Handsome or Handy

Like, gag me with a spoon. My wife’s laptop came with Vista Pre-installed. Which is okay, my Microsoft software (pain-ware) rule of thumb has always been to wait about a year or more before you upgrade to whatever new OS (pain in the OS more like) they cook up.  It’s actually rather pretty looking, and some if it is oddly familliar to linux OS’s running Compiz Fusion. I wonder why. The world may never know…

Anyhow, I need to break in her new laptop and make it Wife friendly. She needs all the crap her old XP laptop had on it so she can run her blog and to make that whole process as easy and user friendly as possible. The less trouble she has conducting her business, the less “honey can you take a quick look at this for me”  that turn into a whole gut wrenching evening that ends in this. Being a frugal patriot I need something free (as in free speech) and free (as in free beer).  I posted a website some time ago about opensource (free speech, sometimes free beer) software for linux, but it should be known that there is a metric ton or more of  open source software for Windows. Just because your operating system isn’t opensource doesn’t mean your software can’t be. This is the list of software I recently installed on my wife’s new laptop to get her up to speed  and ready to blog.

1. Peazip - Peazip will open just about any zipped archive you’ll run into out in the wild wild web, it’s small, it’s fast and it’s free in both respects, freedom and free beer.

2. Filezilla FTP – Filezilla is an FTP program (for uploading files to her server space) that she uses to add photos, files and whatever else she wants to her server space. Any updates she needs to post for her blogging software she can upload with this too. She can also download her entire website to archive it for an “oh shit” day.

3. Gimp or GimpShop – GIMP is not just slang for someone with a bad leg, it also stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Gimp is the original, and it’s a great program to use, but always loose my toolboxes and layer windows and what not and GimpShop makes it look more like Adobe Photoshop, and keeps all your little boxes and what not in a “sandbox.” I’m sorta fond of this version, but either one is a great alternative to shelling out hundreds of dollars for Adobe Photoshop. Also, help me with this folks, no longer refer to edited images as photoshopped, use the new, hip term, “gimp’d.” As in, that photo of the shark flying has totally been gimp’d. Little project courtesy of your Uncle Tom.

4. ClamWin – ClamWin is an opensource, free, virus scanner. It doesn’t disenfect, but it does scan and report. It’s a tattle tale, really. But compared to Norton and MacAfee it doens’t bog down your pc and make you awfully suspicious that most of your PC problems are stemming from Norton/Macaffee… Unbeknownst to me my 500gig junk drawer of a drive was apparently crawling with virii…good to know this BEFORE I turned it into a portable drive so we could move files between my Ubuntu box and her laptop. Funny thing… those virii had no effect on my linux machine… How wonderful Linux is.

5. FoxIt – FoxIt is a free (like free beer), closed source (not like free speech), PDF viewer. It’s fast (unlike Adobe’s mostrosity) and it’s small (also unlike Adobe’s monstrosity). Don’t take my word for it, check out the number one on this dude’s list of bloated software that sucks.

6. VLC - VLC is great because everything else needs codecs, VLC just plays media files. I don’t know how in the hell it works (like gravity) but I assume it some sort of voodoo. Now she didn’t really need VLC for her blogging stuff, but it’s nice to have on her new laptop, this things got a nice wide screen format display that’ll just kick ass for watching movies when we are on vacation. And it’s also free and opensource. Schweet.

The world’s your oyster when it comes to open source software. You gotta find them on the web, shove a knife into them and rip them open to extract the sweet, valuable open source software from within. Even though you’re stuck with some shady, evil emire Operating system doesn’t mean you can’t still monkey-wrench the bad guys by finding opensource alternatives to their high priced (and over priced) software, thats just as effective and often better running than the offal they pawn off on the populace.

The opensource communities have “stable releases” that are, well stable and work and “betas,” software that mostly works well and might need some final polishing while the Corporate Software bemoths have software and tons and tons of patches. You get to do their final testing. Nifty!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some honey do’s to do, and I sorta want some sardines.

-T

I forgot a few things… of course.

7. Pidgin – The only IM program a lad/lady needs. It’s got everything, even icq, which I haven’t used since highschool, oh so long ago. I’m not sure if it’s open source but it is a free download, there’s even a plug in to let you chat over facebook, how cool is that.

8. Spy Bot Search and Destroy – This one is great, but it’s not open source, it is free though. I like it.

Also I should let you know, that some of these installers will try to install toolbars like Yahoo, or an Ebay link. Always use the custom install and make sure you look for those options, don’t get overly happy and click next, next, next. You’re IE will look this. Speaking of IE and suckage, that sort of leads me into a natural number 9.

9. FireFox and Thunder Bird – I don’t use Thunder Bird, it’s the companion to FireFox and is a Outlook replacement. FireFox, of course, is the browser of choice. It’s my favorite browser and by God is should be yours too.

Hopefully I haven’t left anything out. Those are just what her laptop needed, there’s a bunch of others that are handy, just not on her laptop. Let me know what your favorites are!

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This entry was posted by admin on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 12:58 am and is filed under Man-Sciences, geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.