Essential Software for any Windows PC

[LAMBORGHINI FCUKER]

Basically, post ANYTHING for the Windows OS or commonly-used programs that you personally believe has really made things a lot easier on you at the cost of little to no expense on how you go about things.

Anti-Virus, Firewall
Avira Anti-Virus: It's free and it's doing its job. The only problem is a fullscreen advertisement nag upon every virus definition update...that can be turned off if you search on Google.

COMODO Firewall Pro: Also does its job but you need to tell it what programs are safe initially or you're going to go through a lot of nagging, especially if you have games that go fullscreen.

Communication
Digsby- People are giving this thing a bad rap for its high memory usage but they let out a public beta build to halve performance usage. It shows: I just went from 50MB of RAM usage down to 30MB. Supports the following:

IM Services: AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber, Yahoo!, ICQ, Facebook Chat.
e-mail services: POP, IMAP, AOL, Gmail, MSN, Yahoo!
Social Networks: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter.

Skype- Video, voice, and text chat. You should have probably heard of this already.

Internet Browsers
Firefox: De-fucking-facto.
K-Meleon: Alternative browser if you need something done quickly.

Firefox Addons
Adblock Plus - Ad blocker.

Adblock Filterset.G Updater - Updates server definitions for Adblock Plus automatically.

Greasemonkey - This is a highly customizable JavaScript-handling module that will modify inidividual websites or universal elements over the internet. One example is to remove interstitial ads from game sites before you watch a movie. Another ability is to add Quick Reply forms to forums. You need to find these scripts at userscripts.org individually.

Linkification - This plugin will find text URLs on webpages and automatically convert them into clickable links.

NoScript - Blocks Javascript executions, pop-ups, etc.

DownThemAll! - Nifty download manager.

Better YouTube (needs Greasemonkey) - A Greasemonkey script that adds three features to YouTube players:
-Alternate Video Player: Begins pre-loading the video but does not automatically play it.
-YouTube Download: adds a link to download the video.
-YouTube Theater: Removes many elements from the video's page to make the video's screen real estate larger.

FireGestures - Execute movements while holding down the right-click on your mouse to have Firefox do an action, such as moving forward or backward in your history or saving an image without right-clicking.

Panic - Boss key.

RAMBack - Clears internal caches.

RSS Readers
FeedDemon: Does the job in an internet browser-like manner. Handles podcasts too.

Media Players
VLC: If you don't have this you're retarded.
AIMP: WinAmp alternative. Uses up much less memory and is more focused as a player than the Swiss Army Knife that WinAmp is. Also picks up IR remotes.

Miscellaneous
7-zip- All-around file compressor/extractor.
XnView- Image viewer alternative to InfranView. Faster because it's not meant for editing, only viewing and sorting.
Foxit Reader- Adobe Reader alternative. Get this. Now. So much faster.

[Geschpooklichkeit]

That Linkification thing is just what I needed.

Also AVG for free anti-virus. I also use SpeedFan for keeping CPU temperature in check.

[sнυи]

Here's my essentials that I think are useful for most people:

» Kaspersky Anti-Virus (Link)
» 7-Zip (Link)
» CCleaner (Link)
» Combined Community Codec Pack (Link)
» Foxit Reader (Link)
» OpenOffice.org Office Suite (Link)
» Spybot (Link)

My personal choice of video player is Media Player Classic (Link) and I use iTunes (Link) for my music player.

Browser I actually use Opera (Link) instead of Firefox (Link) and shit. That isn't to say Firefox isn't good, because I do believe its best browser out there, but I still prefer Opera for my own reasons.

Also can someone recommend a super uninstaller program? I could never uninstall Guitar Hero III from my computer, it always got an error, so I manually deleted the folders and usually that allows me to go to the "Add or Remove Programs" and then if I hit it again, it'll say the program is missing and to remove it from the list, but GH3 won't. It says it's still there, and it's on the list with no button for uninstall and shit.

(EDIT) Oh by the way this Digsby thing looks cool, been looking for an alternative for Trillian for a while now.

[normac]

Someone explain to me all this fuss about firewalls. The only purpose they seem to serve is being an annoyance and giving you a false sense of protection.

[m335h73r of PBJ]

Originally Posted by Shun

Also can someone recommend a super uninstaller program? I could never uninstall Guitar Hero III from my computer, it always got an error, so I manually deleted the folders and usually that allows me to go to the "Add or Remove Programs" and then if I hit it again, it'll say the program is missing and to remove it from the list, but GH3 won't. It says it's still there, and it's on the list with no button for uninstall and shit.

Just delete the entire program file folder. It should remove every instance of GH3 from your computer after that.

[Geschpooklichkeit]

OpenOffice is only for people who absolutely cannot obtain Office by any means. Otherwise, it is gay gay gay.

If you're having trouble uninstalling something, try this.

[Hiryuu]

Avast! should be added to the anti-viruses mentioned.

Sygate Personal Firewall is a good software-based firewall. As for 'bull on protection' it does a good job making sure your ports don't get attacked and are, instead stealthed so that people can't get in and start messing with your system (which a remote-access virus could do the same). It forcefully denies entry on any and/or all given ports.

Of course, any anti-virus or firewall can be stealthed or cracked if studied enough by enough nerds that drink Dew and eat burritos and Hot Pockets...

Those of you that have a thumbdrive might want to consider getting PortableApps. This is especially useful if you're on a lot of Windows-based systems and you carry your thumbdrive(s) with you a lot. Customizable, too.

[DjRandom]

It seems that flashload.net that the YouTube downloader uses is down, does this happen regularly or is it just a temporary thing?

IE-Tab: This nifty addon is great for sites that generally work better in IE or require IE only to run.

[raven_tkar]

Foobar2000: by far the most efficent media player i have ever used. supports pretty much any format youll ever need it to and can easily convert file formats. Its playlist based so the makeshift library isnt the best, other than that its amazing. Doesnt look to fancy for you assholes who buy/use things because it looks fancy.

µTorrent: another super lightweight program (this one is for torrenting obviously). Amazingly rich in features and the entire program is contained within a single .exe

TweakUI (winXP only): A microsoft powertoy, allows changing of odd options you didnt know you couldnt live without (window focus stealing prevention, disabling the windows key, image thumbnail size and quality, customizable places bar [the icons that appear to the left when youre trying to save a download or something])

Bandwidth Monitor Pro: does what it says, customizable enough to match your desktop if you so desire it to. Another tool you didnt know you couldnt live without!
(PS HERE IS SOME USEFUL INFORMATION WINK WINK
Norbert Saal
93668-33068-78215-34397-16712 )

[BemaniAK]

Originally Posted by Reenee

VLC: If you don't have this you're retarded.

Am I a retard if I don't have it because my MPC+CCCP+CoreAVC plays everything I throw at it?

Also does 7-zip do all the stuff winrar does?
It would be nice to not have the "YOUR TRAIL HAS ENDED BLAH BLAH BLAH" message pop up and not even force me to buy the program every time I want to extract something.

Guess I'll check out Avira, been a while since my computer has been protected.

[raven_tkar]

Originally Posted by BemaniAK

Am I a retard if I don't have it because my MPC+CCCP+CoreAVC plays everything I throw at it?

no because vlc eats balls and you are right about those being the best players out there

[sнυи]

Originally Posted by Your Grandmother

Just delete the entire program file folder. It should remove every instance of GH3 from your computer after that.

Yeah that's what I meant by manually deleted the folders. I usually do that too but for GH3, it still stayed on the "Add or Remove Programs" list so was bothering me.

Originally Posted by Excel-2008

OpenOffice is only for people who absolutely cannot obtain Office by any means. Otherwise, it is gay gay gay.

If you're having trouble uninstalling something, try this.

That worked perfectly, Exy, thanks a lot.

Also I have access to Office 2003 and 2007 and I still choose to use OpenOffice. D:

Also 7-Zip should support everything WinRAR can and more (for example, Japanese users sometimes using the .7z format). It's really light, simplistic, but very practical.

Also when I used to use VLC, it would crash during movies. Plus I hated the fuckin' ugly-ass cone icons so swapped for CCCP+MPC. :]

(EDIT) Oh yeah, I really like this Digsby program, it's nice. Just finished making the transition from Trillian to it.

Also raven wanna help me with skinning foobar? I've been trying to use it for like the last two years but could never get it looking the way I wanted it to (couldn't even successfully install skins) and always gave up. :<

[Hiryuu]

Originally Posted by raven_tkar

no because vlc eats balls and you are right about those being the best players out there

qft

Now, if you're back on a P3 with crap for video then VLC's going to be a good bet better than anything that has a muscle in terms of computing. Hell, even a P3 with an okay video card could do better with MPC over VLC. >_>

EDIT: Oh @#$%, forgot about KLM now that this gets all mentioned. Video codecs for your comp.

[Geschpooklichkeit]

Originally Posted by raven_tkar

(PS HERE IS SOME USEFUL INFORMATION WINK WINK

I'm telling.

[sнυи]

Since we're on the topic of helping me, is there a way to give IE7 a clean wipe? When I installed XP on this computer, the disc was SP1 and the only way to get SP2 was using the IE6 and it got like every infection known to man (even some STDs). I thought an upgrade to IE7 would fix it but it's still horrible. I get a pop-up every two seconds so I have to leave IE as offline, which is very crippling (TrackMania doesn't work, Apple Store, etc.). Help? D: