When you reformat, or setup a new computer, what are the programs on your must install list?


My secret motive for asking: I'm a Linux guy (formerly a Mac guy) about to buy a Windows Vista laptop. I have little clue as to what programs I should get. So help me (and others) out by sharing your favorite apps! Please.


Thus far on my list:
[list]VMWare or Virtual PC ( Dual boot sucks enough on a desktop... )
*Daemon Tools Lite ( for mounting backup ISO's ... )
*Rosetta Stone ( for learning Japanese )
*Sacred 2 ( for fun! )
*Firefox 3.x ( to safely browse the web )[/list]

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？

Well, since it's Windows, you might want to include MalwareBytes...
Also, don't forget some handy Firefox plugins that you need on windows, mainly Adblock Plus. Rikaichan is also handy, if you haven't used it before.
Another thing I install is Notepad2, and there are builds of it where it can hook into the operating system and take over for regular notepad.

(sorry this is gonna be a long one!)^__^
First, some good news, quite a few *nix programs are on windows with precompiled binaries, so if you like, you can setup mplayer , VLC, Openoffice.org, Abiword, WinFF, HandBrake, the GIMP, Audacity, and a host of others with very little hassle.

If your feeling adventurous you might even try KDE for windows (http://windows.kde.org/), it's unstable as hell(for now) and it doesn't integrate well(yet) but it might be worth a few laughs.

You should also get a good zip program, I've flitted back and forth between peazip and 7 zip for awhile now, try em both, 7zip is a little more bare bones, but I like it's file manager more, peazip is more fully featured, but it hasn't been around as long I'm about to switch back to peazip for awhile but that isn't a recommendation.

now on to windows only!(although you can get some of these programs working in WINE, they don't integrate terribly well)

fun= Freespace 2 (it's cheap from GOG.com and you can upgrade the graphics with the Freespace source code project) I also enjoy The Babylon Project(http://babylon.hard-light.net/), but not all the levels are well made and most are down right HARD!

Dosbox - nothing else will do for playing old DOS games, with all kinds of hardware emulation, it's better than real DOS in someways!

antivirus, I'm using Avira antivir Personal, it does popup ads for the full version, so that might be annoying, but it works for me. I still use spybot search and destroy for malware, I know it's not hip anymore but I still like it.

Snipping Tool - the integrated windows screenshot program, a nice simple tool, you can do basic annotation and capture screenies in a variety of ways. Accessible in the accessories menu or from the search bar, speaking of the search bar it's actually not a bad way to launch programs, just start typing the name of the program and it should come up, I've been using it more and more for that.(though if that's not your style, the quick launch bar is always a good option and is in fact what I usually use instead of the start menu or desktop icons)

Notepad++ - I like it, it has tabbed interface, support for split windows, supports plugins, supports converting to other formats(unix,mac or windows) Is it better than noptepad2? eh, don't know. try'em both see what you like.

WindirStat - help keep track of where all your space is going to, it' does a great visualization of all the files on your hard drive.

Exact Audio Copy - for ripping cds, the program is a great ripper, requires some setup but it checks everything to ensure you get the perfect rip, more than most rippers from what I can tell, it hasn't been updated in awhile, but the author still updates the website, so maybe soon.

Alcohol 52% - is my choice for creating ISO backups and virtual drives, there are arguments for daemon tools of course, but A52% gets the job done for me.

AutoGK - more of a frontend for a software suite than a single program, it's mostly for video transcoding, some people now swear by HandBrake, but I like AutoGK, because I can use some of the other programs individually as well.

FastStone Image Viewer - basic image viewer, red eye removal, basic transforms, but I really like the interface, in full screen mode moving the mouse towards the top of the screen brings up a the current folder that you can browse for another picture, move it to the left, bring up a menu for image manipulation, to the right file attributes, to the bottom, zooming and file navigation.

imgburn - although I've had some problems with it not releasing my dvd drive properly lately this still makes the list. Super small, very stable, allows an incredible amount of control over your disc drive(as well as giving you huge amounts of info about it). Just the thing for burning an ISO, a general data disc, a dvd, a music cd, anything! the forums are active and helpful, and updates are pretty regular(the programmer has a good sense of humor too, look at the bottom status bar whenever you start it up)


Foobar2000 - the most amazing audio player ever, as simple or as complicated as you like. It really is amazing, I had almost three paragraphs written about it before I decide to just say this: install it, play with it, poke around the preferences, change things, look at the plugins available, the things this audio player can do with a little set up is just insane, it isn't pretty but it is hands down THE audio player on windows for anyone who thinks of themselves as a power user.

ok I can't help myself,just a few things I can do:
I can play all kinds of programmed music, game or otherwise psf,sid,midi,IT,NSF,SPC. Do bit for bit comparison of decoded audio(regardless of container), rip cds, auto tag, (from file name or freedb). I've been using this player for two years and I'm still finding new features.( only bad thing if you include "file operations" in your install, it will let you !delete! files from within fb2k, some people might be comfortable with this, I am not, but it's pretty easy to disable all the hotkeys and menu entries for that feature)
(I know I'm a raving fanboy, try it for 2 weeks, I mean really poke around and you will be too!)

some screenshots of my fb2k setup:









text string formatting gets a lot done in foobar ^
(whew!, couldn't help myself)^_-

[ Edited Sep 9, 2009 ]

Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live forever in a cradle. - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky<*>

fb2k looks pretty cool. Must test that out with some MP3s. Should have my Dell XPS laptop around Nov 17th. :-D

Wondering if Snipping Tool is a good alternative to ksnapshot? Can you use it to take picture from Flash applets?

How is Notepad2 or Notepad++ for writing PHP code? Any good text editors for writing code/html come to mind?

Guess the biggest programming challenge I have left unsolved is: subversion. Anyone have experience using subversion for version control on Windows? Any tips?

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？

^I have a couple suggestions for that coding question. I ran across a couple handy code/html editors when I was studying javascript. One is Amaya (put out by the W3C), nice for xhtml but didn't quite cut it for javascript as much. For Javascript I decided to stick it with wscite. wscite is nice because it shows clearly any erroneous code so debugging code for syntax is a lot easier.

brobb355 For Javascript I decided to stick it with wscite. wscite is nice because it shows clearly any erroneous code so debugging code for syntax is a lot easier.

Where do I get this?

Links: Amaya and wscite assuming wscite is a Windows version of SciTE.

Thanks for the quick suggestions brobb. If I was writing straight html or javascript, I can see the great usefulness of either of those. I'm mostly doing web scripting, so I don't think either of those will work for me. Ever since I found kate (KDE on Linux), I've been addicted to it.





Anything like that come to mind?

I used Textpad at University for Java programming, but would be nice if there's something better out there.

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？

Rei If I was writing straight html or javascript, I can see the great usefulness of either of those. I'm mostly doing web scripting, so I don't think either of those will work for me.

I usually keep my JavaScript in linked .js files, so even when I'm writing PHP scripts I would still like to have something a bit smarter than notepad to edit my JavaScript files with.

Rei Guess the biggest programming challenge I have left unsolved is: subversion. Anyone have experience using subversion for version control on Windows? Any tips?

Bearing in mind that I'm not a programmer, this looks like it might fit the bill for you:TortoiseSVN

It also has a Firefox extension:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3416

Rei Wondering if Snipping Tool is a good alternative to ksnapshot? Can you use it to take picture from Flash applets?

Snipping tool is very basic and serves my humble needs, most of the screen shots I've posted used snipping tool.

Rei fb2k looks pretty cool. Must test that out with some MP3s. Should have my Dell XPS laptop around Nov 17th. :-D

fb2k is very cool, one of the nice things is the wide variety of plugins that support sequenced music(NSF,PSF,IT,etc...)
It's nice to take a stroll down memory lane listening to some old school video game music and there are actually even some original composers out there(http://sliv.4x86.com/ seems like a good jumping off point for NSF)

[ Edited Oct 26, 2009 ]

Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live forever in a cradle. - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky<*>

Rei Links: Amaya and wscite assuming wscite is a Windows version of SciTE. Thanks for the quick suggestions brobb. If I was writing straight html or javascript, I can see the great usefulness of either of those. I'm mostly doing web scripting, so I don't think either of those will work for me. Ever since I found kate (KDE on Linux), I've been addicted to it.

you hit the nail on the head with that assumption.

As far as I understand, the term "web scripting" could mean many different things as it is a pretty vague term. You could be using Javascript in web scripting or you could be using Ruby on Rails, AJAX, etc... With as much of the code that I've seen of yours I'm assuming that you are referring to mainly using PHP when you say web scripting. Sadly I have not dabbled in PHP at all so finding a tool for coding eludes me as of yet.