As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Options
Essential Windows Programs?
Toothy
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey I just got a new comp, and I had seen a list of essential computer programs floating around one of the threads in the old forum. The main one I was interested in was one that equalized the volume on MP3s. Does anyone know of something that can do this? I am tired of almost breaking the speakers in my car because of freakishly different volumes.
Toothy on
0
Posts
I think foobar2000 has that feature, but I've never used that function. Anyway, good luck in your quest for essential software.
I know what you are referring to, but I am drawing a total blank. I think it was mentioned in Maximum PC sometime in the last few months. I can't for the life of me remember what it was called though.
Podcast 0207: Sinking to new depths
Preview: Is Uncharted: Golden Abyss the Vita’s killer launch title?
Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3: Macro-wreckonomics
I think that is the one I was thinking of too.
Podcast 0207: Sinking to new depths
Preview: Is Uncharted: Golden Abyss the Vita’s killer launch title?
Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3: Macro-wreckonomics
Space Monger, really easy visual representation of hard drive space. Don't bother with the new one, the free old one is fine.
rbtray - minimize any program to the system tray or make any program stay on top of all other windows.
If you mount iso images, winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel is great. It's only 61k. It can only mount .iso files I believe, but it is made by Microsoft, and basically just acts as virtual drives. Very easy and better than Daemontools if this is all you're after.
Get it. Get it now.
I actually had a tech friend write scripts or something onto my windows XP install disc so it installed automatically if I ever formatted. cant do the same with vista annoyingly.
Those. And TrayIt! It's unbelievably useful to be able to minimize any window to the system tray.
Don't use the K-Lite Codec Pack, it's shit. Use CCCP or DefilerPak. They're both ffdshow based, but they've each got a few different things.
However, what you want is replay gain -- it stores the gain data as an id3 tag instead. Foobar2000 supports it out of the box, both playback and generation of RG data. Just select an entire album, right click -> replay gain, scan as album.
I'm just so damn anal about my music collection, so editing the sound is a big no-no. :P (I'd copy the music I want for my car, mp3gain the copies and then burn them so I have the original music in original condition.)
Best tool for backing up information onto dvds/cds.
Key Features
ºburn all kinds of discs
ºaudio-CDs with or without gaps between tracks
ºburn and create ISO files
ºdata verification after burning process
ºcreate bootable discs
ºmulti-language interface bin/nrg → ISO converter, simple cover printing and much more!
ºOperating Systems: Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista
Have a look at Portable Apps.
To contribute something myself, I'm gonna throw in my favorite SSH and FTP client, Putty and Filezilla respectively. Also, the best full-featured text editor Notepad++.
Seriously, guys: we have a keyboard. Moving the mouse around to click tiny buttons on a screen just because that's sort of what a calculator looks like in real life is stupid.
It's not free, and is a little resource intensive (okay, a lot resource intensive for a text editor), but e Text Editor is my new favorite on Windows. Watch the screencast on the website, it's got some really awesome features, and full support for TextMate bundles which only enhance it's usefulness.
Oh, I've been looking for a Textmate equivalent for Windows. I'll have to give that a spin.
Anybody got a favorite word processor? Notepad++ is my text editor of choice because it's free and feature-rich, but as for full-fledged word processors that are free, I'd have to pick Abiword. I still like Word 2003 more, though. I have to tweak OpenOffice not to use a Java environment and to use more RAM so that it doesn't start up so bloody slowly.
One of the first programs I install is Taskix, which lets you rearrange taskbar icons. It's tiny and works perfectly, without the weird UI, strange drag and drop behavior or bloat of Taskbar Shuffle.
You know, you can just use your number pad for input in the windows calculator right?
Launchy has a built-in (but not very full featured) calculator function that handles most of the calculations I need to do on a regular basis.
Anything else I just use Google Calc.
Google has goddamn everything. I use it as a currency calculator too. Just google "100 USD in real money" or something.
'0b101101 in hexadecimal'
'340 in binary'
It's so convenient.
Google does that? No shit? I mean, I wouldn't ever need it to but that's still pretty fucking amazing.
Yeah, it's awesome when debugging assembly dumps because I need to convert between the three on a regular basis. Windows Calc does it too, but since I've already got Firefox open pretty much all the time, it's just more convenient to use google calc. It does binary and hexadecimal arithmetic, too, just type in 0x0AD2 + 0x033 to add the two hex values, for example.
The only thing it can't do, unless I'm missing something, is convert binary and hexadecimal values to EBCDIC or ASCII text. I can dream.
It only cost me being jailed for making a stupid comment in my clone thread
I use Taskbar Shuffle, and I don't see any problems with it. Works as I'd expect it to.
My contributions:
Launchy - Already mentioned, but incase you missed it. It's a program launcher, like Quicksilver(?).
Tclock - Replaces the windows clock. Not fancy, but fully customisable time display format, as well as providing a butt-load of taskbar/start button customisation options. It allows me to replace the start button with whatever I want, for example.
Orbit - Download manager. Integration with Firefox means that this quickly replaced Free Download Manager as my "resumer of choice".
Q10 - Minimal writing environment. I did use Dark Room for my minimalist writing moments, but I find Q10 is more featured whilst still maintaining a VERY minimal display.
uTorrent - If you download torrents, then download this. I'm not even joking. You might think I'm not being serious. But I am. Very serious.