Slashdot Mirror
Top 10 Software Titles Every Home PC Needs?
eabell asks: "I'm buying a new mid-grade laptop computer, which I plan to dual-boot between Windows XP Home and Mandrake 9.x. Before its arrival in a few weeks I'm trying to think of what 'essential' software I'll need to make a usable home system. In general I'd like to spend as little money as possible (free is good). As far as my needs, think 'typical family PC' without an emphasis on gaming. I know I can get something like Open Office for word processing, presentation, etc. needs, but is there such a good thing as a good free virus checker? A good free email client? A handy web browser? What would you consider the top 10 (or so) pieces of software for a new home system, bearing in mind that I need software for both the Windows and Linux side of things?"
For a free Antivirus software go for AVG Anti-Virus. Free for non-commercial, non-networked use. It's what I install on people's machines when they are low on cash, and want to continue running Windows.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I've been using Mozilla firebird for my main browser and it's been really solid.
I also use Mozilla thunderbird for my email, and have been really happy with it.
You can get them from mozilla.org
ad-aware, free for private use./
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware
Here is my top ten list (in no particular order) for Windows. I'll let everyone argue about the Linux tools.
CygWin the Linux-like environment for Windows.
Mozilla naturally.... Use this for mail, news, and browsing if you like.
WS FTP Light a FREE, FTP client that works great.
PuTTY a free SSH client for Windows.
VNC remote controll software, NOTE: the location is no longer on the ATT Labs UK site.
GNU-EMacs for Windows. I usually install it, but use Vi more.
Dev-C++ a free C++ compiler. I use VC++ 6.0, but this is free, and I think it's pretty good.
NetHack You MUST have NetHack installed on everything...
Free-AV free Anti-Virus software for Windows.
Boingo to see where the closest hotspot is. (free) you don't need the service.
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
It's small, fast and has a ton of built in features.
AVG Free edition
Zonealarm
Winamp Classic
..they are the first things I install.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Once you have that, everything else is only a few clicks away...
Along the same lines... Bittorrent
oh and here's a link to Kazaa Lite
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Quicken.
Now, I have no real experience with alternatives so this is a rant about using financial software in general, not Quicken in particular. However, the use I've got out of that piece of software is astounding. The information it gives you for planning is just priceless. You always know where you are, roughly what to expect, can play with what-if's to check how your situation might change...it's excellent.
Get a home finance package, and get into the habit of using it about once a week. I guarantee you won't regret it.
Cheers,
Ian
Go to the Pricelessware site maintained by the alt.comp.freeware Usenet group. On the group, they post and evalute freeware, and the winners make it on to the pricelessware list. Nagware, adware and shareware are frowned upon; the vast majority of the programs listed are no-strings freeware.
...
For instant messaging, I'd go with gaim. Its ability to let you talk to people while leaving an away message up is a lifesaver for avoiding ex-girlfriends.
The best, lightweight graphics viewer, also does movies and sound clips. Great for slideshows keyboard shortcuts for everything. Even my mum can use it and she can't even use a mouse (seriously)
www.irfanview.com
1) Firewall. You will need a good firewall. I've had good experience with Sygate personal firewall. But I'm by no means expert on this.
. comn load. shtml
2) New Browser. Some people are happy with IE but most appreciate the choice. I suggest Opera. As a plus, that'll also include a mail program but I cant comment about that.
3) Audio. Winamp is the winner here, hands down.
4) Video. If you're unhappy with WMP I suggest ZoomPlayer. Remember to download few codec packs too.
5) This isn't really something to buy but I'll say it anyway. Newest service pack/patches. When starting from a clean table they're much easier to install and it's good to start with a patched computer, even if you're too lazy to keep it that way.
Oh and links:
www.sygate.com
www.opera.com
www.winamp
http://www.inmatrix.com/files/zoomplayer_dow
Those should get you started.
The best Ad-ware / Spyware removal tool I've found is
SpyBot Search & Destroy
There is also Ad-Aware though.
Other stuff (non spyware related):
Winamp(2x is best)
Trillian/Gaim
Browsers (and mail): IE6, Mozilla, Opera are all fine
I've found both SlickRun and PopupPopper from Bayden Software to be useful as well.
no comment
I was discussing the virtues of software firewalls with my co-workers this morning.
It's REALLY nice to be able to see what's "phoning home", on top of the regular firewall.
There's a free version, too.
S
I tend to prefer unxutils and MinGw.
Why depend on cygwin, when msvcrt is already gonna be there?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Kerio Personal Firewall.
Kerio is a rules-based GUI-configurable software firewall tool. It ain't a hardware firewall, but it's IMO much more configurable and flexible than ZoneAlarm.
And Norton Ghost. Because if you're smart enough to keep your personal data on a separate partition from the OS and applications, re-dumping a partition takes 15 minutes when things get b0rk3d, thereby beating the fuck out of reinstalling Winblows and downloading patches.
A perfect file manager. No mouse needed, fully customizable, packer and filesystem plugins.
For the Linux side use for example midnight commander.
My suggestions for the Windows side...
For email I'd definitely recommend Eudora as it can be used free (ad based, but small add window) and isn't suceptible to propagating the many viruses that target Outlook.
As someone previously mentioned, I'd also recommend Opera, again, ad based, but a solid browser and mouse gestures rule!
Someone else also mentioned AVG for antivirus, probably the best option for free antivirus.
CDEX is a great MP3 ripping program that I've always used.
We can't forget Sonique and WinAmp for playing your MP3's. I prefer Sonique but that's just me.
Then of course there's Winzip, Adobe Acrobat, QuickTime, VNC, and ZoneAlarm or BlackIce (all available at download.com). These are all (except perhaps VNC) must have utilities for a Windows box.
Every home machine needs a copy of knoppix sitting next to it. This way when an update causes their machine to blue screen on start up, they will have everything they need for to allow for their techy friend to do a data recovery.
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.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Mozilla Firebird has the best popup blocker ever.
All popups are blocked by default. If you run into one of those dodgey websites that spring a nice flash window right up in a popup, you just click the little Blue 'I' icon, press 'unblock' and refresh.
Also, if you want to open a link which opens in a popup, double click on it. That lets Firebird know that you really want this and it isn't a popup ad attached to a link.
0.7 is nearly finished (its out roughly the same time Moz 1.5 is out) and it is far better than the others. Better password manager, web sidebars etc.
Personally, I think firebird has a little while to go for the 'great unwashed' but most of the problems will be fixed by 1.0. How about an intellegent web installer that only installs the things you want? Basic browser? Choose the basic option. Developer? Choose the developer option and get a bunch of useful web development extensions downloaded and built in. RSS/Blog maniac? Choose the news option etc.
Personally if Mozilla Firebird moves quicker, I can't see why PC manufacturers won't load it as default. Dell could advertise they have a 'custom' web browser with popup and ad blocker. Dress it up with a custom Dell skin, and they can make it seem like they have made a brand new browser.
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
Mozilla, powerful and free web browser/mail suite.
OpenOffice, powerful office suite.
Ad-Aware for keeping spyware (Gator etc) out.
BitTorrent for all your P2P needs.
ZomeAlarm a good firewall.
Avast! Antivirus good AV app, free for home use.
TextPad powerful and easy-to-use text editor.
SmartFTP powerful and free FTP client.
On top of these, I always install these non-free apps (non-development related):
Paint Shop Pro all the relevant functionality from Photoshop at a much better price.
Klient the best IRC client. Ever.
Some people have mentioned:
CygWin - a home, non-dev PC doesn't need it
VNC - a home, non-dev PC doesn't need it, and it has security issues
Dev-C++ - not needed on a home PC, it's for development.
NetHack - huh!?
Boingo - the article submitter didn't mention anything about having a WLAN card, so why would he need to find hotspots?
Winamp - redundant since Microsoft released WMP9, which I've found to be just as fast, more stable than WA3, and better at playing movies. Of course, YMMV, and some people prefer to stay away from MS stuff for ideological reasons.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
Other tools that I use extensively, but which are not necessarily "home user" applications are:
As far as entertainment titles go, it really depends on your preferences, but mine are:
Lots of petrified grits
All you need is Mac OS X and iLife. Mac OS X gives you Safari, Mail, TextEdit, iCal, Address Book, and iSync, plus the built-in firewall, DVD player, and DVD/CD burner. iLife is iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, and iDVD.
For home use, you literally don't need anything more than these.
What's that? You don't have a Mac? Ohhhh, you poor thing.
Windows:
/or Sygate for firewall (both are good)
Kerio
Aladdin's free StuffIt Expander (unpacks a lot of different compressed files, including SIT and Gunzip's)
AVG antivirus (free for personal home use)
QuickClear lite (deletes IE cookies/cache/empty's trash)
StartPro (well, it used to be free. Gives you a nice list of programs set to load at bootup, including registry keys.)
Ad-Aware everybodies favorite adware/malware answer.
Mandrake is (of course) easy:
Got the Easy Urpmi and follow the directions to install all the different media sites. Once you do that (its just a cut and paste job) you can fire up rpmdrake and search for software by name/description/type/etc. Mandrake installs with a lot of the right stuff already. I'd recommend maybe installing nano (easy command line text editor if you hate VI/VIM/EMACS/ETC) and of course if you running a system with a NVidia card get the NVIDIA drivers (rpmdrake, but if their not listed NVidia will have them).
Quack, quack.
Despite Microsoft's press releases to the contrary, Windows machines are not secure and need decent firewall and antivirus software. I see others have already mentioned the Kerio firewall, so I'll just add that it can be easily extended with Sponge's excellent, freely available filters. (I'm using set 2, but there are versions that are both more or less rigorous). I've also AVG Antivirus installed it seems to work well enough.
Some other useful free utilities:
Tclockex
A small utility that greatly increases the usefullness of the system tray clock. You can have the date as well as the time, as well as a resource monitor that lets you know at a glance how the system is doing.
AboutTime"
A little applet that sets the system clock from a list of time servers. Works well and unobtrusively.
7-zip
An easy to use explorer plug-in that understands most kinds of compressed files.
CDex
A great tool for ripping / converting CDs and mp3s.
X-teq>
A very powerful utility that lets you change pretty much everything that's changeable in Windows. Allows you to set Windows update registration done, which would only be useful to pirates and won't be mentioned here.
The Proxomitron
A web proxy that strips out ads, pop-ups and other garbage.
I'm more familiar with Redhat, but I have no doubt Mandrake will come out of the box with programs that are functionally equivalent to the ones listed here.
Windows :) -- tiered monthly
1) OpenOffice -- free
2) AVG -- free
3) Gaim -- free
4) Media Player Classic -- free
5) Nero -- ~$50
6) PowerDVD -- ~$50
7) PSP -- ~$50
8) AdAware -- free
9) Sygate Personal Firewall -- free
10) SecondLife
It's a bit unbalaced to list applications for Linux as so much ships with the distributions but so little is handcuffed to them. But here's what I seem to use the most:
Linux
1) MythTV -- free
2) OpenOffice -- free
3) Evolution -- free
4) Gaim -- free
5) MPlayer -- free
6) Xine -- free
7) Gimp -- free
8) Mozilla -- free
9) XMMS -- free
10) Dia -- free
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
HTML-Kit by Chami and can be found at www.chami.com is an excellent editor for programming. It has the ability to plug in modules. It is one of the primary reasons I still use Windows at all. There are some OSS solutions coming of age but nothing I like well enough yet.
PDF Creator as a replacement for Adobe Acrobat.
RealVNC as a replacement for PCAnywhere.
Of course you know a lot of the GPL stuff is cross platform so that's good...
Let's see other stuff I have on my CD, and I do have all the good stuff Gunslinger mentioned...
Snadboy's Revelation (Password Recovery for *** fields)
Password Safe
PuTTY for SSH and Telnet
MySQL-Front for GUI DB use.
WS-FTP for non-com use.
Audacity for sound file editing.
Divx
dBPowerAmp for music conversion
Trillian and GAIM for IM... bite me Yahoo.
I could go on for hours... I'm a professional cheapskate!
I have abt. 500MB of stuff on my pennyless-friend-saver Windows CD. My selection for you is not all from this CD though.
I still use Win9x, and will keep on til forced to upgrade by the Mob. (I also use Debian, of course).
On 9X the key problem is keeping the PC alive and healthy -> use as little MS products as you can.
So, in order:
1)) Use Ranish Partition Manager from a Windows boot floppy to cut up all the partitions you need. Remember to mimic on the Win side a multi-partition scheme as the one on Linux (My values: System 5GB, temp 0.5, swap 0.5, and two data partitions for hot & cold data, + a 5GB extra partition for a mirror of the clean-installed system). Leave Ranish installed on Windows to hack up partitions other than the system one, and to check if the partition table is healthy.
2) Opera or Mozilla for browser, mail, (and with Mozilla also newsreader / HTML editor), so you can use Internet Explorer ONLY FOR WINDOWS UPDATE, THE OCCASIONAL STUPID IE-ONLY SITE, AND NOTHING ELSE. Notice that Opera can also update your Java support.
3) Computer Associates' EZ Armor. Their customer service is not that good, but their sw is excellent, reasonably lightweight, non-intrusive and not very expensive. Do NOT use their firewall.
4) If you can, get an OLDER (before V.3) Zonalarm Pro firewall. Lighter, more stable, enough fine grain selective port enabling. If you can't find it, do use the Armor firewall.
5) X-teq's X-Setup for moving around key data locations (eg, putting all temp files on the temp drive etc etc) and reconfiguring the living daylights out of the irrational and selfdestructive original Windows setup.
6) Open Office is fine and getting better. Sadly, Microsoft's ugly secret formats have not been completely reverse engineered. If you have to use MS Office, see if you can get a legal 2nd hand copy of the '97 version - AFAIK, it was still the most popular with US corporations as of 2002.
7) Multimedia: try to get the old Windows Media Player 6.4 for basic use. I suggest not to touch the more recent versions, which I consider bordering on malware. But do install it, to get all the new dll's - only do not associate it with any filetypes. Also install the latest Quicktime and Real One free players. But for the actual interface, I prefer the older WinAmps (v. 2.x), which is still actively maintained. There may be issues on whether the latest Real EULA allows other sw to use its dll's... find out.
8) Basic CD burning: try by all means BurnFree! It works, stable, lots of tweaks, AFAIK not spyware, although it will explicitly install an "updater" that will later try to install an adware navigation "helper" for IE (not yet available as of last month - bizarre!). It's easy to catch and restrain the updater via ZoneAlarm.
[ Be nice, it's not OS but they give you decent free software hoping to make a buck, so let them "drive" your IE and look at some of their ads, or send them a donation. When I get a job I prolly will. And for that matter, thank generously the sources of good, decent sw you use, OS or not... perhaps not Time Warner Corp. (WinAmp), but u get the idea. ]
9) PDF READER - I avoid Adobe reader like the claps. Yes, get it, it's free and OK but it never shuts up (or down). Get GSview and the Ghostscript libraries for normal use. Leaner, stabler. Only for the nastier of pdf files you'll really need Adobe.
I do not have a 10), but a number of really-nice-to-have's, most free, some OS, or at least cheap and hi-Q shareware, in no particular order:
Picture viewer: IrfanView.
Graphic manipulation: WinGIMP.
Process management: Process Explorer.
Archiver: Ultimate Zip (also, 7-ZIP for the Unixoid formats)
HTML Reader / barebones graphic browser: Off-By-One (fast!!!)
Basic crypto: Blowfish Advanced CS
Instant Messaging: Trillian (multi-network, + IRC too)
Defragmenting (front end): Power Defrag
Linux directory
"I'm buying a new mid-grade laptop computer, which I plan to dual-boot between Windows XP Home and Mandrake 9.x. Before its arrival in a few weeks I'm trying to think of what 'essential' software I'll need to make a usable home system. In general I'd like to spend as little money as possible (free is good). As far as my needs, think 'typical family PC' without an emphasis on gaming. I know I can get something like Open Office for word processing, presentation, etc. needs, but is there such a good thing as a good free virus checker? A good free email client? A handy web browser? What would you consider the top 10 (or so) pieces of software for a new home system, bearing in mind that I need software for both the Windows and Linux side of things?""
;-)
.ISO and .CUE)
.ISO, .CUE, .CCD, .CDI etc. files without burning them)
These are the files I keep on my "Esential CDs" that I bring around to help out other non-techs (Windows users) people. (Of course because they are financially broke after paying $200 for their Operating System, they want everything else to be free.)
Anti-Virus: The best free antivirus program I have found AVG Anti-Virus 6.0
Office Suite: (Word Processing, SpreadsThe quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped off the edge. The quick brown fox ran off with all his toysheet, Slideshows, etc.)
Open Office 1.1
CD/DVD data/audio Burner: (and doubles as a CD image creator
BurnAtOnce 0.99a
CD/DVD image loader/emulator (perfect for people who often misplace their CDs): (loads
DAEMON Tools 3.41
MultiMedia Player (Mpeg, Mp3, AVI, etc.)Winamp Classic 2.91
or for audio only Foobar 2000 0.7
Zip Extractor:Ultimate Zip or7 Zip 3.11
Download Accelerator:Star Downloader v1.42
Internet Browser: (other than IE) Mozilla 1.4 or Opera 6.20
System Statistics: (Motherboard, Memory, BIOS, Video, Software info, etc)AIDA32 3.80
E-mail (other than Outlook Express)Thunderbird 0.2 or Pegasus Mail 4.12
Spyware/Adware killer:Ad-aware 6 or Spybot Search & Destroy 1.2
Pop-up Killer/Browser Enhancer (for IE)Google Toolbar 2.0.102
PDF document reader:Adobe Acrobat 6.0
FTP program (other than IE and the command line FTP)Winsock FTP LE 5.08 or FileZilla 2.2.1
Internet Chat Programs (other than Windows Messenger)Gaim 0.70or Trillian Basic 0.74E
Firewall Software:ZoneAlarm 3.7.211
or if you have Highspeed Internet, a spare 200mhz PC, and two network cards laying around...ClarkConnect 2.0
CD Ripper / MP3 Creator CDex 1.51
Graphics Editor (other than Paint) The Gimp
Graphics viewer (other