George Washington's Teeth

Even in our excremental economy, PCs are cheap.  Microsoft wants to run their entire advertising campaign on that basis, but whatever.  I often use a well-loved MacBook, but in the last year have had occasion to buy two PCs.  Bought a Desktop PC for about $400 and a netbook, mini-laptop for about $300.

After the immediate glow of geek happiness wears off (new PCs always seem fast), the question becomes how to become productive fast.  (I actually had to buy the netbook because we went away for the weekend and I forgot my laptop and needed to do some work).

What I do is connect to Internet and download these 11 apps, and I’m ready to go in about 20 minutes in a productive work environment.

Let me explain.

• AVG Antivirus – Sure you need anti-virus, the world is weird, but AVG Free does a great job and it’s, well, free.
• Google Chrome – Sorry, Microsoft Internet Exporer doesn’t work for me.  I can’t be productive with such a slow browser.  I install the new-ish Google Chrome, which isn’t yet full-featured but is extremely fast.
• Firefox – I also install Firefox, the major open source competitor to IE.  Firefox becomes very full-featured by use of plug-in technology.
• FreeCommander – You owe yourself something better than Windows Explorer.  FreeCommander has plenty of features for making your file and PC management easier.   The dual-interface alone is worth the download.
• Evernote – I store all my information in Evernote (and so should you).  Download the PC desktop version to sync to your web based data.
• Picasa - The best way of managing and editing digital images and videos.
• Skype – For free phone calls to other PCs, conference calls and video calls to other team members.  I also use it for video calling my family.
• Foxit Reader – A lightweight PDF reader, to replace the slow and heavy Adobe Reader
• notepad++ – A hardy open source replacement for Notepad.  Use it for any text editing work that you can get by doing without a word processor.
• Videolan – An open source video player that plays just about any videos you’ve got.
• Revo Unistaller – Finally install this utility to uninstall some of the crap that is often pre-installed on new consumer PC’s.  What comes quickly to mind is the trial version of Symantec Internet Security which is probably already installed on your new PC.  If you activate it, you’ll get it free for a couple of months and then will be nagged to death by the program trying to get you to buy the full version — just saying.

The rest of the apps I use:

• Gmail - Web-based email
• Office Suite – Either Google Docs or Zoho Office, both free and web-based.

Okay, you’re ready to work.