Software: Must Haves And Nice To Haves

[quiksilva]

Following a complete format of my C: I am about to go through the process of installing programs again.

For AV and Firewalls Im using Norton again (the format process restarted the 3 month trial period so I figured why not (even though its very intrusive). I plan to get windows defender and am looking out for a good zero day malware protection program (that looks at the activity of suspicious programs as opposed to relying on signature updates as adware and spybot do). These are the must haves for me.

For music playback, I like Itunes but have found out that my account no longer works, they need an overseas credit card hmm, so I can't use this to subscribe podcasts anymore. So am looking for good alternatives that I can use with my ipod, or for plug ins or complimentary programs that will take care of my podcast subscriptions.

For video playback, I always use WMP 11 and Video Lan.

For photo and graphics editing I'm very fond of Photoshop CS1 (haven't had any need to try the later versions), its a little intimidating at first but sites like good-tutorials.com make using this a breeze.

Video conferencing I use Skype (still haven't found a better free alternative) or MSN.

Open office and web based email sorts out all my work needs.

So what software must you have on your PC?

[sensei]

Firefox

PDF-XChange Viewer

COMODO Firewall

Free Download Manager

Antivir

Spybot

Ad-Aware

MWSnap 3

Faststone Image Vewer

VLC Media Player

Paint.NET

Picasa

Nokia Wireless Presenter

Media Converter SA Edition

Volumouse

WinRar

WinZip

Eraser

TweakUI

to name a few...

Edited January 4, 2008 by sensei

[AlexLah]

For security:

Hitman Pro (is a batchscript that runs free anti spy/malware/trojan and adds extra browser protection) www.Hitmanpro.com

CC cleaner (deletes all temp files and other kind of sh1t in one go)

Zonealarm (free firewall)

Processguard (prevents any changes/installs on your PC while browsing) (When you run Hitman Pro temporarily disable it)

AVast (Anti virus)

Windows Defender (another anti spyware)

All is freeware.

For other stuff I gues it is depending on what you do with your PC.

I do hope that you dowloaded all Windows updates and above programs and install before you hook up on the net with your freshly installed PC.................

[dsys]

I also recently had to recover my hard disk due to a failure.

Heres what I can not live without:

Norton internet security

norton ghost

norton antibot

MS office

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe DW CS3

Photoshop CS2

Illustrator 10

Quicktime pro

VMWare workstaion

MS SQL server 2005

MS visual studio

and for fun

MSDN library

itunes

[Plus]

Do you pay for all those MS Office and Adobe programs?

Opera and Firefox, anyone?

No one mentioned torrent clients (uTorrent or Azureus for me).

Klight media pack with Classic Media Player - beats VLC for hi def video playback.

[dsys]

Do you pay for all those MS Office and Adobe programs?

Gladly.

Opera and Firefox, anyone?

Only for testing

No one mentioned torrent clients (uTorrent or Azureus for me).

dont use them

Klight media pack with Classic Media Player - beats VLC for hi def video playback.

[JSixpack]

Less obvious but wonderful, in no particular order:

ERUNT - (automatic) registry backup and restore, will save your bacon

Total Commander- world's best file manager

Push The Freakin' Button - automatic button pusher

ArsClip - clipboard history manager

Evernote - best notes collector, integrates w/ browsers etc.

foobar2000 - highly configurabe audio player

HDDLife - check drive temps and SMART health

Maxthon - tabbed browser

The Bat! - fabulous email client

Path Copy - context menu option to copy file paths to clipboard

Autoruns - see what's being loaded and turn off the crap

Snagit - screen capture tool with perfect simple graphic editor

Phrase Express - autotext into any application, saves lots of typing

Autoit3 - create scripts to do most anything

PowerPro - Swiss tool of Windows management, create context-sensitive toolbars; long learning curve

nncron lite - Unix-style scheduler

Proxomitron or Privoxy - clean up webpages, cut the ads & other crap

Select All - A utility to add Select All to the Explorer context menu. Also adds an Invert Selection option to the context menu.

SynchBack - file and directory backups and synch

Acronis True Image - create image or clone of disk