Necessary stuff to get for your first new computer in about 10 years

[Hank Venture]

So what should I get for my new computer? I haven't owned a PC for about 10 years, but now I have bought one as my MacBook went to shit (I spilled approx 0.5 liter of soda directly down its keyboard holes).

Is antivirus still a thing? What is the best torrent client going? I've already got Steam for games, and Spotify for music.

Thanks.

[touchingcloth]

Porn

[Zetetic]

Is antivirus still a thing?

3rd party stuff at home - not really, no. Make sure Microsoft Defender is working and updated.

Use uBlock Origin in either Chrome or Firefox.

[Mrs Wogans lemon drizzle]

Have you considered a new Apple M1 Mac?  Thier new laptop/desktop CPUs are inderdibly efficiant and fast.

[beanheadmcginty]

If you get the Epic games library launcher program thing then you can claim a new free game every week on Thursday evening. I've accrued a huge library of games I haven't got round to playing with this. Some properly good ones too.

[evilcommiedictator]

3rd party stuff at home - not really, no. Make sure Microsoft Defender is working and updated.

Use uBlock Origin in either Chrome or Firefox.

Pretty much this - Windows finally has it's shit together in this department, now the problem is browsers. Chrome works great for most people, but is running slow, so some are moving to Firefox. Get the same extensions for both, uBlock, Privacy Badger, Facebook Container.
Torrent clients, you might want to find one you like the look of, but the newer versions of uTorrent have hidden bitcoin miners so avoid those.

[Hank Venture]

Cheers guys, really helpful. The best media player for .mkv files? Still VLC?

[Zetetic]

VLC remains fine.

(I use mpv (see the Windows builds by shinchiro) but it doesn't have much of a discoverable UI.)

[peanutbutter]

I built a PC last year and in retrospect I wish I just got an M1 Macbook Air. I'm probably gonna get one still regardless...

[touchingcloth]

I built a PC last year and in retrospect I wish I just got an M1 Macbook Air. I'm probably gonna get one still regardless...

I have one, but I would say that this line of thinking...

Have you considered a new Apple M1 Mac?  Thier new laptop/desktop CPUs are inderdibly efficiant and fast.

...is not entirely accurate. They are efficient and fast, but on the Air I would say that the speed and efficiency is more surprising for a laptop of that size which doesn't including any cooling fans and which has a very decent battery life[nb]But definitely not a superb battery life if you are a habitual user of full brightness settings.[/nb] than being rapid in absolute terms.

Your mileage may vary, and the things are great for things like photo editing (assuming your software of choice natively supports Apple silicon), but I get the hunch that they may not be as great for serious video editing or gaming.

But like I say, the chips definitely make the Air perform impressively well for its size, so M1 chips in a tower or a MacBook Pro could well be astonishingly good.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Pretty much this - Windows finally has it's shit together in this department, now the problem is browsers. Chrome works great for most people, but is running slow, so some are moving to Firefox. Get the same extensions for both, uBlock, Privacy Badger, Facebook Container.
Torrent clients, you might want to find one you like the look of, but the newer versions of uTorrent have hidden bitcoin miners so avoid those.

Good suggestions here. qBittorrent is pretty much like uTorrent before it went shit I think. I think I've used it on windows/linux/osx.

[Chedney Honks]

Mouse and keyboard.

[Phoenix Lazarus]

I've heard there's been things called floppy disks since I got my mainframe (presses button on wardrobe-sized structure with revolving tape spools).

[badaids]

Pretty much this - Windows finally has it's shit together in this department, now the problem is browsers. Chrome works great for most people, but is running slow, so some are moving to Firefox. Get the same extensions for both, uBlock, Privacy Badger, Facebook Container.
Torrent clients, you might want to find one you like the look of, but the newer versions of uTorrent have hidden bitcoin miners so avoid those.

For browsers I use Opera and it's great and runs slickly. Free VPN built in that is good too, but I don't know if other browsers have caught up on this point.  I'd never go back to other better known browsers.

[pigamus]

Opera can fuck right off, and anybody who's ever tried to sync the desktop version with iOS must surely think the same. Basically you can't, but they don't tell you that, and world of misery then ensues. Bastards.

[JaDanketies]

yeah was gonna say uBlock Origin, qbittorrent if that's your kinda thing, Tor if that's your kinda thing. Chrome. I also use a password manager Lastpass but they've got a bit 'we want to charge you' since. Proxflow is another good extension that can help you watch geographically-restricted YouTube content. I used to also think VLC media player was a must-have but Windows seem to have improved on that front a little bit, or perhaps it's because you stream everything these days.

Libreoffice if you're going to be working on it and want a free MS office alternative. Notepad++ if you ever need to mess around with html or code.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I used to use Lastpass until they hobbled it to push their premium offerings, so packed my shit up and went with Bitwarden which has been fine, feels a bit more basic but has narrower scope and does it well. I think Lastpass will start to get more complicated and bloaty as they add more and more premium features.

[touchingcloth]

Another vote for Bitwarden over LastPass. They're basically the same thing for a home user, and Bitwarden is actually better in some respects as it allows you to enter multiple domains against the same credentials, so that you could keep the same login details for cookdandbombd.co.uk and cookd.andbombd.co.uk.

[JaDanketies]

Is it easy to make the switch? I've got about 500 entries in Lastpass and it's business-critical.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Yeah you can export to csv then Bitwarden can import it. Seemed to work fine for all my stuff.

[touchingcloth]

It's easy to import to Bitwarden, exporting from your current manager might be a problem. My old home manager was "PWSafe", and it didn't allow for exporting passwords, so I had to add them all in manually. While LastPass does allow for exporting, my workplace LastPass has this option switched off, so I had to copy passwords from there manually. If you're not able to export it's still worth the switch, you just might have to allocate an evening of your life to the faffery. Thankfully Bitwarden does allow for exports, so it should be a one time deal.

[JaDanketies]

Perfect. I got three 'device switches' on Lastpass Free and if I switch device one more time then it's gonna be a very long and boring process to get back on track.

[An tSaoi]

Every time I get a new computer, my immediate downloads are:

Firefox, Opera and Tor
- some form of adblock
- some form of Dark Reader (for making websites go into Night Mode)
- some form of bulk image downloader
- Ant Video downloader
VLC Media Player
Spotify
RAR Extract Frog or 7-Zip
GIMP (until I can get round to installing my old Photoshop Elements 10 from the CD)
Bulk Rename Utility (for renaming loads of files at once, eg adding suffixes and dates)
MP3 Tag (for renaming mp3s, adding album art etc)
Open Office (a free Microsoft Word knock-off) I could use Google Docs, but sometimes I'm offline
I suppose Zoom will be on the list next time

[seepage]

I use Advanced Renamer for renaming files and folders. It's got some amazing features and supports regular expressions e.g. to reorder parts of a filename.
I use SyncToy for backup but I think it's no longer officially supported.
Handbrake for correcting/converting video files.
The built-in Photos app includes a basic video editor for splitting/joining.
For viewing photos I prefer the old Windows Photo Viewer to the Photos app but you have to now search for & apply some registry changes to enable it.

[An tSaoi]

Anyone know any good free video editing programmes? Nothing complicated, just holiday vids for relatives.

[seepage]

As above, the Windows built-in Photos app includes a basic video editor.

[beanheadmcginty]

Anyone know any good free video editing programmes? Nothing complicated, just holiday vids for relatives.

VSDC

[Chedney Honks]

Anyone using Tor is a paedophile is a common assumption.

[JaDanketies]

Anyone using Tor is a paedophile is a common assumption.

I have some very mundane uses for it. You can see what a website looks without any cache at all, and it seems to work more reliably than and is just as easy as 'flushing' the DNS cache. You can also use it to bypass some restrictions on websites, like 'your IP can only do this thing on this website once a day'. I know there are other tools available. At least 10% of my use isn't noncery.

I think that a VPN will one day be an essential install but I've literally never deliberately used one, only when workplaces have had it as standard.

[An tSaoi]

VSDC

cheers