A shiny new ASUS 1000H EEE PC will arrive at our house at some point over the next few days, and I have been thinking about the list of software to install on it.
Google Chrome
Google’s new browser is light, fast, and takes up very little screen real-estate. I’ve been using it since launch, and it’s been rock solid. Some pages mess up, but that explains my second pick.
Mozilla Firefox
In it’s latest incarnation, Firefox is fantastic. The only reason Chrome gets used instead is speed and footprint.
Digsby
Digsby is an IM client par excellence - allowing you to connect to Jabber, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, ICQ, Facebook, Twitter and IRC all at once - and all with a pretty small memory footprint.
Yahoo Messenger
Sometimes you connect to a Yahoo Instant Messenger client, and they absolutely need you to have be running it at your end for some piece of rich functionality.
Windows Live Messenger
This one is here primarily for contacting colleagues in the office, and for the peer-to-peer webcam functionality - perhaps Live Messenger’s only saving feature.
Skype
Skype is quickly becoming an essential install on all platforms. The voice and video chat capabilities - let alone phone calling - are a great facility to have.
Open Office
Version 3 of Open Office is fantastic. Good enough to question installing Microsoft Office at all.
Media Monkey
Rather than install iTunes, Media Monkey is a lightweight media management tool that does exactly what it says on the tin - and does it with a small footprint.
Textpad
A commercial editor, but I own the license for it, and know it inside out. For many in the world of Microsoft Windows, Textpad is the “editor of choice”.
Python
There are times when you (as a developer) can see how a small program could do a repetitive job for you very quickly indeed. That’s why I will be installing Python.
Nod32
Antivirus services will be provided by Nod32, which I own licenses for. It’s lightweight, fast, and solid.
7-Zip
Compression software. It’s free, and it understands both ZIP and RAR formats. Not much else to say really.
TrueCrypt
Truecrypt makes encrypted volumes - pretend drive letters that point towards encrypted files. While using it, you’re not even aware it’s there - and when not using it, even the NSA would have trouble getting at your data this millenium. You don’t need fancy password programs - all you need is text files and TrueCrypt.
FileZilla
I do a lot of work on the web - so a good FTP client is a must. Luckily, FileZilla is free, and perhaps the best FTP client available for Windows.
WinSCP
Those who know better don’t expose their servers to the world through FTP - they use SSH instead, and WinSCP provides an excellent open source file transfer client.
PuTTY
Wonderful secure shell client - perfect for communicating with production webservers over a secure (encrypted) protocol.
Irfanview
Irfanview provides the ability to look at just about any bitmap graphics format, and to make basic changes (cropping, rotating, contrast, brightness, colour, etc).
Google Picasa
Perhaps the fastest, most impressive photo management software for Windows. It’s quick, it’s powerful, and it’s wonderfully intuitive. Oh - it’s free too.
Primo PDF
Great free PDF printer driver, allowing you to create PDF files from any application that can print.
Foxit Reader
It reads PDFs perfectly, and launches in under a second. What other arguments do you want to hear?
CCleaner
We all know that Windows degrades over time - chiefly due to the registry becoming more and more bunged up. CCleaner, or “Crap Cleaner” goes through your registry and clears away all the rubbish - hopefully leaving you with a faster machine.
AdAware
One of the oldest, and one of the best malware detection and removal tools around - and it’s free! Helps detect and clean tracking cookies, spyware, trojans, and various other types of malware that might have found it’s way into your system.
uTorrent
By far the best bittorrent client I have ever used. Light, small, solid, fast, and feature rich.
So there you go - most of the software is freeware, and the list will hopefully be a good pointer for others wondering what would be useful to install on their new machine. The list isn’t exclusive to any platform in reality - I have most of this stuff installed on every Windows machine I use.