You have to be careful what you wish for. A few weeks ago, my Windows laptop (provided by Yahoo!) was feeling kinda slow. There were little problems that I couldn’t seem to fix with the OS and I began to feel like it would be a good idea to wipe it clean, reinstall Windows and start fresh.
A few days later, my laptop wouldn’t start up. I brought it to the IT guys and they figured out the problem. One of the clips at the top of the screen broke off in the bottom half and got stuck inside. This happened some time ago, but eventually that clip got loose inside and shorted out the motherboard. Apparently it’s fairly common.
Well, I got my fresh install of Windows and had to go through the process of reinstalling all the apps I use. That brought up the question of what apps do I really need? Over the years I’ve found a bunch that are essential for me to feel productive. Here they are in order of priority.
- Thunderbird – Email is still the killer app, and this one really gets how I deal with all that junk (and the real emails too)
- Firefox – The most extensible web browser ever
- Yahoo Messenger – This is how work gets done
- Palm Desktop – Pretty much required if you have a Treo
- Slickrun – By far the most useful Windows utility. Type in quick shortcuts to run programs, go to web pages, anything.
- Mapsource – This is how I view all my maps and transfer waypoints to my GPS.
- PuTTY – The best free terminal program out there.
- Stickies – I don’t know why Windows doesn’t come with one of these like Macs do.
- Winamp – A simple audio player that plays just about anything and doesn’t get in your way.
- NoteTab Light – An excellent little replacement for Notepad
- ExpertGPS – The killer feature of this one is being able to take any map as an image and calibrate it with GPS coordinates so you can overlay waypoints on it and create custom hiking maps.
- RealVNC – This is how I fix my parents’ computer. 🙂
- WinSnap – A great application for doing screen captures. Capture a region of the screen, save it to a file, print it or email it.
- TreeSize – Gives you a map of where all your disk space is going so you can free it up.
- Profont – A good monospaced font is hard to find. This one is compact, clear and free.
- VLC – This video player will play just about anything.
- Gaim – For those times that I need to speak to AOL or MSN friends, this client is far less annoying than the official ones.
- Flickr Uploadr – The fastest and easiest way to get photos on Flickr
- SlingPlayer – Gotta watch those Red Sox games
Tomorrow I pick up my brand-new MacBook Pro, so I guess I’ll have to start making a new list.