Five more ways to supercharge your new PC

April 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

greatfalls

Last week I posted Got a new PC? Supercharge it fast with 11 free apps.  That explained when you get a new PC, inexpensive as they are now, what free apps you needed to get productive.  Today 5 more free apps that you ought to consider.  This list is for more advanced users.

  • Paint.NET –  A lightweight graphic and image editor that has most of the functionality most people would ever use from the very heavy and expensive Adobe Photoshop.
  • FileZilla – FTP may be old and creaky but it doesn’t go away and someday you’re going need to up/download files.  This open source FTP client is full-featured.
  • Fastone Image Viewer – A fast image viewer that dispays digital images in a zillion grahic formats.
  • Seesmic Desktop – Do you use Twitter?  Seesmic Desktop is the best of the current crop of Twitter Clients.
  • Windows Live Writer –  Do you blog either for yourself or your company?  Windows Live Writer is  by far the best client for writing blog entries from your PC.  If you don’t use the online interface for your blog, use Windows Live Writer.

Go ahead now, make yourself productive.

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Filed Under: freeware, Windows, Windows Vista Tagged With: , , , , ,

Got a new PC? Supercharge it fast with 11 free apps

April 23, 2009 By 3 Comments
George Washington's Teeth

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:

Okay, you’re ready to work.

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Filed Under: Desktop applications, freeware, Productivity, Windows, Windows Vista Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Picasa for Mac, we’ve been waiting for you

January 6, 2009 By Leave a Comment

 picasa-mac-button

I’ve happy to report that at this week’s MacWorld, Google has released a beta of their superb free photo organizer and retoucher, Picasa. 

Picasa was available first on Windows, then curiously on Linux, all before the Mac.

My own first use and other reports show that the Mac implementation of Picasa is both very feature-true to the Windows version and seems faster than Apple iPhoto which since included with a Mac has always been the top choice for Photo organizing on that platform.

I could say that having Picasa now available for the Mac eliminates on the few remaining deficits in the Mac vs. PC debate, but it’s probably more accurate to say, having Picasa for the Mac eliminates one of the last reasons for using Parallels or VMware Fusion to  run Windows on a Mac.

 

From the Google Press Release:

Picasa for Mac makes it easy to manage large photo collections and helps users make professional-looking edits without any technical knowledge, including:

  • A drag-and-drop photo collage tool that gives users control over layout and content
  • A retouching brush to wipe out scratches and blemishes – and repair old photos
  • A slideshow movie maker that uploads users photo montage videos to YouTube with a click
  • Smart auto-cropping that guides user

Picasa for Mac "plays nice" with iPhoto, and takes a read-only approach to editing photos stored in the iPhoto library, duplicating files as needed, so that users’ iPhoto libraries are never affected when they use Picasa. Avid iPhoto users who currently use our Picasa Web Albums Uploader plugin can continue to do so, although features like automatic web sync, photo collages, and more will only be found in the Picasa application.

This first beta of Picasa for Mac matches the speed and most core features of Picasa on Windows — and we’ll be working on more refinements to the Mac interface and feature set as time goes on.

Download Picasa for Mac (beta)

Picasa for Mac running on my laptop.

picasa_mac

Filed Under: Digital Pictures, freeware, Mac, Photo Sharing, Windows, Windows Vista

Q-Dir: A very flexible Windows Explorer Replacement

November 25, 2008 By Leave a Comment

q-dir-logo Be it Windows XP or Windows Vista, there’s always a need for a Windows Explorer replacement.   The weakness of the standard file explorer has always furnished a breeding ground for innovators.

Q-Dir is a freeware file manager that is really great if you have a lot of file copying and moving to do, since it can keep many windows and folder views open at the same time.  The default view is four windows, but it looks like anything is possible.

Views can be saved as favorites and you can add shortcuts to frequently-accessed folders.

There is also a an extension that can be added to your right-click menu for launching Q-Dir to view a folder.

Download Q-Dir [via lifehacker ]

q-screen

More features from their web page after the jump.

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Filed Under: Utilities, Windows, Windows Vista

Feeding my Sticky Note habit

November 18, 2008 By 2 Comments

pnotes-logo1 Now I might be the first to suggest that using sticky notes to keep track of information might not actually be considered organization, and in-fact may be more like a condition requiring a twelve-step program.

I love sticky notes, though.  Especially electronic ones.  Once I open the first note I can suddenly think of tons of things to write each in different notes.

This confession probably explains why I like Pnotes so much.  Pnotes means either pinned notes or portable notes.  The Pnotes folks say you can decide.

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Filed Under: freeware, Portable Apps, Windows, Windows Vista
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