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Topic: Essential Software (Read 359936 times) previous topic - next topic
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Essential Software

Reply #75
Perhaps it was mentioned here already but Crimson Editor is a freeware code editor that stacks up quite well against UltraEdit32.

The other program which will become indispensible to those of you with full hard drives is the spark of genius known as Scanner (also freeware). [span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%']XO is fun too.[/span]

stripe/ben

Essential Software

Reply #76
jEdit - great text editor (written in Java, but it's cross platform because of that), with support for lots of various encodings (incuding Unicode) and everything I have seen in much more expensive programs. Opensource and completely free.


Essential Software

Reply #78
Konqueror, the fastest webbrowser in the world (yep still beats firefox)
actually it isnt only a webbrowser, more like a swiss army knife ;-)
And K3B to burn my CD's - what to say about K3B, its recognized as the best burner for linux (and probably the world )
Kaudocreator for rippin' - too easy ;-)
Juk for playing audio - far from perfect, I'm waiting for a perfect app... there are thousants of music players for linux, but most suck, and the few which dont suck, arent very good. maybe XMMS (winamp clone) but it doesnt really fit in KDE, imho.
Kmail, embedded in Kontact - best mailclient in the best groupware client for linux I know of (and it's just a few months old)
Kopete for chatting on msn, irc, and icq (tabbed interface, yow!)

actually all other things are so integrated in KDE I dont really can list them here. ftp? you whoulnt even know the textdoc you're editting is on an ftp server (try that in windoze!!! hahahaaha) download accelerator? whoulnt improve anything... etc etc...
KDE as desktop (you've guessed it) - the apps above belong to the KDE standard apps.
aMule for p2p

It took me some time to go Linux and abandon windoze, but I cant stand windoze anymore. you feel so... restricted... when using it, esp if you know the power of linux.

thanx to the whole community for creating it!
[span style=\'font-family:Arial\'][span style=\'color:red\']Life Sucks Deeply[/span][/span]

Essential Software

Reply #79
i don't think anyone has mentioned PowerDVD yet. yeah, it's a bit unstable (even v. 5) but compared to the alternatives WiMP9, WinDVD etc, it's really feature-packed, at least the more expensive  versions. As a poor student i cant afford a big Hifi-system but PowerDVD on my PC combinated with my Audigy2 is just the best you can get.  Lot's o' DSP's like  SRS Trusurround, Dolby Virtual Speaker  and  that can be useful to boost up bad speakers, but my favourite is Dolby Headphones.

For mp3's I use winamp 5, mostly becouse of the cool plugins (Enhancer 0.17, DSP stacker...). i like that wonderful, trippy thing Milkdrop 

Essential Software

Reply #80
PowerDVD 4 which came with my Plextor PX-116A would simply not work on my
PC (constant crashing). I'm using Intervideo WinDVD 4 (bundled with my Radeon)
instead.
Wanna buy a monkey?

Essential Software

Reply #81
To this gigantic list I can add:

SequoiaView: http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/
An excellent way to manage disk space, gives a visual map of your disk.

Process Explorer: http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml
A gives a tree-list of processes, and also what dll's are loaded by which process. Very useful while debugging.

www.sysinternals.com has many other excellent utilities. Highly recommended for developers.

rajas

Essential Software

Reply #82
Quote
Winamp,
EAC,
ACDSee,
Command.com

heh .. i converted someone to ACDSee classic after he'd used Irfanviewer for years because it was faster. also maybe proved that it was around first, not that that's a biggie

Quote
md5 Summer

DAMN's Hash Calculator does MD5, 4 SHAs, RIPEMD-160, HAVALs, "Good old CRC-32". drag n drop, too

@deejimon:
OSX firewalls be damned, what good are they without OUTGOING connection protection?? Little Snitch is a must....

@sramov
i liked xerver better after trying all or most of the simple freeware ones out there...

i also liked The Font Thing, a freeware font viewer, but after installing some opentype fonts, found it wouldn't read/use them... any of you use a good, free one?

Essential Software

Reply #83
Internet Time Adjuster
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_inet_time.htm

I don't like XP synchronizing only once a week, I put mine at least daily.


Free Windows Update CD
http://www.microsoft.com/security/protect/cd/order.asp

All updates for (almost) all versions of windows until October 2003.


McAfee Command Line Virus Scan
http://vil.nai.com/vil/virus-4d.asp
http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/
ftp://ftp.nai.com/pub/antivirus/datfiles/4.x

The Daily one is , well, updated daily. Stinger is an emergency killer (like the recent SASSER worm). the datfiles work with the evaluation version. Command line also available for Linux and other operating systems. I've always liked command line since DOS.


ProtoWall
http://bluetack.co.uk/pw.html

Combine with your firewall. Blocks unwanted people.




David Racho

Essential Software

Reply #84
Allsnap: a tool that stays on tray, and make windows align between them(like winamp does with its windows for example) and the borders of the desktop.

Essential Software

Reply #85
Quote
jEdit - great text editor (written in Java, but it's cross platform because of that), with support for lots of various encodings (incuding Unicode) and everything I have seen in much more expensive programs. Opensource and completely free.


1) Does not properly recognize binary files & provide hexediting possibility
2) Ugly fonts by default & some weird things like adding visible line terminators (they look like dots, which is evil idea when editing source).
3) Uninstaller requires reboot & leaves shit behind

"Three strikes and you're out"

Quote
Perhaps it was mentioned here already but Crimson Editor is a freeware code editor that stacks up quite well against UltraEdit32.


Quoting from "Functional limitations"

2. Crimson Editor is not adequate to edit a file containing more than 65536 lines.

Don't make me laugh. Neither tool comes close to UltraEdit.

Essential Software

Reply #86
To add to the Win32 texteditor war:

SciTE is a really nice editor.
"To understand me, you'll have to swallow a world." Or maybe your words.

Essential Software

Reply #87
Quote
1) Does not properly recognize binary files & provide hexediting possibility
2) Ugly fonts by default & some weird things like adding visible line terminators (they look like dots, which is evil idea when editing source).
3) Uninstaller requires reboot & leaves shit behind

"Three strikes and you're out"

1) There is a Hex plugin. Not as good as a standalone Hex editor, but it's there nonetheless.
2) ?? It uses Courier New AFAIK. It's the standard fixed width font used everywhere (Visual Studio IDE etc.) In any event you should try your results with turning on font smoothing (Via Global Options | jEdit | Text Area | Smooth Text ).
3) Agree with you on the uninstaller completely though. Requiring a reboot is completely unwarranted and it does leave shit behind.

The dot marking the end of line is hated and loved. I guess once you learn to recognize it, it's a good visual indicator for the end of line (esp if you code something like Python).

The good side of jEdit is the huge collection of free plugins available. The Java specific plugins are especially good (including the in-process Java debugger and intellisense like autocompleting) and the Visual Diff plugin is better than most other visual diffs available)

(On a side note, I hardly use jEdit any more having moved to a company which develops exclusively using Visual C++)

Essential Software

Reply #88
The one thing I use that I haven't seen mentioned yet is rxvt for cygwin. It's like having a real x-window, instead of a gimpy dos/x-term-ish poop monger.

edit: HTML -> BB Code

Essential Software

Reply #89
Quote
2) Ugly fonts by default & some weird things like adding visible line terminators (they look like dots, which is evil idea when editing source).


Menu Utilities\Global Options\jEdit\Text Area: Unselect "End of line markers" to get rid of the "evil dots"  or change the color from red to whatever turns you on.
"There is no point in saving WAV... unless you have a huge HD in a very slow computer" - Jan S. (WAV or FLAC, Space No Problem)

Essential Software

Reply #90
Quote
SequoiaView: http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/
An excellent way to manage disk space, gives a visual map of your disk.

pretty cool, i know what kind of files to blame for being fat now    (shame that file management is kinda lame - 'open in explorer' ..)
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

Essential Software

Reply #91
Here are a few I use that I have not seen mentioned:

Sync2IT - This great program/service syncs my bookmarks over multiple computers and adds a task-bar favorites menu for easy access to my bookmarks.

ieSpell - This is a free spell checker for IE and those browsers that are based on IE (like myie2.)  GREAT for us forum posters who can't spell worth a damn!

RoboForm - I love this password keeper and form filler.  It lets me generate random passwords for websites and keep them on a USB thumb drive to use on multiple computers.

Essential Software

Reply #92
C4U - a program that will see for you if there are any changes on the web pages you normally have to browse manually. Very useful to check if there are new drivers/software versions available etc. It can detect text changes, new links, new images, new email addresses, can search for keywords, and be automated. It's free, but the problem is that its development is dead since a couple of years now, and it doesn't have its web-site anymore, so you have to google it. Latest version is 1.3 (build 164).

P.S.: If you know of similar free program, let me know.

Essential Software

Reply #93
This thread is excellent, nice to see so many good tools being recommended
Quote
BlackBox for Windows. What more can I say? Well... if you want something fast and small to replace explorer.exe as your default shell, this is it. It does take a lot of work to get used to though, which is a definite minus. I tried it, and I liked it, but ultimately, it took a little too much time to set up. YMMV.

This one really got my eye. I have used some of the other programs people mentioned, but didn't know Black Box was available for windows systems.

I visited the link you provided, and did some reading. Checked other links and discovered a version called bbLean. Got it working in five minutes, very easy to run for a quick 'get to know'.

Impressed, a day later I have converted to using it as my default Windows XP shell. A nice feeling not seeing 'Explorer.exe' in my tasklist.

This version is a fork of the BlackBox windows project, and can be found at http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/bblean/ .

Thanks Infophreak!

Essential Software

Reply #94
Quote
C4U - a program that will see for you if there are any changes on the web pages you normally have to browse manually. Very useful to check if there are new drivers/software versions available etc. It can detect text changes, new links, new images, new email addresses, can search for keywords, and be automated. It's free, but the problem is that its development is dead since a couple of years now, and it doesn't have its web-site anymore, so you have to google it. Latest version is 1.3 (build 164).

P.S.: If you know of similar free program, let me know.
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


I use [a href="http://www.markwell.btinternet.co.uk/webmon/]WebMon[/url] instead. It is an nice free and small program that I use from an USB drive. If you add some command line parameters it does not touch the registry. It checks for updated web pages or parts of web pages at custom intervalls.

Essential Software

Reply #95
Here's another contender for the ubiquitous text editor category:

    Notepad++ :    http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/

What I really like about this one is launching speed.  Launches twice as fast as Ultraedit.  I never gave that much thought until I tried Notepad++.

Some noteworthy features:

Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding (for Java, C++, Perl, HTML, PHP ,etc...)
Regular Expression Search supported
Zoom in and zoom out
Bookmarks  (in a text file, not website bookmarks/favorites)

Essential Software

Reply #96
IpCop: it is a linux based firewall. I use it instead of the router for my home lan. Has very good features. Actually version 1.4 is on RC1 stage, and is very promising. It stealths completely your computers from internet. Very friendly to use, and provide one of the best uses you can give to your old 486/Pentium computer.

 

Essential Software

Reply #97
My list. Sorted randomly. I'm sure that I forgot something but I don't know what. 
  • Notepad++
  • Media Player Classic
  • Cygwin
  • VMWare
  • RainMeter
  • Winamp5
  • FlshGet
  • Mozilla ThunderBird
  • Mozilla FireFox with
    • Chatzilla
    • FlashGot
    • AdBlock
    • FoxAmp
    • Bookmarks Synchronizer
  • 7-zip
  • 98 Lite
  • Apache
  • FileZilla server and client
  • Gaim
  • Gimp
  • PuTTY
  • QuickTime Alternative
  • Real Alternative
  • DivX
  • RealVNC
  • Shareaza
  • Win2VNC
  • VisualBoy Advance
  • ZSNES
  • CDex
  • GhostScript/GhostView
  • ScummVM
  • Console
  • FreeCOM

Essential Software

Reply #98
Quote
  • QuickTime Alternative

  • Real Alternative


What do you mean by "alternative"?

Essential Software

Reply #99
Quote
What do you mean by "alternative"?
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=242274"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

These are alternative packages that only install the codecs, not the bloatware programs, so you can use them in media player classic (for example). Google for them, they are easy to find. I don't know if it's allowed to post links, since the packages are not official.