I recently got a new laptop, nothing fancy, but it needed some tools to be really useful. This is the list that I came up with and it’s just as useful for desktops:
- PC Decrapifier – Get rid of the preloaded junk so we can make room for the good stuff
– You have to have Firefox right?- Notepad++ – Great replacement for Notepad, particularly good for programmers
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Open Office – It’s not MS Office, but it’s amazingly close and amazingly free
- GIMP – It’s not Photoshop, but still very powerful and useful, and again free
- Picasa – Easy and free photo organization if you plan to store pictures on your laptop
- Itunes – Even if you don’t have an Ipod it’s a good organizer and makes burning easy
- Filezilla – Free and secure FTP program, if you like that kind of thing
- UltraVNC – Computer Remote Control and Vista compatible
- IZArc – Free zip/unzip program
- AVG -Free antivirus
- XAMPP – Free WAMP webserver. Easy to setup to build and test webpages locally.