.mrt memo

Although Windows isn’t free, it doesn’t mean you can’t set up your system with freeware on it, but you have to know the software. So I compiled a little list you should install on your average Windows XP installation (probably it’s also a Vista list, but I haven’t had the unpleasure to work with Vista). I have used this list already twice now and it’s a big timesaver for me. So I published it to save even more time for you aswell.

The software in this list is free in a sence you don’t have to pay for it, may even happen some of it is Open Source.

• Firefox – you need to browse with something. And don’t forget the plugins.
• Opera – a cool browser in case you don’t want to mess up your Firefox tabs, but want to check something quickly. So, a fast alternative.
• AVG Antivirus Free Edition – you need an antivirus, it’s Windows for Douglas’ sake
• Spybot Search & Destroy – and you need something to fight all that spyware out there
• Zonealarm Free Firewall – a personal firewall as a secondary line of defence against attacks from the outside and also inside your system (blocks traffic both ways, unlike Windows XP firewall)
• VLC media player – play DVDs, AVIs and other movie files. All without the codec hassle.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader – read PDFs
• Adobe Flash Player – all those flash movies, games and webpages
• Java Runtime – and then there are some old Java applets around..
• OpenOffice.org – open source office applications suite
• DirectX 9 – a little something for the gamers
• Irfanview – the best program to look at pictures
• SciTE – the best text editor, supports painting text in multiple languages and tabs
• IZarc – it’s freeware and it opens quite alot of formats like zip, rar, tar.gz, bz2 etc.
• Skype – who doesn’t use Skype?
• aMSN – alternative MSN client, doesn’t come with ads and is open source
• CDex – easy cd ripper with CDDB support
• mju Torrent – a cool tiny torrent client
• Audacity – open source multitrack audio editor, don’t forget to install LAME MP3 encoder and other plugins
• WinSCP – this is how you use SecureCoPy to transfer files to and from Linux from Windows, supports SSH keypairs
• Putty toolkit – terminal emulator, Pageant, Puttygen and such nice little utilities
• Daemon Tools Lite – mount disc images in virtual drivebay
• FileZilla – FTP client (and appears that there’s also a server version)