My list of 'must-have' Software

Everyone has their favorite programs. You know, those applications that you just cannot live without. For some, it may be as simple as Internet Explorer, or maybe Outlook or Outlook Express. As a confessing tech junkie, I have my list of programs that I just cannot seem to live without. Every new install of Windows has to have these programs installed before the computer is ready to go. Here goes:

Total Commander. I can't stand Windows Explorer as a file browser. It just plain sucks. It (along with the Start Menu) has stayed the same with every version of Windows since Windows 95. It hasn't improved a bit in my opinion. So, I don't use it. I use this powerful program written by G. Hisler. Total Commander is a multi-paneled file manager for Windows, a program like Windows Explorer used to copy, move or delete files. However, Total Commander can do much more than Explorer, e.g. pack and unpack files, access FTP servers, compare files by content, and much, much more.

NOTE: This is the only shareware title in this list. It's not free, but it is worth the money!

Winamp. I know, I know. Many of you use Windows Media Player for all of your multimedia. I've never cared for it for music or movies. Come to think of it, I don't use it for anything. There are a lot of programs out there that play MP3 and other audio formats, but for me, Winamp just runs and will play any music files I can throw at it - MP3, Monkey's Audio, FLAC, SHN, etc. And, it's free.

Media Player Classic. Now THIS is what a video player should be! Small, fast and versatile. Media Player Classic looks just like the good old Windows Media Player 6.4, but has many additional features. It has a built in DVD player with real-time zoom, support for menus, support for AVI subtitles, QuickTime and RealVideo support, built-in MPEG2/SVCD/DVD codec, and it also plays DivX and XviD. It also supports SVCD/CVD selectable subtitles and lots more. The best part about Media Player Classic is the ability to modify the filters when playing your favorite video files. It will play practically video file you throw at it. And it's FREE!

Slowview Image Viewer. Do you remember what ACDSee used to be like back when it was still fast and small? Do you wish you could find an image viewer that was just as fast and small and didn't have a lot of bloat? Look no further. SlowView is a multimedia viewer that supports more than 40 image, video, and audio formats. Among them are: JPEG, GIF, MNG, PSD, TIFF, TGA, MP3, AVI, MOV, and many others. With it, you can browse images in thumbnail mode, or one by one. You can also perform simple functions like creation of custom image effects, batch processing, or catalog creation. It supports Drag-n-Drop, wheel mouse, and other technologies. Slowview was originally written by Nikolaus Brennig, who ended up discontinuing the project and selling the rights for it to Ashampoo, who renamed it "Photo Commander", added a bunch of "features" and started charging for it. I don't begrudge anyone their chance to make a buck, but here was a program that just worked great. It's still available for download at a lot of the file sites like Betanews in the link I provided. 

KeePass Password Safe. Even if you don't have as many passwords and software keys as I do (at last count, I have 144!), you need this utility. This thing has been a lifesaver for me. KeePass is a free/open-source password manager or safe which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key-disk. So you only have to remember one single master password or insert the key-disk to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish). It's a fast, small, and brilliantly designed application to store all of your login information, passwords, and (most slick of all) files like software registration keys in one small database. The app itself is small enough to fit on a floppy. I keep it on my workstation at work, my home PC and a USB keyfob. And it's actively developed and FREE!

Maxthon Web Browser. Forget Internet Explorer. Forget Firefox. In my not so humble opinion, this thing is the fastest, most secure browser available today. It uses far less memory and resources than any browser I'm aware of (and I've tried them all). It's loaded with features, has an entire community building plugins and applets for it, it's actively developed and supported, it's very, very secure, and it's free! Talking about resource usage, I currently have 7 tabs open in Maxthon, and Task Manager tells me it's using a mere 10k of memory. Firefox, with the same tabs open, is using 74k of memory. While, I think that Firefox is a good browser, it's not a match for Maxthon. Check it out, use it for a while, I think you'll agree.

Foxit PDF Reader 2.0 for Windows. If you think that Acrobat Reader is your only choice for reading and printing PDFs, are you in for a pleasant surprise! Foxit PDF reader is hands-down, the fastest and best PDF reader on the planet. It's small (the download is only 1.5MB, compared to Acrobat Reader's 23MB!), and blindingly fast. I haven't installed Acrobat Reader on any of my computers since discovering this little gem a couple of years ago. It's also available for mobile devices (PDAs) and Linux operating systems.

Screenshot Captor. Many operating systems enable you to take a basic screenshot of your desktop of the active window. Within Windows, you can press the 'Print Screen' button on your keyboard and that should take an instant grab of your entire screen. However, this doesn't always work and isn't always the best way to grab your desktop. If you'd like to grab just a section of your desktop or application, grabbing the entire screen is overkill and requires a lot of system resources, especially if you have a large monitor. Screenshot Captor is a free tool that enables you to take a grab of your entire screen, a specific window or simply a section of the screen. It's a wonderful little tool that can easily compete with the commercial screen-grabbing tools (like Snagit) on the market today.

PrimoPDF Creator. PrimoPDF is a free tool for creating high-quality, fully PDF specification compliant PDFs that can be viewed with any PDF reader. It has a  user-friendly interface and enables you to create PDFs just by using Window's print dialog from any application.  It's completely free - no nag screens or watermarks on your PDFs. You can also create secure PDFs with 40-/128-bit encryption and, if you want, add document information (title, author, subject, keywords, etc.) to converted PDF files.  

GetDIZ Text Viewer. This is nifty replacement for Windows Notepad. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with Notepad, but it doesn't format ASCII properly, and ASCII art looks terrible in Notepad. Many downloadable ZIP archives have DIZ and NFO files included within them. These are just simple text files that can be viewed with Notepad, but GetDiz is a freeware text-viewer especially designed for those files. ASCII art is displayed correctly and the user interface is small, handy and specific. Version 3 includes several new features like Print support, URL launch, Find/Replace, Trim copy and Keyword highlights.  I use it as my default text viewer for Windows.

These are just a few of the day-to-day utilities that I use to make my computer time more productive. I hope you enjoyed reading this post, and find these gems as useful as I do.

Next post - System Utilities I can't live without. I'll be compiling a list of my favorite, cannot-live-without, system administration utilities. In the near future, I'll post on some other fascinating little programs that I use a lot.

Take care!

Steve (aka Cheeseflavor)