Ten... freeware gems for new PCs Reg Hardware PC Week If you’ve just purchased a spanking new Windows PC, what to slap on there often leaves pause for thought. The trial bloatware that inevitably came with your machine might keep you busy for a while until the payment nag screens start. Yet those costs and curses aside, there are plenty of free apps out …
7zip, OO and Avast were the first things I put on a new Win PC recently. Not heard of Bvckup, must try it.
Don't like VLC on windows. Too flaky
For editors, I'd recommend PSPad over Notepad++ any day. It is particularly good at handling large files. I work with log files a lot, some Gb in size and it can handle them with no problems. Also lots of search&replace functionality, syntax highlighting, FTP access, macros, diff, block highlighting, etc. Well worth the money (!!)
First thing you do when a relative gets you to help set up their new PC is delete that Norton trial crap that PCWorld keep insisting on installing.
NotePad++ can be infuriating if you have (or had open) files from across a network share, as it is always checking them for updates.
A nice simple paint application is Paint.net.
FreeMind is useful for firing down thoughts at the start of a project.
Virtualbox for getting all flavours of Windows, OS/2 etc. to run.
DosBox for your old games.
For an XP machine, the Royale theme can brighten up the desktop a little, makes the blue slightly shinier.
CDBurnerXP - I prefer it to Imgburn, though both are good
Paint.NET - I find its menu structure more straightforward than GIMP, plus there's a good community developing plugins that extend functionality a lot
Audacity - best free sound editor going, IMO
Virtual Clone Drive - since Windows still can't do much with ISOs natively, this creates a virtual loopback device so you can mount & manipulate them
GSMART control - querying SMART data from installed drive
Acronis Drive Monitor - handy little drive monitoring tool
I used to use Avast but I've moved to Clam for myself. Most users will be fine with Microsoft Security Essentials. If you're only dealing with .zip file then Windows handles them natively, same for burning. NVidia actually cleans up it's driver refuse if you choose a clean install now which removed my need/desire for CCCleaner. VLC: damn good. Open Office...? Still no. I use MS Office myself but I've used Google Docs quite a bit and it's better than Open Office.
Still, a good list. Gets people thinking about and looking for alternatives.
Read your post and had to ask - how many of us here (or know people we work with who) insist on calling it "C-C-Cleaner" when it blatantly isn't called that!
Great little utility but unfortunately was blacklisted in my corporate environment due to its ability to uninstall software that the in-house Client Management system had marked as un-uninstallable - he he
Other nominations:
F.lux - adjusts the colour temperature of your display according to the time of day. Obviously not for image editing etc, but good for when using web browsers.
MagicISO - A virtual DVD dive.
HDRview - views HDRI (.hdr, .exr) files. Despite my previous comment, IrfanView can't do this - maybe there is a plug in?
VirtualDUB - does loads of video encoding stuff. Turning a sequence of still images into an AVI, for example. Many people might be better served by a specific converter for their needs though. (eg just to get a video onto their PMP)
CoreTemp - tells you how hot your CPUs are. So you put some more books under your laptop in the hope of increasing airflow.
Nice feature of Picasa is that if it is open when you hit PrntScrn, the screengrab is automatically saved (you don't have to manually paste it into Paint etc)
Is next to useless now.
Use to work great a year or so ago but now it rarely detects anything while the other products I use still find stuff.
As for SpybotS&D thats great if you like using software that looks like it was designed for Win95. Pus it's got way bloated now.
All those extra Spyware detectors are a waste of time. All you need is a free AV and thats it.
The reason being is that once you are infected you cannot clean off those drivebys etc. using those apps on the PC. They don't work. They might delete a few files but they wont get rid of it all.
The only way is to remove the HDD and scan it in another machine with about 4 different products so installing Spybot/Malwarebytes etc. are largely a waste of space.
Surprised you didn't mention Paint.net and Irfanview - 2 of the best photo tools available for Windows.
Paint.net has almost all the features you are likely to need from Photoshop and is totally free.
Irfanview provides a slick interface to paging through masses of photos.
No mention of 'Karen's Replicator.' It used to be mentioned a lot.
Backup across network, schedule, autostart...... It runs. I don't even notice it (exactly how it should be) and my backups are on my other machine.
Free. Bigger than Bvbackup but worth a look...
More functionality? I dunno....
Tried Karen's Replicator, Microsoft's SyncToy, RapidBackup, SyncBack, Yadis file Sync, RichCopy from Microsoft, etc. all fail on large data sets (1.5+ TB total size and over 100K files) transferred over a network. The only one which did not quit is TeraCopy - there is a free version, and it is the only copy / sync utility I found which generates CRC 32 for the files it copies/checks and does not quit with very large datasets (NAS to NAS or local disk to NAS). http://codesector.com/teracopy free for non-commercial use only. FastCopy http://ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en also deserves an honorable mention for handling large file sets.
Well, my wife's PC (Dell mini with XP) has Avira and it's a naggy bastard that pops up a message that needs to be killed via taskmgr. Maybe I'll try a reinstallation.
LibreOffice, yes, although there's a bug in the keyboard handling (first noticed when using the Formula Editor) such that you have to use the plus on the keypad instead of the shift-equals to get it to behave properly at times.
I might also suggest people give KDE for Windows a try. (http://windows.kde.org/). Basically it's porting the KDE infrastructure and applications to Windows. It's up to KDE 4.8 and has continued to get closer to Linux quality*. Running the software will load the KDE libaries, but if you find multiple pieces of software in there useful the overhead is shared. All Free (beer and speech).
Anyway, I was glad to see 7Zip as number 1 because it was my first thought.
* Don't. Just don't.
The OpenOffice developer community was messed around by Oracle, so the bulk of the devs left to set up LibreOffice. Oracle since gave OpenOffice to Apache, and that development is supported by IBM. Because of the different licenses of the two projects you can expect new OpenOffice features to appear in LibreOffice, but not vice versa.
VLC is terrible. At least if you want to use it for home cinema playback. MPC-HC all the way! Mind you my setup is rather esoteric (ffdshow, MAdVR, LAV etc). I have way to play nearly every format in exactly the way I want (like auto switching HDTV refresh etc for PAL, NTSC etc).
I personally use AVG which works fine. I tend to switch based on the latest reviews though. I prefer XNViewMP beta over Irfanview right now (It displays transaparent PNG's correctly) although it can be a bit buggy on occasion.
I am not sure 7-zip adds right click context menus to Explorer. I like the way in Winrar you can right click and 'extract here'.
Oh and therer is some issue over whether Eraser will actually erase data on solid state storage such as flash drives due to the way wear levelling works. You may 'think' you erased the data but it cold be hiding in the redundant data portion of the memory still. just so you know.
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...in that it can usually be relied upon to play stuff nothing else will touch (though I find the transcode to be rather flakey), however the UI is horrible. I prefer SMPlayer, though it seems like later MPlayers are more finicky in what it'll play.
+1 for Avast, the sandbox does work in the free version, you just need to be running the file off a removable drive. Yes, it hassles you to renew each year. It is dead easy, just find the renew button, click it, and give an email address.
What I would appreciate is something that can join up multipart RAR files. It seems 7zip can't do that. Yet?
I like FreeMeter, so I can quickly see what my 'Net connection is up to. Sits in the systray and at a glance I can see graphically how much bandwidth is being used. It's old now and crashes on system startup but I still like it - any alternative solutions welcome.
http://miechu.pl/freemeter/download.aspx
XPLORER: Another one that's never mentioned but it's WONDERFUL!!
From http://www.zabkat.com/
It's a Windows Explorer replacement but it does so much that I use it continuously. It's main strength is the twin-pane approach with tabs on each pane to different folders. If you do a lot of work in folders this is for you.
It also does overwrites like Eraser, Mass rename for photos, previews for images, amend file attributes - lots more, and that's only in the free version. The paid version does even more.
I can't praise it highly enough, and clearly it needs a wider audience.
Just try it.
Best free search utility bar none. Way better than even advanced Windows 7 searches.
Finds filenames and contents using Boolean or Regular Expression criteria.
So good, I bought the paid for version - Filelocator Pro, which is better again (tabbed searches, can save results, outputs results in various formats for further analysis).
Highly recommended.
... as it does not play well with shell integration and windows 7 it seems.
Also, it's algo to name the folder if you uncompress a zip to a folder.like.this was not good.
I now use IZArc http://www.izarc.org/
For windows 7 peeps, I also always install 7 taskbar tweaker ( http://rammichael.com/ )
You sure you're using the version of 7-Zip that corresponds to the architecture of your OS? Installing the 32-bit version of 7-Zip on a 64-bit version of Windows will result in shell integration problems (as I witnessed back in the early days of 64-bit computing. Ran XP Pro x64 on one of my rigs, but at that time 7-Zip was only available in 32-bit). Shell extension started working properly once they came up with 64-bit native versions of 7-Zip.
Apart from the article dubiously recommending OpenOffice instead of the more featureful LibreOffice (does anyone with a new PC bother installing OpenOffice any more?!), here's some "obvious" ones left out:
* Microsoft Security Essentials - a free download (even SMEs can use it on up to 10 PCs for free) and actually does its job quite unobtrusively and is lightweight too.
* Daemon Tools Lite - useful for mounting ISOs as a drive (amongst other features). Bizarre that Windows 7 *still* can't do this, ho hum.
* Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome - anything but IE, surely?!
* ImgBurn - again, does a lot more than the standard CD/DVD burning stuff baked into Win 7.
* puTTY and/or FileZilla - essential tools if you ever have to transfer files or login remotely to another machine that isn't running Windows (yes, shock, there are non-Windows machines out there).
* VirtualBox - so you play with VMs (often running Linux) to see what "real" operating systems are like :-)
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