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A new dawn for my computer

Started by Fry, July 29, 2014, 01:28:31 PM

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Fry

So my computer kept buggering up, and rather than go through the rigmarole of fixing it (it was probably a driver clash but whatever) I just wiped the HDD and did a fresh install of Windows 7.

So I have a new start, I've download my graphics card drivers and chrome, but that's it. I was wondering what software you guys normally chuck on your computer when you first get it? Stuff like media players, and security programs, perhaps something for monitoring the health of my rig.

NoSleep


olliebean

Some sort of sandboxing software, like VirtualBox or Sandboxie, so you can try out whatever software you like and not worry about it cluttering up your system if you decide you don't want it.

Onken


Quote from: olliebean on July 29, 2014, 03:07:56 PM
Some sort of sandboxing software, like VirtualBox or Sandboxie, so you can try out whatever software you like and not worry about it cluttering up your system if you decide you don't want it.

What the dickens is sandboxing?

Media player wise, I go with MPC-HC for vids. foobar2000 for mp3's/FLAC.

I haven't bothered with anything more complicated than what Windows provides for anti-virus protection or a firewall for about 8 years and I really don't any of those old programs, AVG etc. CPU-hogging bullshit.

Blumf

Quote from: clingfilm portent on July 29, 2014, 06:49:38 PM
What the dickens is sandboxing?

It's a technique where you run programs in a way that restricts what they have access to (files, networking, whatever...) so that, if anything dodgy does happen, the damage is limited.

There's various ways of doing it; from running the program in a separate, locked down, user account, to running a full virtual PC.

I'd start by changing my browser to Chrome or Firefox immediately, then installing Adblock Plus and Ghostery through the browser extension page, you'll find it in the settings menu. Those two should stop you from getting 90% of malware if you browse mucky websites.

FileHippo is great for finding free stuff and seeing what's popular. They have top ten downloads for all sorts of software and the download speeds are always good.

Install VLC for playing video files and during the install check the box for it to play all video files and uncheck the box to play any audio files.

For music I guess iTunes or Mediamonkey are pretty good; basically anything that isn't Windows Media Player or RealPlayer.

I used to use Avast! Free Edition for anti-virus because it lets you register for 365 days with a non-existent email address, such as JoanCollins@wankmail.com. It's quite cluttered and full of options you don't need though and I've recently discovered BitDefender Free Edition which is reputedly as good as Avast at stopping viruses. The interface for BitDefender is as simple as you can get. You can pretty much forget about it once it's installed.

LibreOffice with the GB language pack will sort you for typing work stuff.

For torrenting, my preferred client is qBittorrent. It's reliable and open source, so you don't have to worry about it reporting what you're downloading to The Man.

That's all I can think of at 5am.

Big Jack McBastard

What he ^ said annnd.

MPC-HC - For anything that VLC has trouble with.

MRU-Blaster and CCleaner for tidying up.

MagicISO - Still handy for virtual mounted drives as is Nero.

OpenOffice - If you don't fancy some feature bloated pirated version of Office.

WinRar and 7zip.

XnView - A bit of tweaking and it's better than the standard picture viewer in Win7.

If we're talking FF extensions then also:

Colourful Tabs
DOM Inspector/Element Inspector
Element Hiding Helper for Adblock
HTTP Nowhere
ImageBlock
NoScript
NoSquint
TinEye Reverse Image Search

Also might be an idea to prune your running services (Run: 'msconfig') things like Remote Access, Parental Controls, Fax, Bluetooth etc, but do your installing of stuff first and then do this so you have the whole kaboodle to parse for anything iffy.