Software I use

by Kwong

Every now and then I’d get asked this question and I’d casually recommend something. For some reason I’ve become the goto-guy for windoze software recommendations. In light of that, I thought I might as well post a list (non-exhaustive) of stuff that I’m using that other people might find useful.

Browsers:

Chromium (Chrome without Google’s crap) : I find the nightlies good enough (bar the occasional bugs which shouldn’t be much of a problem since they get fixed so quickly)

Firefox : I use it as a backup to Chromium but it’s starting to win me back with its smaller memory footprint

Editors

emacsW32 : Just a personal choice

Notepad++ : I don’t use it often but I quite like the XML tools (offered as a plugin) which I use to test XPath queries

Microsoft Office 2010: Would be using LibreOffice if it weren’t because of school requirements.

Google Docs : Team project collaboration. Online storage means I can access documents pretty easily as long as i can haz internets

MediaPlayers:

foobar2000 : without any customizations

VLC : just works plus I quite like the small step video playback speedups whenever I need to watch my webcasts at 1.5X speed

Media Player Classic + KLite Mega Codec : Backup to VLC, but I never seem to have to use it

Instant messaging/IRC

GTalk with Psi configured to use the MSN protocol

Pidgin: Multiprotocol IM (my old favorite)

XChat 2 : Just works, mIRC just doesn’t cut it for me anymore.

Security

Microsoft Security Essentials: good enough

Windows firewall : good enough

Truecrypt : Encrypted virtual disks

Readers:

Sumatra PDF : Lightweight, very fast. My only gripe is that it has rubbish print support.

Net Utilities:

Tixati : Torrent client, been using it since uTorrent sold to BitTorrent

WinSCP :  for FTP, SFTP

PuTTYTabs: putty with TABS!!!

OpenVPN: VPN Goodness

Efficiency boosters/System Utils:

7zip : For extracting compressed files

Flux: Great for late night laptop usage, reduces stress on your eyes.

CCleaner: Good for cleaning up / freeing up disk space and also removes useless registry entries.

Daemon Tools Lite: for mounting ISO files

Launchy: Quiksilver for windows

deskview: declutters desktop icons by giving you the option to view icons as lists

Everything: Very fast search tool

Dropbox: Online storage, access files from anywhere with internet

Teracopy: File copying on steroids

Misc.

VirtualBox: Free alternative to VMware workstation

Eclipse : For Java projects large enough to require the use of an IDE

AutoHotkey : Awesome tool for repetitive tasks