Outfitting Windows
Friday 02 February 2007 at 12:56 am.Used tags: avg_free, blender, blue_marble, desktop_earth, firefox, foxit, latex, launchy, miktex, nasa, openoffice, software, songbird, thunderbird, trillian, vlc, winamp, windows, x_chat, xfire, ypop
The installation of Windows on my old computer was at the end of its lifespan. It was time to reinstall windows anyways, I just did it on something a bit newer. There really isn't anything wrong with my old system. It still plays most the games I want to play. My Dad will enjoy it very much when I give it to him. I took photos of the hardware installation which I talked about in a previous post. Now I am going to talk about the software I installed.
Here is the selection of free (as in beer) software for Windows that I am using to make my new computer more comfortable.
- Wallpaper: Desktop Earth - A wallpaper generation software that uses NASA's Blue Marble images and recent cloud cover data to create real time wallpaper.
- Antivirus: AVG Free
- Browser: Firefox with Blue Ice theme and a slew of extensions
- Email Client: Thunderbird with YPop to download my yahoo email
- IM: Trillian, X-Chat, Xfire - Everything, IRC chat network, and in game instant messaging, in that order.
- Video: VLC - Very versatile and powerful video player. It can even function as a streaming server.
- Music: Songbird - The Firefox of music players. Literally; Songbird is based on Firefox code. While this product is in "Developer Preview" stages, I am liking it far more than iTunes. The interface is even more intuitive than Apple's product. When this becomes closer to a more public version, the number of extensions will probably erace any need I have for the versatility of Winamp's plugins.
- 3D Work: Blender - Another versatile and powerful 3D modeler, animation, rendering, game engine, even a video editor. Unlike many other combination projects this one does most of them well.
- PDF Reader: Foxit - A lightweight pdf document reader. In consumes a fraction of the resources that Adobe's reader does and boots up in fraction of the time as well.
- Office:
- OpenOffice - An alternative to Microsoft Office. It can read and write MS Office documents. Contains spreadsheet, document, presentation, vector graphics, formula editor, and database management. While not as robust as MS product, it has the features which most people use 90% of the time. It does consume a bit of computing power so I may look at AbiWord as a possible writing software.
- MikTeX - A Windows implementation of LaTeX which I will be using to write my thesis.
- Helper: Launchy - A nifty little program which can launch programs and documents with just a few keystrokes.
Once I get my Windows environment how I like I will then set up my Linux work environment where I will work on my Thesis and research.
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