Wednesday, February 23, 2011

First geek post of 2011

Since I'm at home on a school day (just went to the doc and he said I'm finally free from crutches!), I decided to write a long-overdue post. And a geeky one at that.

and here it is - the updated list of free, useful apps that currently reside on my machines.

1) Microsoft Security Essentials http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/



I abandoned AVG Internet Security for this, mainly because AVG 2o11 refused to co-exist with my COMODO firewall, something I couldn't sacrifice for the sake of an updated AVG version. So I went searching for an alternative, and MSE popped up with very good reviews. One review in particular caused me to go ahead with MSE "...these guys at MSE are working to protect their own product (Windows)..."

Made sense to me. Low on resources, unobtrusive, regular updates, scanning is fast, and according to many websites has a fairly good detection rate. And its free!

2) COMODO Firewall (and Anti-virus) http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/



I've been using this for many years now, and it hasn't disappointed me yet. It usually detects malicious stuff way before my anti-virus could even sniff at it, which says a lot about its monitoring ability. Excellent replacement for the Windows Firewall.

It has a setting called Defense+ that prevents unauthorised installations, but isn't for the faint hearted - programme updates and innocent installations usually cause it to raise the alarm, something I've learnt to live with. Besides, it does let me know what's happening behind my back in my computer.

3) VLC Player http://www.videolan.org/vlc/



If you've heard of it, no surprises there. It is THE open source video player that can play almost every video format out there, and has replaced the player I've been using for years (Media Player Classic). Its fast and has no problem playing HD videos, although I've had a few problems with subtitles.

4) MusicBee http://www.getmusicbee.com/



For those who don't own iPhones/iPods or are not using Macs and are craving an iTunes-like experience this player is for you. I was looking for a replacement for my old SongBird, which was crashing and starting to lag, when I chanced upon MusicBee. Amazingly it looks almost like SongBird, minus the lag and the crashes. It scrobbles to Last.fm flawlessly, and playback is smooth, with the songs almost starting immediately once you click "play". One drawback is that it doesn't show up on my Windows Live Messenger, which might be just me.

5) Dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/

This little tool was introduced to me by a friend, and its amazingly useful! It works like an online storage box of sorts, and you can sync its contents across all your computers and devices. And its as simple as dragging and dropping into the Dropbox folder in one computer, and voila! You can access it anywhere with an Internet connection! You can also share files with friends who have Dropbox accounts as well.

6) Dekisoft Monitor Off http://www.dekisoft.com/mou.php

This little gadget turns off your monitor with a click of the mouse or by pressing a hotkey on the keyboard. Extremely useful for laptops and can help save battery life as well. I use it whenever I transform my laptop into a music player.

7) GIMP http://www.gimp.org/



Free Photoshop anyone? Does almost everything that Photoshop can do, and is an incredibly powerful image editing software. I don't like its floating interface though, which can be changed via downloadable skins (something which I haven't gotten round to doing)

8) Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/



If you ever need a free relatively basic audio editor, Audacity works just fine. It has tonnes of editing options that I haven't fully explored yet, aside from the usual cut and paste, equalising, pitching and normalising.

9) 7zip http://www.7-zip.org/

Annoyed by WinRAR telling you to purchase the product because your 30 days trial is up? 7zip unrars those .rar files (something Window's native unzipper doesn't), as well as many other compressed formats. And it doesn't annoy you because its FREE. It doesn't pack into .rar though.

There you have it. I have others, like CCleaner, but those have been mentioned far too many times (and underlining their importance).