Recommendations for "must have" software

[OnTheWarpath15]

Well, my 8 month old XPS 420 is back up and running, after being completely stripped down, and the OS being re-installed.

Per the suggestion of Hamas in my other thread, I chose not to re-install Norton, and am going with AVG for the time being.

I'm in the process of copying over 70GB of files from my external HD, and was thinking about software - now that I have a clean slate, what do you guys recommend as "must have" software?

Other than Office 2007, Firefox, and AVG, this thing is a blank slate.

My personal must haves:

Paint.net
Firefox
My logitech software for my Harmony One remote


Thoughts and suggestions?

[Fish]

Photoshop - Picture editing/creating
Jasc Animation Shop - Animation editing/creating
VLC Media Player - Best universal media player. Very small. Lots of codecs included.
WinRAR - File compression software
Nero - CD/DVD creation/copying
μtorrent - Torrent software for downloading porn and movies
FlashFXP - Great FTP program. Allows copying from one FTP site to another FTP site
Dropbox - Online file sharing app used to share files between computers of any OS
DVD Flick and/or DVD Shrink - For ripping DVDs, encoding various video files to DVD, cloning DVDs, etc
PowerISO - ISO utility for creating, extracting, editing ISOs
PuTTY - SSH/Telnet utility for tunneling through firewalls, remote terminal use, etc.
Ultramon - Utility for taking advantage of more than 1 monitor, extended desktop
Synergy - Utility for sharing keyboard/mouse with multiple OSs
AOL...:evil:

Those are essentials for me anyway...

[Psyko Tek]

pRON?

[morphius]

irfanview - image program, great for quick resizes, viewing, and red eye
picasa - image library
keypass - password keeper
avast - virus protection
izarc - opens zip/rar/etc

(all above is free)

Fish got the rest of my list...

[OnTheWarpath15]

A short explanation of each program would be nice as well....

:D

[morphius]

A short explanation of each program would be nice as well....

:D
done.

['Hamas' Jenkins]

CCleaner or Registry Mechanic--Either one are good tools for cleaning out crap. Registry cleaners are a bit controversial...I believe that they offer some benefit with no real down side or memory whoring.

Peer Guardian--Don't use a torrent program w/o Peer Guardian.

Orb (If you have a 360)--It allows you to stream and play music and other media through your 360 much easier than doing so through WMP.

[SLAG]

I would leave AVG and switch to AVAST, i find AVG too bloated

I would say Pidgin ( http://www.pidgin.im ) and Skype.

WinRar,
VNC Server/Client

[Fish]

I would strongly recommend against a registry cleaner. They very well can do more harm than good. You're much better off learning how to manually clean your registry. Which is easier than you would think. The problem with reg cleaners is that no 2 registries are exactly alike after some use. Just think of all the different hardware manufacturers that you could possibly have, and all the possible different software you could have installed. Each entering it's own registry keys. And the reg cleaner must determine if all those possible registry entries are legitimate or not. It's akin to car engines. They all do the same thing, but to think that you could use the same tool on a Chevy pickup as you would an Audi sedan is just silly. There are simply too many possibilities of stuff in your registry to have a single reg cleaner that works for all and can make that determination correctly.

JMO....

[Buehler445]

I would leave AVG and switch to AVAST, i find AVG too bloated

I would say Pidgin ( http://www.pidgin.im ) and Skype.

WinRar,
VNC Server/Client

DaFace tells me pidgin is good shite.

[Buehler445]

Personally, I use the following:

Winamp - I'm too lazy to find anything new/better
Office - you've got it
Trillian - It's working OK, but it broke down on DaFace and that's where pidgin comes in
Roxio - to make CDs. It sucks, but it came with my computer and again I'm too lazy
Ad-Aware - anti spyware
Spybot - same
Itunes - for the ipod
utorrent - torrent
Quickbooks - Accounting software

I'm freaking boring dude, sorry.

[chasedude]

http://www.tycamtech.com/extensions/firefox/ffvb/

FfVb - A must have as I see you use Firefox.

- Powerful ignore allows you to ignore users (threads, posts and even quotes), threads, keywords and prefix (in vb 3.7). They will be stripped right out of the page! You will forget they even exist!

- Highlight the threads/posts of users you like so that they're easier to find. You can now choose the colour to highlight as well.

- Context menus means no more typing or checking boxes. Simply right click on the user, thread or prefix that you would like to ignore or highlight and you can add them to your list with a single click!

- Preference window shows all your users, threads, prefixes and keywords in collapsible tree lists sorted by forum. Now you can remove users/threads/prefix/keywords as easily as you added them. Right click and choose "Remove" and their threads/posts will become visible again.

[Braincase]

Foxit Reader for PDF's. Much smaller than Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Auslogic Disk Defrag. Good defragmentation tool.

7zip for compressing/decompressing all the popular compression formats.

[Buck]

Nice thread, I'm updating my new laptop with some of these programs.

Hamas, can you go into a little detail about Peer Guardian?

Im having a little trouble finding a download of it for Vista

[Shag]

Nice thread, I'm updating my new laptop with some of these programs.

Hamas, can you go into a little detail about Peer Guardian?

Im having a little trouble finding a download of it for Vista

PG basically prevents you from making connections to IP addresses/ranges that are known to be associated with potentially problematic entities - government, law, schools, software developers, etc. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with Vista unless you want to jump through some hoops...

[Buck]

PG basically prevents you from making connections to IP addresses/ranges that are known to be associated with potentially problematic entities - government, law, schools, software developers, etc. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with Vista unless you want to jump through some hoops...

Shit...so If I download a torrent, I should make sure that basically there are a lot of thumbs up on it, to know its safe?

[Sure-Oz]

MalwareBytes-antispyware/antimalware
mcafee siteadvisor-watches sites to make sure its good or bad, like popups that are bad, downloads etc. before you enter it.

['Hamas' Jenkins]

Shit...so If I download a torrent, I should make sure that basically there are a lot of thumbs up on it, to know its safe?

Not only that, but while you are downloading some torrents, h4x0rz could potentially scam through your other files on your computer since there is a connection between the seeder and leecher and put some nasty shit in there. It's not just for DRM policing.

[Stryker]

DVDFab Plat.
Nero 8
PowerDVD 7
WinAMP

[OnTheWarpath15]

Not only that, but while you are downloading some torrents, h4x0rz could potentially scam through your other files on your computer since there is a connection between the seeder and leecher and put some nasty shit in there. It's not just for DRM policing.

So, what should Vista owners do?

[BigRedChief]

Zone Alarm- For a firewall since Windows firewall is easily breeched.

[007]

Zone alarm is friggin annoying will all its popups. It is really good though.

[BigRedChief]

Zone alarm is friggin annoying will all its popups. It is really good though.
give them their $20 bucks or whatever to register it. It well worth it.

[Taco John]

Thread over:

http://lifehacker.com/5098944/free-software-were-most-thankful-for

[Buck]

Thread over:

http://lifehacker.com/5098944/free-software-were-most-thankful-for

Awesome...

I will download a bunch of those to my laptop on the weekend.

Does anyone use Thunderbird?

Can I use a yahoo account in Thunderbird?

[Gary]

I would add Xoftspy(spyware remover). It has found several things on my system that Spybot, Ad Aware, & Zone Alarm's spyware couldn't find.

[Buehler445]

Bumped for people (read: ME) who may be getting a new computer or needing this information.

Thanks OTW.

[macdawg]

utorrent - torrent client
peer guardian - torrent protection thingy
avg - anti virus
a squared free - best anti spyware/ anti trojan I've found
spyware blaster - blacklists sets of spyware, immunizes your system to prevent common spyware from being installed
hijackthis - solid anti malware tool
dvd shrink - burn dvd's
nero - burning program
convertxvidtodvd - as title says
firefox - browser
ccleaner - pc cleaner
reg cleaner - registry cleaner, sorts out individual entries also
ntregopt - compacts the registry
autoruns - advanced version of msconfig, really shows what is in your computers startup folder, extremely useful

[RippedmyFlesh]

Awesome...

I will download a bunch of those to my laptop on the weekend.

Does anyone use Thunderbird?

Can I use a yahoo account in Thunderbird?
Thunderbird is usually for SMTP type email accounts such as the one your ISP gives you or a work related account where they have their own mail server.
Thunderbird=Outlook express basically but people who use it will tell you its 10X better than OE.

[ChiefsFan4Life]

I love Enso: http://humanized.com/enso/launcher/

[the Talking Can]

Open Office...screw microsoft

and GIMP...open source version of photoshop

[Psyko Tek]

Zone Alarm- For a firewall since Windows firewall is easily breeched.

I ran across a name for that ass today

http://www.holytaco.com/2008/08/29/keyra-augustinas-ass-2

Not that safe for work

NTSFW