored. People in the industry know it and, increasingly, the average person is comming to know it. Noone with an ounce of credibility would recommend that product even to Hitler. I you want to play Russian roulette, go for it and install NAV 2005. Don’t say you haven’t officially been warned, though.
Two of my favourites, I haven’t seen here:
Text editor: PSPad
http://www.pspad.com/en/
Compression utility, similar to 7-zip but with better GUI: IZArc
http://www.izarc.org/
gvim
cygwin
gimp
mozilla-suite
OO.org
First, you guys might wanna check this out – it’s a list that belongs to a friend of mine:
http://www.monroeworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=266
Anyway, besides the apps that showed up on everyone else’s list, here are a few of mine that are (AFAIK) not on others’ list in this thread. BTW: These are the main ones currently keeping me off of Linux
Directory Opus – best file manager in the world
http://www.gpsoft.com.au
WinOrganizer – ‘Outliner’ program with PIM features
http://www.tgslabs.com/en/winorganizer
Adobe Audition – Audio editor
http://www.adobe.com/products/audition/main.html
3D Arcade – frontend for various arcade/console emulators – build your own virtual arcades
http://3darcade.mameworld.net
Streets & Trips – the online maps are almost good enough now .. almost
http://www.microsoft.com/streets/default.mspx
Intellipoint
Mouse driver that lets me customize the buttons on my mouse at the application level
XtremePCR – Program for controlling my XM Radio
http://www.xtremepcr.com/index.htm
TimeTrax – Similar to the above, but this one is stricly for recording
http://www.timetraxtech.com
Newsleecher – BINARY usenet downloader, better than Newsbin (IMHO)
http://www.newsleecher.com
Well, that’s all I can think of for now … except for at least half a dozen apps for creating music
Also, I should note that I use AVG – NAV is crap. Also, you don’t really need a spyware detector – search for my Windows security article on this site.
winvi and ViM
Mozilla or Firefox
Thunderbird or Slypheed
VLC and MPlayer
7-Zip
GIMP
FileZilla
GAIM
OO.o
Wget
CDBurnerXP Pro can be found at:
http://www.cdburnerxp.se/
who ever mentioned burnatonce, thanks!!!
Disclaimer
FYI: CDBurnerXP Pro is a free download, used it a couple of times and its pretty good.
– fdisk & format to reinstall OS
– ultimate boot cd (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/) to help recover the sistem
– Clamwin (http://www.clamwin.com/)
– Spybot – SDerach & destroy – to detect spywares
Antivirus: Freedom, freely provided by my ISP
Office: moving from MS Office to OpenOffice 2.0
Image: Gimp 2.2.8
Image vector: Inkscape
CD/DVD burner: Nero (provided with DVD-ROM)
Video: Quicktime, Divx player, PowerDVD
Audio: Itunes, Winamp (switching from mp3 to ogg)
Browser: Firefox (installed FTP uploaded by extension)
Email: Thunderbird + Calender
Bittorrent: Azureus
Compressing media: Filzip
Modeling: Blender 3d 2.37a
GnuWin32
TurboCad
Games
Windows is useless for anything else.
following on from earlier
FileZilla for FTP and GUI SSH uploads
http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/
PuTTY for SSH
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
Inkscape for vector graphics work.
http://www.inkscape.org/
OpenOffice.org For all standard office tasks and reading/writing MS formats
http://www.openoffice.org
Gnumeric for quicker handling of spreadsheets, much lighter than OO.o but just as capable.
http://www.gnome.org/~jody/gnumeric/win32/
Abiword as a lighter word processor, still very capable for simple tasks
http://www.abisource.com/download/
PDFCreator with GNU Ghostscript to add a highly configurable PDF printer to the system
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
Dev C++ in the event that i need a C compiler and nice IDE
http://www.bloodshed.net/dev/devcpp.html
CDrtools and CDRDAO are indispensable burning tools
http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/cdrecord.html
http://cdrdao.sourceforge.net/
CDex for ripping Audio CDs
http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/
OggDropXPd to encode to the best lossy format there is
http://www.rarewares.org/ogg.html
Burrrn to burn audio CDs from my assembled music collection
http://www.burrrn.net/?page_id=6
Mplayer and VLC for Audio/DVD playback and stream ripping
http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32/
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Audacity for audio editing/processing
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Spybot Search and Destroy is largely redundant if you don’t use IE or Outlook, and avoid installing crap on your box, but it’s useful just in case.
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/
CrackAttack! is a great falling block puzzle game, especially good online.
http://www.nongnu.org/crack-attack/
BitTorrent official client for software distribution, though it unfortunately works equally well for illegal distribution of copyrighted content too.
http://www.bittorrent.com/
JRE and LimeWire Basic for software distribution accross Gnutella, there are obviously other possible uses for such software though.
http://www.limewire.com/english/content/home.shtml
http://www.java.com/en/download/windows_automatic.jsp
Apache, MySQL, PHP, but only if you absolutely can’t find a spare machine to run linux versions on.
http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/win32/
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/4.1/installer.html
http://www.php.net/downloads.php
Ubuntu or Debian GNU/Linux instead of windows, far better than windows IMHO, if you think software installation is complicated, think again, just use the Synaptic GUI Package manager (based on apt-get) to select the packages you want to install and it’ll download, install and configure them all for you! Ubuntu is fantastic for new users, Debian better for more experienced users, try a liveCD first if you want to find out how things work, even with an ubuntu based LiveCD you can use synaptic to download and install packages from the web to your ramdisk.
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
http://www.debian.org/
LiveCDs
http://www.gnoppix.org/ – Bleeding edge Ubuntu
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/download/ – Ubuntu LiveCD ISOs
http://shipit.ubuntulinux.org/ – Free Ubuntu CDs, Live and Installation, delivered to your door, no purchase necessary.
Obviously some of that collection isn’t Open Source, when behind a suitable firewall, even a NAT router helps, most of the non-free stuff isn’t necessary, or even better, there’s Linux, and for the most part these apps, or better, come with your distribution, or are easy to install from its repositories.
Internet
Opera
Firefox
Thunderbird
UltraVNC
NX Client
Putty
GAIM
Filezilla
BitComet
Media Players
VLC
BSPlayer
Quicktime Alternative
Real Alternative
Quintessential Player
Security
NOD32 Antivirus (best commercial AV IMO)
Spybot S&D
Spywareblaster
Adaware
MS AntiSpyware
Ewido Anti-Trojan (free version)
Of these, only NOD32 runs resident, and it’s very lightweight. I never get infected (using Opera primarily for browsing), but I dutifully run scans every so often, immunize using Spybot and Spywareblaster and use a custom hosts file.
Utilities & Misc.
Crap Cleaner
Tweak UI
Alcohol or Daemon Tools
Sysinternals (various)
Virtual Dimension (Multiple desktops, *nix style)
SyncBack
Synergy (lets me control Ubuntu machine running side by side nearly seamlessly with same mouse and keyboard)
DupFiles
Sequoia
WinRAR or 7-zip
Filalyzer
Picasa 2
Notepad++
Metapad
Powertoy Calculator
Nero
Irfan image viewer
numb nutts in the article put norton antivirus (which sucks), and no firewall….. hehe
what a moron, firewall first
ZoneAlarm for windows
AVG antivurus runs circles around norton and uses half the resources … and is free
anyway…. this article is a total joke
Opera
Foobar2000
Antivirus, firewall and diagnostic utilities
+Whatever my current employer is using, compatibility is generally much more important than personal preferences.
I only listed the one’s that are perhaps not so well known;
Notepad2 (alternative to notepad.exe)
XnView (image viewer – alternative to ACDSee)
Media Player Classic (almost perfect video player)
QuickTime & Real Alternative (because QuickTime and RealPlayer suck ass)
The All Seeing Eye (a must for online games)
foobar2000/musikCube (2 great music players)
That’s about it. There’s of course the ussual stuff like Firefox, Reader, Azureus, VS.net, WinRAR, iTunes, Gnotify, Nero,…
No antivirus, spyware removal,… whatsoever. Only use Microsoft’s regclaner every now and then.
numb nutts in the article put norton antivirus (which sucks), and no firewall….. hehe
what a moron, firewall first
RTFA and get a clue. He installs XPSP2 before anything on the list, giving him the firewall.
AVG antivurus runs circles around norton and uses half the resources … and is free
I’ve personally had less trouble with NAV than AVG. The superiority of AVG is not as clear cut as you imply. There are situations where AVG fails, as there are with NAV.
anyway…. this article is a total joke
You didn’t even read it properly. You’re the joke.
NAV does do better on detection tests vs. large numbers of zoo samples than AVG, which does worse than most (Kaspersky usually does best in this kind), but both are generally fine vs. current in the wild stuff as long as they’re kept updated.
* AVG is faster and lighter weight (and free for home use).
* NAV I’ve seen disabled by malware on more than a few times…arguably comes from being a market leader, but whatever. Same deal with McAffee.
I personally prefer NOD32 because it’s also very lightweight and fast, and has excellent heuristic detection of unknown threats as well as frequent updates.
Osnews V3.0 is the most important application.
In addition to mentioned…
All either Freeware/GPL or “Free”
EditPad – Text editor, or
ConText – text editor (tabs, highlighter, macros, yet light.)
Stardock ObjectDock Free edition – Mac’s Dock knock off. (appears spyware-free for the last 2 years.)
Memento – the best Post-It notes of 7-10 I tried (colors, transparancy, 248Kb!, “crap”-free) (http://www.guyswithtowels.com)
multiDesk 2001 Beta – virtual desk manager (move windows bw desks with mouse, 150kb) (search on download.com, developer is MIA)
Norton is the number one troublemaker on nearly all the systems people I know have come to me for support on. After I uninstall it and replace it with Avast (which is free, btw), most of their problems have gone away. Norton has also failed to remove (and sometimes even find) certain viruses Avast have taken care of.
This sort of article is a “must-have” in order to generate some pageviews, isn’t? Every once in a while, we see one of these (specially on SourceForge)… 😛
Any way, here is my list:
Firefox
Thunderbird
Winamp
PuTTY
Media Player Classic
K-Lite Codec Pack
BSPlayer
AVG
ZoneAlarm
BitTorrent
Skype
iTunes and Quicktime
Miranda or Trillian
Photoshop
Dreamweaver
Corel Draw!
Blender
AdAware SE Personal
SpyBot
Nero
BitTorrent
eDonkey
Kazaa Lite
Inkscape
unix utils (old pre-cygwin unix shell workalikes like grep and sort)
NeoRAGEX
ZSNES
I’m pretty sure that I’m forgetting something, but I don’t boot into Windows so often anymore so that’s doable, I guess. But when I have to, this is the software that makes Windows bearable IMHO.