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I use IrfanView. The lighest and quickest image viewer for Windows that I've ever used.

Slackware, you insensitive clod! ;-)

Actually on a serious note, I install (for my mother, family and friends)...

7-zip
gs / gsview
Firefox / Thunderbird
AVG
WinPT
Eraser
OpenOffice
Gimp (depending on the family member or friend)
Gaim
FileZilla
Amaya (only because bluefish is not available on win32 yet)
RealVNC
VIM
irFanview
Azureus (depending on the family member or friend)
Daemon Tools (depending on the family member or friend)

You insensitive clod, not all people want NT 4 SP2 on their win 98 boxes.

Seriously though, the first thing which goes on is the latest McAfee Stinger. When that's wiped out most of the viruses, I uninstall their out-of-date Norton - so many people don't realise that the major antivirus vendors are on a rental model and just buy the product and expect it to last forever. Then Avast! Personal Edition goes on, and the PC is fully scanned. After that comes Spybot and Ad-Aware. I use both because each product has its stregths and weaknesses. All of this is done form a CD burnt with the latest patterns so no internet connectivity happens until their PC has been cleaned. And then Sygate Personal Firewall completes the mix of security products.

After that comes Thunderbird and Firefox, The GIMP and Audacity (if they are into that sort of thing. And of course we musn't forget IrfanView.

Irfanview can with the appropriate plug-in. :-)

It can view those old IFF files you might have laying around as well.

CDEX
IRFanView
Winamp
iTunes
FireFox w/AdBlock and various other extensions
Some music
Assorted pictures
Spybot & AdAware
XP SP2
DefilerPak
Novell VPN client
Citrix client
Farbrausch demos
PuTTY
and the all-important XEvil

open first pic, hit 'b', go to directory, add all, advanced -> resize, start.

Not that much more complicated.

batch commmand structures aren't limited to *NIX based machines you know. Unfortunately the windows GUI makes it a lot less common.

Open Irfanview (free), half a dozen mouse clicks and it's churning away doing the job.

This is assuming you're not running XP and have the MS Image Resizer PowerToy (also free) which makes the job even quicker. Browse to the folder with the photos (usually MyDocs > MyPics > Folder, or it'll be open after the automatic picture transfer has done it's stuff), Ctrl-A, right-click, Resize Pictures, click on Medium (800x600), OK.

Or just install ImageMagick for windows.

I'm no windows fanboy, but it's easy to automate this sort of stuff on most OSs I've used and Windows is no exception. But hey, if you feel superior typing away commands to do this sort of basic stuff, feel free.

"Batch conversion", perhaps? Granted, you need someware to do that. Some are free. My favorite: IrfanView.

Or, you could just get the Windows version of ImageMagick.

/not a Windows fan, but not a zealot

I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but [see my sig]:

I don't think I actually ever bothered to steal a copy of Photoshop, so for most of my uses when I was largely a Windows guy I would use Irfanview, which kicks ass if you don't have much to do, and crappy old MS-Paint.

When I finally needed to move out of kindergarten and get a "real" graphics program, I started playing with the Gimp - only because it came with a linux distro I was fooling with at the time.

Thus, the Gimp was my first exposure to "real" graphics programs.

On the Gimp, I learned how to use layers. I made my first gradient. I stopped downloading desktop pics from Spymac or wherever and started making my own. I eventually grew into a fairly solid artist. I'm considering making a huge piece and putting it in the local art show next year in the mixed media category. I think I could win.... The Gimp really has done everything I could ask of it.

When I tried my dad's Photoshop, I couldn't find my way around, because I was used to the Gimp. I thought PS was laid out badly, because I was used to the Gimp. I couldn't do much at all, I was stumbling around, spending most of my time searching for things like how to draw a straight line in PS, because I was used to the Gimp. A lot of my time was spent mumbling, "hmm... that's stupid!".

I find that the layout might matter the first little while you're using an app, but once you get used to it, all apps approach the same natural level. My friends who use WindowsMediaPlayer are as fast and efficient in it as I am in iTunes. I struggle with apps my dad zings around in, and he struggles with the ones I'm awesome in. But our effectiveness at getting our various jobs done is roughly the same.

It's like learning a language: I am *fluent* in the Gimp. I barely speak "tourist" Photoshop. And sitting at Photoshop thinking "this would be so damn simple if I was on my OWN computer using the Gimp" is frustrating. It takes me a lot longer to get things done.

The Gimp can do everything I ask of it, and when I think it can't and want to be surprised, I simply ....

• startup control panel & startup monitor which i use to see if any worms, viruses or adware get onto my PC and have to ask my permission to register as a starup program
• zone alarm so i don't have to worry about any program trying to get into my computer or even worst
• irfan view as my all-purpouse image viewer and sound player. i use it as my primary file association for all of these, particularly since i often want to just double-click an mp3 etc.

winzip
realvnc
ad-aware
html-kit
irfanview
zonealarm
kazaalite
subspace/continuum
prime95
weatherbug
google toolbar

1. Mozilla Firefox
2. Microsoft Office
3. PuTTy SSH Client
4. WinRAR (will check out Izarc too)
5. WinAMP
6. POPFile, an Email Filter
7. SmartFTP, gonna FileZilla a try though..
8. IrfanView, a free picture viewer
9. NetTransport download manager, also downloads media streams
10. Windows Media Player 9-- its actually pretty good!

Kerio Personal Firewall - great software firewall, a must on any Windows box
F-Prot AntiVirus - another must have, antivirus software
Tray Wizard - extentions to 2K system tray
DAEMON Tools - mount ISO images off your harddrive to virtual CD drives
FlashFXP - FTP Client with loads of nice features
UltraEdit - must have text editor, nice features such as syntax highlighting
IrfranView - multi-format image viewer
Media Player Classic - replacement for WMP that blows it out of the water
WinRAR - multi-format archive app
PuTTY

How is it possible to not have IrfanView in this list? It's always in my top three installs when I start using a computer or reinstall.

I use Irfanview with the "all pluggins" patch to play MP3 files and streams. Great light footprint media player and image viewer.

The availability of a free-as-in-beer compiler for Windows doesn't have as much of an impact on Windows programmers as you might think. In the free-software world, the good coders tend to work on the Linux kernel and such things. In the Windows world, the good coders tend to want money for their work. Which means that the people left to develop freeware (i.e. free-as-in-beer, not-usually-free-as-in-speech software) are...

The not-so-good coders. The coders who would just look at you funny if you suggested that they use a command-line tool.

Sure, there are exceptions, like the excellent IrfanView and of course the wonderful (and also free-as-in-speech!) utility CDEX, and of course many "cross-platform" projects like Audacity and The GIMP (many of which originated in the Linux/Unix world anyhow)... buuuut... the majority of the freeware coders in the Windows world tend to be those who couldn't easily make a living off of their code.

You have to remember that the CULTURE in the Windows world is not like that of the Linux world...

While we're on the topic of comparative culture (drifting rapidly off-topic here, but...), please note that in Windows-land, money is a much stronger motivator. Additionally, in Windows-land, conformity is a lot more prevalent. You still see Unix coders who prefer some obscure clone of EMACS or vi, or an even more obscure editor no one's heard of, or one they wrote themselves. Windows people tend to write their papers in MS Word, and only MS Word... because that's what everyone else uses. It is a more conformist culture (this isn't a judgment, it's simply a fact!)

I am, at this very moment, editing a letter using GNU nano and a CGI I scripted in Perl to format it nicely for printing and/or PDFing. I'm not using MS Office, or even OpenOffice. And there are gajillions of people using "weird" or otherwise obscure solutions like that throughout the Unix world. In Windows-land, a weird approach like that would just get you funny looks. Like I said-- differences in culture...

Be careful though. I've encountred a lot of software labeled as freeware on download.com, only to end up being dissapointed with a spyware loaded POS. If you're looking for an image viewer, by chance, Irfanview is arguably one of the best out there. I've been using it for years. It's very stable and quick, and supports a boatload of image formats, as well as video and audio (if you download the plugin package).

Ok.

Here's a Windows program called IrfanView. No Linux version, but I can verify that it runs very well in Wine. While it can't add borders around an image, it does have a graphical Batch Conversion/rename tool that can do everything else you've described.

Ah, Gallery. I tried it and it punished my P-200 server by telling it to process so many pictures. I guess that's what I get from a budget solution. I use a simple self-made PHP script, IrfanView batch-makes the thumbnails, I copy the pics and thumbs onto the server with Samba (FTP would work as well, and both are better than having to use http upload, IMO), and call a script to put the new pics in MySQL.. Still got a lot to work on (add pics in album, change viewing order, comments), but it's served me well.

For images and video I use IrfanView is like xv but on steroids, it can show images in full screen, create slideshows, batch convert/process files, download images from a digital camera or scanner, it has may useful hotkeys (like [space] to see the next file in the directory) it also plays audio files, but I prefer winamp or zinf for that

• CygWin. The Linux-like environment for Windows.
  Mozilla. Use this for mail, news, and browsing if you like.
  Firebird. for FAST browsing.
  WS FTP Light. A FREE, FTP client that works great.
  Filezilla. which is TRULY free and does sftp as well.
  PuTTY. a free SSH client for Windows.
  TTSSH. is a much less clunky ssh client than PuTTY.
  iXplorer. freeware secure FTP client
  VNC hello!? remote controll software.
  Tight VNClike the original, only FAST.
  GNU-EMacs for Windows. just trust me ;).
  Dev-C++a free C++ compiler for those who can't afford VS.
  NetHack. as someone here said, you MUST have NetHack installed on everything...
  Free-AV.free Anti-Virus software for Windows, (mandatory these days). or
  AVG Free edition. another free Anti-Virus software for Windows.
  Zonealarm. my favorite Personal Firewall,, really!. or
  Kerio. another firewall that some seem to like. or
  Sygate. yet another firewall. whatever floats your boat.
  Boingo. to see where the closest hotspot is, hehe.
  OpenOffice 1.1 the Microsoft Office KILLER :) {really!}
  Winamp 2.x for audio/video usage in Windows, stay away from the new one :).
  Mark's Adding Machine is much better than the Windows calculator.
  SpyBot Search & Destroy The best Ad-ware / Spyware removal tool we've found, "IE is unusable without".
  Ad-Aware another spy-ware app "alas poor Windoze."
  Trillian a favorite IM, since we're all chatters @ heart. or
  GAIM since trillian hogs resources, "bad piggy!".
  Gimp image creation/editing. Who needs Photoshop anyway?
  EnZip freeware Zip Utility, Stop nagging you WinZip!!
  Iview is a great little image viewer. or
  Irfanviewone of the best image viewer out there for Windows.
  Audacity is a great little sound editor.
  Virtual Dub. a great video editor.
  cDex gotta rip those cd's for the RIAA!
  MAME for games, period. Free. You can buy some ROMs, or *ahem* ask around. and finally
  XPantiSPY since XP is E-V-I-L.

And FINALLY, don't trust me! Trust the experts;

Go to the Pricelessware site maintained by the alt.comp.freeware Usenet group.
The

• The Bat! mail client (shareware)
• Opera browser/mail/newsclient (adware), much more lightweight than Mozilla
• 40tude Dialog newsclient
• Total Commander file manager (shareware)
• eMule peer-to-peer client (open source)
• ViM
• editor (open source)
• GhostScript and GSView for PostScript and PDF rendering/conversion/manipulation (open source)
• ActivePerl, ActivePython, ActiveTcl for scripting
• 7-zip packer

These are some of the free (speech or beer) software I'd install on a family, non-gaming machine:

• Web Browser: Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird
• E-mail: Mozilla (cross-platform), Mozilla Thunderbird (cross-platform), Evolution (Gnome), or KMail (KDE)
• Office Suite: OpenOffice.org
• Media Player: QuickTime (Windows), Zinf (cross-platform), RealPlayer (cross-platform), WinAmp (Windows), MPlayer (Windows), XMMS (Linux)
• Image Viewer: IrfanView (Windows)
• Instant Messaging: Gaim (cross-platform)
• Personal Information Management: Palm Desktop Software (great PIM suite even if you don't own a Palm)
• Other: Acrobat Reader (although I'm weary of their DRM), Java 2 Runtime Environment, Macromedia Flash and Shockwave players, Ad-Aware (spyware remover for Windows), ZoneAlarm, Sygate Personal Firewall (firewall, alternative to ZoneAlarm), Grisoft AVG Anti-Virus, FileZilla, WinRAR (not free, shareware with nag window), Ofoto desktop software (basic photo album and touch-ups, even if you don't use Ofoto's online services)

Some other software I'd install on my own desktop (dev), in decreasing order of importance:

• Cygwin, bascially all packages
• UltraEdit32 (45-day trial shareware)
• TightVNC
• Ghostscript and GSView
• Java 2 SDK
• Eclipse
• Borland JBuilder Personal
• ActiveState Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk (yes, even though they are in Cygwin), Jython
• GIMP
• POV-Ray
• At least one of Apache, Tomcat, or Plone (Zope)
• HTTrack (a website copier)

AVG is total rubbish compared to Avast!, which is also free for personal use. Highly recommended.

I also recommend the image viewer IrfanView, the Filezilla ftp client and server, Audacity, The GIMP for Windows, the ConText text editor, the KiXtart scripting tool, GAIM for Windows, and that's just for starters.

Browser: Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 (or 0.7 nightly build)

Email: Thunderbird 0.2 (or 0.3 nightly build)

Office Suite: Open Office 1.1

SSH Client: Putty 0.53b

Graphics: Irfan View 3.85 or GIMP 1.2.5

Music: Winamp 2.91

Virus Scanner: AVG 7.0

Instant Messenger: Psi 0.9 or Trillian Basic 0.74E or gaim 0.70

Non-Copywrited Music downloads :P : WinMX 3.31

Video Player (paired with an ATI Video card): ATI MMC 7.6

FTP : LeapFTP 2.7.4

ok so that was 11 .. sorry ;)

Irfanview image viewer. Reads almost every image format known to man, and so much better than having IE pop up every time you want to view a JPEG or GIF! Also performs most every basic image edit (rotate, crop, sharpen, resize) that a basic home user would need, short of PaintShip Pro or Photoshop.

CDex MP3 ripper. IMO the best MP3 ripper out there. Uses the LAME codec. Also encodes to OGG, VQF, APE... And completely open source.

Editpad text editor. A replacement for the terrible Windows Notepad. Opens unlimited numbers of documents into a tabbed format. And has some nice little features, like header and footer options for printing, timestamps, ROT-13, etc. Also available for Linux...

Mozilla Firebird
Proxomitron filtering proxy
WinKey Killer (Other free apps on this somewhat dated site)
IrfanView
SysInternals monitoring apps

Other have already mentioned Cygwin, AVG, Anti-Vir and Ad-Aware. Still use an older version of Kerio Personal Firewall before it became shareware.

Try Irfanview instead. It's free.

Irfanview - hands down the best image viewer out there for Windows. Free. Windows only (but will run under Wine if you want)

Gimp - if you want to edit images. Free. Linux and Windows.

MAME - for games, period. Free. You can buy some ROMs, or *ahem* ask around. Windows and Linux. (Xmame)

CDex - for CD ripping in Windows. Free. Windows only, but several good ripping programs are available for Linux. (search freshmeat)

GNUWin - a collection of free apps for Windows. Worth the download.

Audacity - if you want to create/edit sound files. Free. Linux and Windows.

Winamp - for listening to audio files. Free. Windows only. I like XMMS for Linux over Freeamp.

Opera - web browsing, email. Free. Windows and Linux. I prefer it over Mozilla, but not by much.

I like to use IrfanView for image viewing. It's free for non-commercial use.

Are you absolutely positively sure you want to use Windows XP Home instead of the much better XP Professional or even better 2000 Professional? I've had nothing but heartache with the PCs that my family members have bought that have XP Home on them...

Otherwise, people have already suggested Mozilla and a few have suggested Mozilla Firebird, which I myself think is a far superior mail product. Mozilla Thunderbird is what I use for mail at home right now, but it's an acquired taste.

Ad-Aware is indispensable. Every PC should have a copy of it.

For image viewing Irfan View is probably the greatest thing in the world.

You'll of course need WinZip and you'll need the DiVX codec and unfortunately you'll also need Quicktime and Shockwave for numerous braindead (and not so braindead) websites along with the latest Java VM. Besides that, the rest is left up to personal taste. I'd suggest a copy of MS Office because OpenOffice makes me want to gnaw my arm off but then again that's also partially because I can buy Office on student discount at the University Bookstore.
Oh, and get a BitTorrent client from somewhere.

Firewall - Kerio Personal Firewall - bloat-free firewall, very small memory footprint, extremely powerful, and it's free.

Compression - 7zip - compression utility that handles virtually every format, integrated into UI, and it's free.

Imaging - Irfanview - image viewer handles virtually all image formats, plays Flash and video, plus can thumbnail, batch-convert, retouch, and it's free.

Music - Winamp - Plays virtually all music formats (including WMA without the DRM annoyances), plus 2.91 now plays video and streaming video, and it's free.

The key here is these programs are capable replacements for a lot of more expensive pay programs. For example, Norton Firewall, Winzip, ACDsee together come to about $200 retail.

Try irfanview an excellent image viewer, with automatic resize and slideshow!

Try irfanview an excellent image viewer, with automatic resize and slideshow!

Regardless, I'm sure the mighty Irfanview is just as good, if not better. I've yet to find a graphics viewer to beat that. Awesome program.

And no, I have nothing to do with the program, just a BIG fan (first util I install on any new PC I use).

And at the risk of being modded down, this 2 minute posting delay SUCKS!!! Totally relevant post and I have to sit here kicking my heels. Thanks Commander Jackass.

I can't help you with any software success stories, but I can give you my first impresion of your product, for what it's worth- At first glance it comes across like any other image viewer, which is not good because I already have irfanview, and am quite happy with it, so why should I pay for yours? Well, after going over the features, there are a couple of things your product offers that most image editors don't offer. Don't market it as an image editor. Sell it as a "Network Image Grabber". Organize your list of features under categories, like Networking features, Editing features and Thumbnailing features, and make the most unique categories the most prominant. As far as hackers stealing your work, consider opening up the source code under the GPL. At least that way you would stand a chance of getting something in return(improved code), for what is already being taken. You could give the code away, and still sell the binaries.

Just to be extra annoying, there's no well-publicized external Flash viewer to use outside of the browser, either.

Doesn't everyone use IrfanView? Ok, it's not well-publicized, but it's so good that it doesn't have to be.

PNG can be read by both MSIE and MSWord. (Note: the Windows version of IE does not do PNG transparency very well. Ironically, it works on the Mac OS X version.)

As a last resort, tell your COWorkers to get IrfanView which is, IMO, the best graphics viewer for win32 in existence. It's damn fast, non-bloated and as long as you get the plugin packs it supports practically every format out there.

Dang. My Athlon 900 played it fine. Maybe you need a different player. I used IrfanView.

Why force a slideshow on someone who'd rather view the pics in Photoshop, MS Photo Editor or Gimp?

Well, your script is useful if all the files are in the same directory, and you want to resize all of them. But what if you want to resize a few images from different directories across your system?

Since I have to use Windows at work, and don't mess much with images at home, I can't recommend one Unix graphics program over another. But on Windows, Irfanview is priceless. The batch convert program works incredibly well, and does a lot of things like color balance changes and format conversions. Also, the thumbnail view lets you take a directory of images and convert it straight to a web page with thumbnails, linked to full-size versions and with file sizes listed below the thumbnails. Irfanview is the best Windows program I have ever used.

> Oh dear god, I'm going to have one hell of a > time converting over 500 JPEGs to PNG, a format > my pr0n collection viewer doesn't support on a > frickin' celeron 633!

Two things:
Adobe Photoshop batch conversion
IrfanView (it views EVERYTHING)

MSIE 6 image autoresizing, and the small floating toolbar above images to save, e-mail to someone else, resize, etc. This has allowed me to make MSIE my primary image *viewer* instead of Photoshop which takes insanely longer to load. For editing of course, I still use PS or PSP, but I don't have to load 300+ plugins to look at the latest picture of some computer hardware, a digital pic from my friend, or other stuff.

There's no point in running either PSP or a full IE browser window just to look at an image. Try out IrfanView, a little but really good freeware app. It reads more or less every image format on the planet, it's blazing fast and have some edit capabilities.

This has allowed me to make MSIE my primary image *viewer* instead of Photoshop which takes insanely longer to load.

Photoshop is an image *editor*. Why on earth would you use it as a viewer?

May I introduce you to Irfan View? It will open more formats than IE, as it is designed for the job, and it has lots of extra tasty features as well. Loads pretty fast too. Oh, and it's free.

dont care to lose some quality while your at it?
convert to microsoft-GIF convert to ASCII...and you should end up with a 250*256 bit at most sized (unless i'm mistaken here) image...which can be resized by H(x) html tags or other things for web, or just plain compressed and left like that :)

The market for commerical Windows Image Viewers is going down the toilet because the most excellent viewer is freeware ... IrfanView is my friend.

If you're on a Wintel platform, Irfanview (www.irfanview.com) is a great freeware tool that can open damn near any format of image (some that other viewers can't) and is a small download. I've opened some pretty dang big images in there (a 42 meg jpeg that was ungodly huge), and it loaded fine (and it can open cmyk images and do basic manipulation, resizing, color adjusting, etc...). I've been using the program since version 1.2 and love it (it's at 3.61) and recommend it to anybody that needs a simple graphic viewer (it's a helluva lot faster than ACDSee).

I agree with you, but don't you think you could have said it a bit more elequently? Perhaps you wouldn't be considered flamebait, and might even be taken seriously if you learn to refrain from using phrases like "giant, stinking, smelly, steaming, smoking pile of dog-doo."

I work in a Community College computer lab, (The Windows half, the other half of the college is Apple-only) and I absolutely hate how QuickTime forces itself into the Control Panel, crams itself into the starting programs list and consistantly begs you to upgrade to the pro version every time you open a file with it. I admit that I've never liked the company, but it's not bringing itself into any better standing with non-Apple fans with this kind of behavior. So far only RealPlayer and MSN messenger have managed to top its annoyance-factor.

Try Irfanview. It's small, it's unobtrusive, it's fast and it's freeware. There are plugins for many different media types. If you like it, be sure to thank the author for all of his hard work!

unbookmarkable

What? True, it's not simple, but you can generally manage to get the URL to the Flash file (use the source, Luke) and either keep it or save it.

To view them later, either craft a curstom HTML page or use a stand-alone Flash player. On the Windows platform, Irfanview has a plugin to view Flash files.

Now I'm screwed until I can find a player that will handle avi's, Mp3, and Mpgs.

You migth want to check Irfanview, a Windows viewer that I use for just everything. It's a 600K executable, and freeware.