I just had a hard drive go bad on me so I had to buy a new drive and reinstall Windows. Here’s the software I put back on my computer immediately, the essential software that makes Windows XP useable for me:<\/p>\n
WizMouse<\/a> – lets you scroll a window without you having to give it focus. Brilliantly simple and useful.<\/p>\n Crashplan<\/a> – I would have lost data if not for this online backup tool.<\/p>\n EditPad Pro<\/a> – my text editor of choice. It also comes in a free version that’s fine<\/a>.<\/p>\n Autohotkey<\/a> – giving me keyboard controls<\/a> like Ctrl-Alt-C for Calculator and “..4” to automatically type my phone number.<\/p>\n Google Chrome<\/a> \u00a0– the best, fastest, easiest to use, prettiest browser.<\/p>\n CCCP<\/a> – the Combined Community Codec Pack lets Windows Media Player play most every video format automatically<\/p>\n Freecalc<\/a> – by Moffsoft, a better calculator than the built-in Windows one. Easy, clean.<\/p>\n Picasa<\/a> – the best home picture viewer<\/p>\n Teracopy<\/a> – replaces windows file copy… the best feature being if a copy fails, I see what happened and can recover, unlike Windows copy<\/p>\n Rename-It!<\/a> – lets me rename files en-mass<\/p>\n PureText <\/a> – strips text formatting when pasting.<\/p>\n Put \u00a0Windows Explorer in the Quicklaunch toolbar and change the startup options target to “%SystemRoot%\\explorer.exe \/e,c:\\aaa”. More examples<\/a>.<\/p>\n Set Gmail to be the default email client in Chrome<\/a><\/p>\n Disable Windows Search When Searching Windows Explorer<\/a><\/p>\n Truecrypt<\/a> – keeps my passwords safe on my computer.<\/p>\n ————————————————– KFC<\/a> – Kill Flash Cookies The Sysinternals<\/a> tools are amazing. Filemon to see what is slowing down my hard drive, Pagedefrag to defrag your pagefile.sys. Several tools to help find malware<\/p>\n DVD Decrypter (local archive<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n
\nThe second round of essential software<\/p>\n
\nFilezilla
\nUltraVNC<\/p>\n