What's on my PC?
There is a huge plethora of software out there and you may be interested in what is used at this dot on the planet. I use stuff because it does a job. I am not into products which can do masses but fail to do the basics well. Most people use less than 10% of the functions available in MS Office so why pay for the other 90%?
Nowadays I use as many computers that are not windows based as are so strictly speaking I should at least two versions - if not futher versions for the different distros of Linux but for now just the one.
Miscellaneous and File Utilities
- Google Desktop Search - Does what it says on the tin just like its internet search tool
- Webshots - a desktop background manager and screen saver, with a free account you can download photographs to enhance your desktop
- WordWeb - a stand alone dictionary and thesaurus utility that is much better than Microsoft's Word attempt and now links to web resources too.
- Stickies - a post-it for screens, and more. Again a great improvement over the Notes facility in Outlook and free.
- KDiff - File difference and merge tool: free, effective and simple
- Knoppix Linux Distribution - excellent alternative OS, available as a Live CD.
- Credit card size Linux Distro - excellent tiny OS, available as a Live CD, embbedded or HDD versions.
- PSPad - a great virsatile editor.
Web Tools
- Filezilla - Secure FTP: free, does its job well with no fuss
- FeedReader - RSS Reader: free, simple and effective. To get the best from RSS you need a good permanent connection as it works best when updating the feeds regularly
- Opera - Browser: much neater, faster, more configurable than IE and with a great User Interface, always loved the mouse guestures, ahead of the pack
- Firefox - Browser: coming up fast on general use and because of its greater market penetration more likely to work with more websites so I have this to back when accessing those sites that have coded for IE or Firefox (Netscape) but no other browser (and there are many)
- Thunderbird - E-mail client from the Mozilla camp and again just does what it should well. Extensions are available again to enhance the basic functions
- HTML-Kit - HTML editor: this is free, provides plugins and is better for those of us who prefer to code HTML in the raw. Has support for extensions spell checker, HTML Tidy, etc.
Image Utilities
- PaintShopPro - Image editor: a lot for powerful than paint, I have had this ages and like its simple interface. It was a JASC product until Corel took over.
- Adobe Elements - Photo editor: this is taking the crown from PSP especially when working with photos
- Picasa2 - Another excellent free tool for searching out, organising and printing photos, and you can burn CDs of your photos for playing on your TV
- Google Earth - this is brilliant geographical information system. It provides, via the web, satellite and plane images of the Earth's surface. See your home from 300 feet! The images are old so our house doesn't exist, its just a builders work yard.
Development Tools
- Borland Turbo Prolog - A DOS tool I bought years ago for a language that never caught on but has its uses in Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems
- Delphi - Came out of Borland and now an impressive development tool kit that I use for knocking up my own software. I am currently using Turbo Delphi Professional for Win32.
Video Utilities
- Zoom Player - This is a lovely video player
- DivX Player - this time a player with its own excellent codec
- VirtualDub - is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
OS Utilities
- Belarc - tells you what you got on your machine from the inside out
- TClockEx - a much better clock and calendar for the system tray
- Process Explorer - one of many tools to help with admin and debug tasks - not for the faint hearted and now part of Microsoft - this one better replaces Task Manager
- TCP View - tool to help with network debug tasks - not for the faint hearted
- PasswordSafe - safely store all those user names and passwords you need nowadays
Linux Utilities
Many of the above Windows software has either direct eauivalents or have been ported, or even started on Linux. Picasa, Google Earth, Thunderbird, Firefox and Opera are all available in Linux variants.
- xaos - Fractal generator
