Since I bought a new laptop recently I had the opportunity to configure a computer from scratch.
I’ve done this a few times for my self and for friends so there’s a few steps I always take before I consider a computer ready for use.
Once I plug in a network cable and go on the internet I use windows update to get the latest security updates. I use the free version of AVG antivirus. Once that’s up and running and windows update has told me that I have all necessary updates, I’ll download firefox and install it as my default browser.
A lot of machines come with adobe’s PDF viewer installed which is the biggest bloaty piece of crap I’ve come across in long time. Try out the beautifully tiny foxit pdf reader which starts up very quickly and doesn’t bring your PC to a grinding halt. There may be lots of advanced features in the adobe reader, but I’ve never used them so I don’t care.
I get all my email through gmail so I don’t usually install a mail client, but I have used thunderbird before which worked very well.
If you’d like a gmail invite let me know
If you do choose to download firefox or thunderbird you should also check out their extensions which can be extremely useful.
I use the free and versatile 7zip to open and create archives. I do my web development with apache as part of xammp which includes apache, php, perl and mysql with phpmyadmin. It’s an incredibly easy install and you can have a test server up and running in minutes with zero configuration.
I didn’t use eclipse before but I tried php eclipse on my new computer and I really like it. The text editor is great, and it seems very configurable. I hope to add in some support for subversion for version control.
Once I’ve got a working version of my code I can upload to the server using the filezilla ftp client.
Those are the essentials for my day to day computer use. I may get some entertainment software like vlc for video and winamp for mp3s. uTorrent is a good way to find either.
Leave a comment if there’s an item of software that you can’t be without.
What is essential to your PC?
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Winamp, GTalk, GaIM and uTorrent are my essentialls. They’re always the first to go on the PC. Ironically none of those applications are available on the MAC. I converted about a month ago
Still though, the MAC has alternatives which are just as good.