Essentials

These are programs that I consider essential and would be the first programs that I’d install to a new system.

• XP SP2
• Microsoft AntiSpyware
• Microsoft Office
• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• PuTTY - My SSH client of choice
• WinSCP - Fantastic program for SCP and SFTP
• SlickRun - launch things by typing words; sort of like the Run dialog on steroids. [ my blog post ]
• StrokeIt - awesome mouse gestures program, huge time saver. [ my blog post ]
• TClockEx - mostly because I like the pop-up calendar that you get when you click the clock.

Favorites

• XP SP2
• Microsoft Office
• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• PuTTY
• WinSCP
• SlickRun
• StrokeIt
• TaskSwitchXP
• Yahoo! Messenger
• IrfanView and IrfanView Shell Extension
• OpenExpert
• iTunes
• dBpowerAMP Music Converter
• PDFCreator
• MultiTimer
• YAC
• Cygwin
• Quick Zip
• TreeSize
• Clipomatic
• Icon Restore
• Vim
• Palm Desktop
• BackupBuddy
• Sunrise
• CDBurnerXP Pro

The jury is still out…

Being here doesn’t mean that the program isn’t good. It might mean that I’m still playing around with it or it might mean that I may or may not keep the program on my system long-term. It may be good, but just something that I may not use a lot. For example, Skype is a great app, but I might decide that the benefits of VoIP are not compelling enough for me and the telephone is good enough for me.

• Rainlendar - nifty looking Desktop calendar and todo program.
• Y’z Dock - Impressive emulation of the Mac OS X dock. Thing is I just don’t know if I love the Mac OS X dock. Great eye candy, but I’m more of a text guy than an icon guy and if I owned a Mac, I’d probably grab a more keyboard-oriented launcher like Quicksilver
• Skype - nicely done VoIP app
• ActiveWords - Powerful commercial keyboard productivity app, very nice actually. It’s just that SlickRun does the essentials for me, is lean and mean, and it’s FREE.
• AppRocket - another keyboard launcher; not free but kind of nifty because you don’t have to enter your own keywords. It’s able to do very fast searches for directories, filenames, etc… Need to play with this more though to see if it can replace SlickRun for me.
• Tray Pilot - allows you to toggle the system tray on and off to make more room for task bar buttons. The thing is I have a love/hate relationship with the task bar anyway and I think that multitasking is overrated.
• TrayBar - Had this installed a long time ago, found that I didn’t use it at all (the last thing I need is MORE icons in my system tray), and I uninstalled it.
• EscapeClose
• PowerMenu - This app lets you minimize apps to the system tray instead of the task bar.

Crap

• RealPlayer - obnoxious; to me, one step above malware. For an alternative, check out the aptly-named Real Alternative
• Barca Pro - email client, funky UI, sucky IMAP implementation can only access Inbox but no other folders

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