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Most useful PC applications?

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Blablurn

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I would like to know about GAFs most useful PC applications. What programm is always on your PC. It doesnt matter if its for safety reasons, for speed/performance reasons or for productivity. I would like to get some knowledge how you deal with the software area of your PC/Laptop.
 
Total Commander, you can't live without that. Also, TreeSize or WinDirStat to see all your crap on hdds.
Qtranslate if you need easy translating in any application. Advanced Systemcare for other minor stuff.
 
House keeping: CCleaner, Defraggler
To do list: Wunderlist
Screen temperature: f.lux
Music: Foobar2000
Privacy: PeerBlock
FPS counter: FRAPS
Find junk I can delete from my hard drive: TreeSizeFree
If I really have to: OpenOffice
Pictures: XNView
Snore: Foxit Reader
 
Programs I always install after a fresh Windows installation:

CCleaner - Clean registry, unused files, etc.
CPU-Z - For CPU information.
GPU-Z - For GPU information. (Duh)
Core Temp - CPU temperature monitoring.
Notepad++ - A better Notepad.
KeePass - Password manager.
ImgBurn - To burn ISOs to CD/DVDs. Mostly use it to burn Windows because I always seem to misplace the damn DVD.
foobar2000 - Music player. Only recently started using it. It looks nice when you mod it.
VLC - Video player.
CCCP - A codec pack, comes with MPC-HC (Another video player).
7-zip - Pack/unpack zips, rars, 7z, etc. No real need for WinRAR with this.
Avast - Virus scanner.
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Pro - Anti-malware scanner and real-time protection.
Comodo Firewall & Defense+ - Firewall and HIPS scanner/real-time protection.
DeepBurner - Burn files to CDs/DVDs or make music CDs. (Really a thing of the past now with phones and MP3 players.)
DropBox - File backup/sync.
FileZilla - For FTP.
WhoCrashed - Look at crash logs.

Left out ordinary things almost everyone knows about like Flash.
 
Visualante2 said:
House keeping: CCleaner, Defraggler
To do list: Wunderlist
Screen temperature: f.lux
Music: Foobar2000
Privacy: PeerBlock
FPS counter: FRAPS
Find junk I can delete from my hard drive: TreeSizeFree
If I really have to: OpenOffice
Pictures: XNView
Snore: Foxit Reader
Click to expand...

Can you tell me more about PeerBlock? The idea sounds good. Just read a little about it.
 
Drazgul said:
My man. VLC is trash in comparison.
Click to expand...
I really don't understand this attitude at all. VLC has played every single file format I've thrown at it, and doesn't need to install a bunch of codec packs.

How on earth is that "trash"? What is so much better about MPC?
 
Marty Chinn said:
MPC-HC says hi.
Click to expand...
Too much dicking around for bugger all advantage.

Avast
Malwarebytes

SpaceShark said:
I really don't understand this attitude at all. VLC has played every single file format I've thrown at it, and doesn't need to install a bunch of codec packs.

How on earth is that "trash"? What is so much better about MPC?
Click to expand...

It's just people stuck in a timewarp. I have no problem with MPC but the elitists of it are ridiculous. VLC is great and perfect for my needs and most peoples.
 
Chrome, VLC, Winamp, and Splashtop. Those are my most often used [free] programs.

Chrome has been my go-to browser for over a year now, thanks in large part to multi-device bookmarks syncing. I know that Firefox has its own Sync thing, but Chrome's system is less wonky and works with no effort on my part. The only reason I keep Firefox installed is for the DownThemAll and Video Download Manager extensions - which I don't use all that often.

VLC is ugly and many of its features are half-baked but whatever. It opens practically anything, including files I'm still downloading. I can use it to convert, stream, and record videos - it can even access my TV card. The later versions of VLC have a highly customizable interface, so you can swap out some of the less than useful buttons for others.

I first installed Winamp like 15 years ago and still use it to this day. It's lightweight, supports a plethora of sound enhancement plugins, and doesn't try to take over my computer like iTunes does. It just works.

I prefer Splashtop to the other VNC-ish programs because it has excellent video/audio streaming even over 3G, takes the least amount of time to start a session, and it doesn't put up nag screens. My main use for it is streaming live TV to my Android from my PC when I'm on the go. Note: you will have to initially point the client to your PC's IP address, but unless your IP changes a lot, this shouldn't be an issue.
 
SpaceShark said:
I really don't understand this attitude at all. VLC has played every single file format I've thrown at it, and doesn't need to install a bunch of codec packs.

How on earth is that "trash"? What is so much better about MPC?
Click to expand...

There is nothing better about MPC.
I tried it for a bit after reading about all the praise, but nah.

VLC Player has yet to let me down.
 
Dropbox: Cloud storage/Backup
Evernote: Notebook catch all app
Notepad +++: Text editor
Snagit: Screen capture tool, way better than the built in tool.
 
Macro programs, I use both:

Macro Expert Enterprise
EZ Macros

Other:

End It All (closes programs that hang)
Crap Cleaner
Rename 1.56.0 Superb Batch Renamer (file and extension renamer)

Text:

Quick Search and Replace (searches through text/word files)
Notepad/Metapad/Wordpad
Kleptomania (text "grabber")

Photo:

ACDSEE photo Explorer v3.1 build 921 (Simple and does the job)
Ulead Photo Explorer 8.0 ESD (a more advanced photo explorer with nice renaming options)

File Explorers:

2xExplorer Build: 1.1.0.17
 
Not free but my contribution is Sublime Text. Available on Mac and Linux as well, it is fantastic for editing virtually any text based file, with a few notable exceptions that Notepad++ handles.
 
My most used programs: CCleaner, foobar2000, MPHC, Paint.Net, Skype
 
VLC has been buggy for me for about the last year or so. But I find myself loyal to it because before VLC, I had to use Windows Media Player, Quicktime, and Real Player to play all files. Never again.
 
Somebody already mentioned this, but I'll jump in as well: For someone who finds themselves on a computer in the evening, I feel like downloading flux is one of the best decisions I've made. I find bright lights to be too harsh at night and this has even made my sleep noticeably better (get sleepy at the right time rather than those all-too-common late-nighters people get on computers):

http://justgetflux.com/
 
MSI afterburner - for fiddling with GFX card settings
Foobar2000 - BEST music player. Customizable and extremely light weight.
Krita - Free image editing/painting program. Finally I can say goodbye to Photoshop.

Marty Chinn said:
MPC-HC says hi.
Click to expand...

This gets my vote. VLC went down the drain a few years ago.
 
Skinpop said:
MSI afterburner - for fiddling with GFX card settings
Foobar2000 - BEST music player. Customizable and extremely light weight.
Krita - Free image editing/painting program. Finally I can say goodbye to Photoshop.



This gets my vote. VLC went down the drain a few years ago.
Click to expand...

Would you rate KRITA higher than Gimp?
 
DeSo said:
It's just people stuck in a timewarp. I have no problem with MPC but the elitists of it are ridiculous. VLC is great and perfect for my needs and most peoples.
Click to expand...

After well over a decade of installing codecs and using various players, the last several years I've never had an issue with just using VLC for playback of the vast majority of my media files. I hear it may not perform as well on other operating systems like Mac, but it's been fine for me for general playback purposes on Windows.

If I was setting up a HTPC, I probably would use MPC-HC though since you can better customize options like filters/renderers and whatnot so you can tweak the visuals better for your display.
 
Be careful installing imgburn though, the latest version has hidden adware that's hard to get rid of. Just read every screen carefully and choose custom install.
 
- Ninite - allows you to mass-download and install (or update) various applications; really helpful, especially since no application installed that way contain any malware/adware

- Firefox, Chrome, Opera - browsers (duh)
- 7-zip for zip and rar archives
- foobar2000 - music player
- sumateraPDF - pdf reader
- VLC - movie player (it plays everything you throw at it and doesn't require you to install additional codecs)
- Dropbox - cloud storage
- LibreOffice
- Paint.net - simple but very useful graphic editor
- CCleaner - for cleaning registry and removing temporary files
- PSPad - notepad
- TotalCommander - file explorer
- Bullzip PDF Printer - for printing stuff to pdf
- GameSave Manager - easy way to backup and restore you game saves
- Spybot - Search & Destroy - looks for malware/adware and removes it

CadetMahoney said:
ACDSEE photo Explorer v3.1 build 921 (Simple and does the job)
Click to expand...

Highfive. Still the best photo explorer there is. Shame that further versions turned to crap thanks to filling it with useless features and ugly UI :/
 
Winamp, man. Good old Winamp. And f.lux for automatic brightness adaptation depending on the time of day. God-tier program.
 
Good recommendations so far.

Here is one I just started using.


Duplicate Cleaner

My music and video collection was a mess, files everywhere from different users on the PC. Plus I had two hard drive crashes without a good back up (I had just copied one time from my PC to a Mac over the network). I found a program that allowed me to save most, if not all my media files, (should recommend that too, but I can't remember the name) but the file names were lost. The duplicate cleaner found all the files that were duplicates and allowed me to free up a lot of space. I did the same thing to my Android phone.

A couple others I've used a lot are CDex and CutePDF (free print to PDF file creator)
 
chrome
sumatra pdf
transmission-qt - bittorrent client
steam
sublime text - text editor
foobar2000 - music player
musicbrainz picard - music tagger and organizer
dropbox - cloud storage
7zip
virtualbox - virtualization
console2 + msys -> usable console + collection of GNU utilities such as bash, make, gawk and grep
spacesniffer - treemap visualization of file hierarchy
 
sonicfan said:
Good recommendations so far.

Here is one I just started using.


Duplicate Cleaner

My music and video collection was a mess, files everywhere from different users on the PC. Plus I had two hard drive crashes without a good back up (I had just copied one time from my PC to a Mac over the network). I found a program that allowed me to save most, if not all my media files, (should recommend that too, but I can't remember the name) but the file names were lost. The duplicate cleaner found all the files that were duplicates and allowed me to free up a lot of space. I did the same thing to my Android phone.

A couple others I've used a lot are CDex and CutePDF (free print to PDF file creator)
Click to expand...
I've never tried this version. I've always used Auslogics Duplicate File finder. But totally cosign on these types of programs. I cleaned out tens of GBs on my 500GB HD using this program because it contained haphazardly organized files over the span of many failed hard drives that I never bothered to go through again.
 
A few that will be forever on my PCs. Dropbox, Last Pass, 7-zip, MPC & VLC, Media Center Master (local metadata for XBMC on my Apple TV) and Music Bee.
 
download-hero-cros_2x.jpg


The image is perfect too as it shows so many devices I own.

Chrome + Google Sync = Next Level

Owning an Android smartphone, Nexus 7, Desktop, and Chromebook it's A+++ syncing evrything between all my devices.
 
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