Dark Pegasus

You have that just formatted feel. You just installed all the required drivers, Windows is running fast and smooth because there is nothing on it.

Now what?

Well, you install apps to make it useful of course! The real question is what to install? That’s where this post comes in. It’s as much of a checklist for myself as a guide for everyone else, what to install right away without spending any money.

Web Browsing

• Firefox [Open Source] – Tabbed browsing owns. Pro-tip, middle mouse click on a link to open it in a new tab, middle mouse click on the tab itself to close it. No more searching for the X icon. It certainly whoops Internet explorer. Oh, and make sure to install the AdBlock plugin. The internet is a much nicer place after that.
• Chrome [Open Source] – The Google web browser. Chrome is fast. Like… really fast. That’s really its killer feature. It has other nice features but is too new to have a community built around it. That means no adblock. Oops. Heh. Um yeah, anyway it’s way faster, doesn’t crash as often as Firefox and is prettier too! Just no extension mechanism yet and no adblock.

Instant Messaging

• Pidgin [Open Source] – If you have accounts on multiple services like AIM, MSN, Yahoo or Google Talk, you should definitely get Pidgin or something like it. It has support for _everything_. Okay, maybe not everything but I sure can’t think of any services it doesn’t support. It’s not as pretty as Adium for the Mac, but it’s pretty good. Now if they would just add support for skinning…
• Trillian [Free / Pay] – Trillian isn’t open source like Pidgin and so isn’t updated as often but it’s still quite good. I use Trillian Basic (free) but it doesn’t support Jabber connections like Google Talk so I have to use Google Talk on the side as well. For more features you can pay for Trillian Pro but at that point I’d just use Pidgin.
• Skype [Free] – I don’t use this very often but it has come in handy several times. This would be replaced with Google Talk if it only supposed video chat and calling landlines. Oh well, this will stay until the day Google Talk can do those things too.

Media

• Media Player Classic [Open Source] – Open source media player that looks like the old version of Windows Media Player (back when I liked it) but works better.
• Combined Community Codec Pack [Free] – You need this if you’re going to play videos from the internet. This has every codec you’ll ever need except for Apple’s. If you want to play a video file that requests downloading a codec after you’ve installed this don’t bother. It’s probably going to do something not good to your machine.
• iTunes [Free] – Okay, so I really like iTunes for its library management and connectivity to the ipod. And it makes it really easy to download songs and shows legally.
• Picasa [Free] – Image utility from Google. Very handy if you’re just a casual photographer like me and wants to touch up the color and lighting on your images. I have a small confession to make – I’ve never done anything but hit the I’m feeling lucky button, uploaded to web albums and organized my pictures. All the same it does a really good job at it and I haven’t seen anything as well suited for the casual photographer like me.
• Paint.NET [Open Source] – For when I need to create simple images or do real touch ups I turn to Paint.NET. I can only hope that Microsoft one day bundles this with Windows and shows mspaint the door. I can’t compare it vs any commercial image editors since I haven’t tried them.
• Foxit [Free] – View PDFs quickly and easily with this. Much less bloat than Adobe Reader and renders almost everything I throw at it properly.

Games

• Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory [Free] – I’ve wasted many hours playing this game. Addictive, fun and well balanced. The graphics are a little dated but that doesn’t affect the gameplay.
• Savage [Free] – Fun game, Savage 2 is out but you have to pay for it – if you get it, buy it on Steam, see below.
• Steam [Free... kind of... in some sense] – Steam is the only thing on this list that really requires paying for something to get some functionality out of it. It’s worth it. I have to hand it to Valve, when Steam first came out with HL2 I thought it was the dumbest thing ever. Why should I have to be able to connect to the internet to play my game? That wasn’t an issue but it was the principle of it that bothered me. Okay, I take it all back. Being able to buy and play Portal, Orange Box, Max Payne, and having the download and install managed so seamlessly, I am in awe. Hats off to you Valve. It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.

Utilities

• InfraRecorder [Open Source] – Need to burn or rip CDs or DVDs? Get this. I originally found this on the Ubuntu download page and haven’t bothered with Nero or Roxio since. Simple interface, open source and does everything I need.
• μTorrent [Free] – This is the nicest and quickest bittorrent client I’ve used for windows. Azureus/Vuse is open source and good too but uses more resources. All I want is a nice list of my downloads in a low overhead client. μTorrent delivers.
• 7-Zip [Open Source] – I used to use WinZip. Then I moved to WinRar because it had better windowing abilities and supported rar (of course). Now I’m on 7-Zip because it handles opening .rar files and doesn’t nag me to buy it.
• AVG [Free] – There are two versions of AVG, one free one not. I use the free one and it seems to do a good job. Scans take a long time but they run in the background.
• Daemon Tools [Free] – This goes really well with InfraRecorder. I have more hard drive space than I know what to do with so I rip my DVDs onto my hard drive then play them using Daemon Tools. With it I can mount the DVD without having to look through my collection. I just look in the folder on my computer.

Geek

I’d suggest the above for anyone, the below is a little more specialized. If you’re interested in downloading these I assume you know enough about them.

• Eclipse [Open Source] – Java IDE. Works quite well, not as nice as Intellij but much better than Visual Studio.
• Notepad++ [Open Source] – High quality text editor. Everyone needs one of these. Textpad is actually my preferred editor, JEdit is also pretty good but I don’t like the interface as much.
• SQuirreL [Open Source] – Universal SQL Client
• Cygwin [Open Source] – Unix shell for windows
• Python [Open Source] – Programming Language
• TortoiseSVN [Open Source] – Awesome shell integration for Subversion and it comes with a cool diff tool as well!
• Putty [Open Source] – Telnet/SSH client

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