New OS- Essential installs?

initiatefailure

So I just picked up a shiny new PC laptop yesterday and besides noticing an interesting design trend at the stores (everyone is making MBP clones this year) I'm happy with it.

I've spent the day installing all of my fun programs and wondering what I've missed.

VLC
WinRAR
PowerISO
Anti-virus (AVG. not sure if it's still good or not. it seems much more pushy about paying for it than older versions)
Steam
Rocketdock
rainmeter and wallpapers
CS5

That is essentially everything I need for work and play and a few utilities.

What am I missing? What essential programs to you use? What makes them so important?

edit: also discovered that I bought it one day too late for a free xbox. that's kind of sad.

nessin

In a semi-unrelated note, can you answer a question that has plagued me for years? Why WinRAR? I mean, I get it back when it was that or WinZIP, but these days even WinZIP is better and if you want free then other programs like 7-zip blow it out of the water. I've yet to find a single justification for why someone would use WinRAR once the whole "I didn't know any better" excuse ran its course years ago.

Anyways, generally people (myself included) would recommend a basic text editor that doesn't have the additional baggage that default notepad does. I use notepad++, but there are others.

initiatefailure

You know, I have no idea. when I first got a program for .rar files years ago, I hated 7-zip for some unremembered reason so i got winrar. I've just used it ever since. in fact it's the same installer I've used on the last 3 computers.

TychoCelchuuu

Grab 90% of this with ninite

Opera - best web browser by far.
Skype - Dur.
Digsby - Best IM/twitter/Facebook client I've found.
foobar2000 - Best music player.
Media Player Classic - I like this much more than VLC
MSE - Better than AVG/best antivirus, if you ask me.
Dropbox - Dur.
7-Zip - As nessin noted, much better than WinRAR.
WinDirStat - Cool beans.
Filezilla - Best FTP client I've used.
PDFCreator - Dur.

initiatefailure

holy crap that is an amazing utility. and I can't believe I forgot some basic things in there. I'm guessing MSE is security essentials? and ok I'll give 7zip a shot and see what I've been missing.

Mike Danger

Maybe Digsby has improved since I last used it, but when I last tried it I thought it was a giant piece of junk. I like Trillian a lot more.

I always make sure to get Notepad++ and PuTTY, but depending on what you do, you might not need/want those.

amnesiasoft

initiatefailure wrote:

I hated 7-zip for some unremembered reason so i got winrar.

Likely because 7-zip is kind of crap, but I suppose it's not nearly as crappy as WinRAR.

For music, Zune is the absolute best. Nothing compares to the Zune software.

Tef

Also found on ninite is teracopy, which I'm a big fan of.

Soluto is an excellent app for chopping boot times and streamlining your browser. It's big plus is that it's got an incredibly simple to use UI, I love it

Antihippy

I really don't like rocket dock.

The taskbar pretty much makes it redundant.

Also, I'd recommend j.river jukebox as a music player. Supports alot of formats (though AAC is funky due to needing quicktime I think) without the incredible default ugliness of foobar, and also much more immediately usable than foobar. Just make sure that you organise your music collection really well.

http://www.jriver.com/mj/

an_alt

Not that it hasn't been said yet, but one more vote for replacing:
VLC with MPC
any AV software with MSE and MalwareBytes
WinRar with 7-Zip

I'm not really happy with any of the browsers or music players so I'm not going to weigh in there, but that j.river player does sound interesting...

iTunesIsEvil

More votes for:
7-Zip (I only dislike that it does not associate it's GUI with the extensions it supports)
Filezilla
Microsoft Security Essentials
Media Player Classic - Home Cinema
Dropbox
WinDirStat (useful when you need to know why the fuck your user directory's size just skyrocketed)

I vote for Chrome over any other browser.
I've not tried PDFCreator, but I haven't had any issues with doPDF if you want an alternative there. Though if you've got CS5 you probably have the default Adobe PDF printer.
I end up editing text files fairly often so I replace Notepad with Notepad++.
If you do any linux admin over SSH I'd grab PuTTY.

ben0207

ninite.com is the best thing ever.

Maguano

this is a handy little guide.
http://www.tweakhound.com/the-windows-7-freeware-machine/

Antihippy

BTW, speaking of rainmeter, is there a guide to coding and making your own custom skins? It's a project I've been interested in for awhile now.

I could probably just google it but I like making people just show me the guide without sorting through various links.

K0dos

I agree with most everyone else use ninite to install Security Essentials, Chrome, VLC, Steam and Notepad++. Then add in any other programs you might need. Since chrome has flash and PDF support built in there is no reason to install them from Adobe.

splash

All my essentials have been said already. So I'll just add that AVG is not good anymore.

I'm unsure about this, but how good and safe is Chrome's auto-viewer for pdfs? The few times I used it the quality seemed rather poor viewing it in the browser. Can you disable scripts from running when they open? Sumatra PDF is a good alternative if these are valid concerns.

nessin

ben0207 wrote:

ninite.com is the best thing ever.

Never knew about that before, but it does look awesome. Has some really odd applications built-in though, such as KeePass 1.x instead of 2.x

bowen

What I use:

7-zip (zip, rar, lzma -- pretty awesome Windows Explorer integration)
Notepad++
Putty (ssh/telnet client)
Chrome (web browser)
Thunderbird (email/can do calendar too)
Filezilla (FTP client)
Microsoft Security Essentials (antivirus, best one I've used to date after AVG shit the deck)
CD Burner XP (burning media)
LCISOCreator (good for making ISOs... may not work on protected media, I use it for media that's not copy protected at work)
Paint.NET
Microsoft Office (Free version that's ad based)
Adobe Reader (the new one is nice and fast, third party PDF readers are hit and miss sometimes)