Stuff to install on a new Windows PC
17 Sep 2008That is, the stuff I install on a new Windows PC. Since I need this list several times a year, why not make a blog post of it. As you will see,I have a more than average interest in video (conversion) and sysadmin (SSH/FTP). The links typically go straight to the download page.
Audio/video
- iTunes (+Quicktime): excellent music manager and it rips to MP3 really fast
- CDBurnerXP: for burning CDs, DVDs, ISO files
- Irfanview: image viewer, editor and converter – for people who think Photoshop is overkill
- Picasa: photograph workflow & archive manager (from Google)
- VLC Player: ultimate video player, very complete set of codecs
- ffmpeg with a GUI like GVC: video conversion: AVI, MOV, MPG, MP4, …
- Handbrake: will make a good MPEG4 of any DVD in one go
Internet
- Skype: for chat, phonecalls and SMSes with people far away
- Chrome, Firefox or Opera browser – personally I like Firefox less. Opera is solid and fast, Google Chrome is an interesting new kid on the block.
- FileZilla: FTP client
- Putty: SSH and telnet terminal
- EditPlus: customisable editor for text, HTML, CMD … that also works over FTP
- uTorrent: because sometimes you need to … get stuff, you know
Tools
- Google Pack: contains Picasa, Skype, Google Toolbar and a whole bunch of other useful programs
- Adobe PDF reader: for reading PDF documents, and everything is in PDF these days
- 7-Zip: compression/expansion of ZIP, RAR and 7z archives
- CutePDF with GhostScript: printing to a PDF file (also allows converting a PostScript PS/EPS file to PDF)
- UnixUtils: I’m a sucker for GAWK and WGET
- Nokia PCSuite: for synchro with my Nokia N91 (yes, it’s still my phone!)
- XAMPP: for developing with Apache/PERL/PHP/MySQL on Windows
