My PC has been having performance issues of late; I’ve collected a lot of software I rarely use so I think it might be time to evaluate what I need, backup my data to CD-Rom, re-format and reinstall!
Not including device drivers for printer, camera, CD burner etc here is what I couldn’t do without:
- Mozilla Firefox
- Paint Shop Pro
- MYOB (business accounting package)
- Open Office – the Microsoft alternative
- Adobe Acrobat Reader
- eTrust anti-virus
- Ad-Aware anti-spyware
Now here are some commercial programs I currently use a lot, but they seem to be resource hungry and I am always getting Windows errors with them:
- Macromedia Homesite
- Ipswich WS_FTP
I am thinking of replacing them with NVU and Filezilla respectively. I am also replacing my copy of WinZip with 7-Zip, since the latter seems to open many more archive files than the commercial program. It is disgusting that software I have paid money for is less satisfactory than its open source counterpart!
A couple of non-essentials but nice to haves are:
- Putty telnet client
- Skype and Yahoo messenger
- Xara Webstyle
- Gmail Notifier
Darn CD burner seems to be having issues.. going to have to resort to transferring these files over LAN to my laptop, same as I did for H’s sound files.
I was trying out NVU today.. a bit too “sophisticated” for me. I just want something for programming raw html with useful bits of code snippets. I think I’ll go back to EditPad. If only HomeSite was more resource friendly 🙁
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