My wife got an upgraded computer recently and I got the task of setting it up for her. It’s a Toshiba so it comes with Windows XP Home. Though I had thoughts of trying to convert her to Linux, she gets around fine in Windows XP, I opted to have her stick with the OS and interface she knows - after all it’s already on there.
However I wanted any additional programs installed to be either GPL’d or in the very least freeware (trying to avoid all shareware). Here’s what I ended up with:
1. Word Processing - Since she doesn’t use Spreadsheets or Database I opted for Abiword over Openoffice.org as I find it a little more intuitive.
2. Music - Winamp
3. Image/Photo Viewing - IrfanView
4. Photo Editing - The GIMP
5. Email - Thunderbird with GPG/Enigmail
6. Browsing - Firefox
7. ZIP/Archiving - 7-zip
If you have any suggestions for alternative programs or other ones needed on an average user system, list them here.
5 Comments until now
I’lll have to check out some of these.
Forgot one:
Xvid [http://xvid.org] for Xvid/DivX decoding.
A couple more
VLC for videos ( this is BY FAR the best )
Filezilla for FTP
Foobar2000 for music
MWSnap for screenshots & screen rulers (awesome program)
Antivir for Virus (free enough)
ImgBurn for CD burning (Although Nero comes with most CD burners)
CDex for ripping mp3s
GAIM for all things IM
Google Docs and Spreadsheets for office ( I use nothing else these days )
Those are just a couple things that I have open now
I should check out ImgBurn, I run DeepBurner (their free one) but it does have some limitations.
And yeh Foobar2000 hands down is the best free player. I used Winamp for my wife because she knows it the best.
A couple more that I use:
Putty for SSH
PDFCreator - great for printing to PDF as well as making JPG/TIF via Print.
DAEMON Tools for DVD/CD Emulation
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