Here is a short list of free programs I can’t live without on my computer. They aren’t really music related, but help keep my computer running smooth or generally make my life easier.
Firefox probably doesn’t need any introduction. Just use it, everything looks better, you can block any ad, its safer than IE and its faster. Other reasons: Tabbed browsing, extensions and themes.
CCleaner cleans the crap out of your temp folders, internet cache, registry, and can uninstall the stuff the regular windows program can’t find.
Auslogics Disk Defrag is a great free defragger if only for the reason that its faster, way faster than the standard XP one. It also never gives you an error saying something can’t be defragged.
VLC Media Player plays pretty much any media file, I use it mostly for video. Its very straight forward, usually just drag and drop. The GUI isn’t sleek, but you should be watching the video not the interface anyway. Like I said earlier, it plays anything.
Foobar 2000 is my audio media player of choice. It plays everything including FLAC which is the main reason I use it. The standard installation is very minimal graphically, but it is highly customizable, check out the forums for some examples. It is not connected to website like the other big media players like iTunes.
Yahoo! Widget Engine ok, I could live without this one, but it helps keep my life organized so thats why I included it here. The widgets I use are Daily Planner Calender, Forget Me Not notes, WeatherEye, and Neon Clock.
- Daily Planner Calender is basically a to-do list and a simple, easy to use calender. I add things like my work schedule, pay day, and meetings and it reminds me of upcoming events right on the to-do list. This is something that should be built into an OS.
- Forget Me Not notes are like Post-its for your desktop and basically get used for shopping lists and quick reminders.
- WeatherEye is great for when I don’t want to look out my window to see what the weather is like. lol. Actually it streams current and short term weather data and saves me going to the weathernetwork website.
- Neon Clock gets used because it shows the date, is much larger than the standard clock, and has an easy to use alarm.
Yeah, I’ve used most of them, good stuff. And remember Apple-chewers, most of them are on Mac as well.