not my blog

I was talking with one of the guys that I work with today about programs that we use, and I realized I’ve never really sat down and thought about the programs that I use most every day and that I just couldn’t live without. I tried to stay away from the commercial, or work specific stuff, and focus on things that I use personally and that I couldn’t live without in my personal life. I think I came up with a pretty solid list of programs that I use daily. The most interesting part about the list is that there is only one commercial program in the entire list, and the only reason I use it is because there currently are just no programs that match it for quality and function at this point in time. If you know me, you know I don’t buy that much software, so if I purchased it, you know it’s something good. So in no particular order:

Firefox
I spend a lot of time on the web. Entirely too much time on the web. With it’s tabbed browsing features, RSS bookmarklets, and general spiffines, Firefox is an integral part of my daily computer useage. Currently I use 2.0 RC2 and have found it quite useful, with the new built in spell checker it makes all those hours spent in the forums even more productive.

VLC and Media Player Classic
I am a media junkie. Movies and TV are consumed at a voractious rate on my computer, and VLC and Media Player Classic are my work horses. Yes, they are seperate programs, but I find each one has its own niche with the files that it plays (they are both all-in-one players, but each one plays center things better), so I am including them as a pair on this list. They are both great programs and ones that should be on everyones computer. The removal of the need to ever have to worry about a codec issue makes these programs worth it by themselves. Add in not having to throw away my money on a DVD decoder and you have a pure winner.

Alcohol 120%
With two small children in the home, making sure you have backups of things is always a good thing. I use Alchol constantly to backup the kids computer games, burn backup copies of the children’s DVDs that I made with DVD Shrink, and mount ISOs of programs stored on my PC. Between being the best burning program on the market and having virtual drive emulation, this program belongs on every machine that I have. There are free options that can emulate the overall effect of Alcohol, but I don’t think they match up to Alcohol’s burning ability, plus I like the all in one features of the program.

7-zip
When it comes to compressed file management 7-zip is the absolute top of the food chain. I’ll take it over WinRAR, WinZip, PKware, etc anyday, and it’s free. It’ll extract darn near any file you can throw at it, and it has it’s own open-sourced compression format that makes the commercial ones jealous. 7-zip is usually my second install on a PC after Firefox. If you haven’t tried this program yet and you have been looking at compression software, make sure you give 7-zip a try before plopping down your money on one of the commercial solutions.

Process Explorer
As a power user, the standard task manager just doesn’t cut it. With the programs additional graphing options, almost infinite reporting options, and the directly linked ability to research DLLs and more it is the obvious choice for the replacement of task manager. And did I mention you can actually replace task manager with it, so that Ctrl-Alt-Del will actually launch Process Explorer? This thing tells me everything I ever wanted to know about my computer and much more.

PDF Creator
I create PDFs of invoices and statements for everything I do online. Much easier than wasting paper and then having to worry about filing it later. And as we all know, why pay for something when there are good free alternatives. PDF Creator is a nice little free PDF printer that definately gets the job done when it comes to converting your content to PDF format. There are numerous other free PDF printers out there, but I like PDF Creator mostly for the fact that it just works and it is open source.

iTunes
Ok, so sue me. I still just haven’t found anything that works as well as iTunes. Songbird is coming along, but it’s just not ready for prime time yet. Would I like to replace it? Yes. Have I found anything better yet? No. If anyone has a nice lightweight media player with a good song management function and is capable of handling a 5000+ song playlist with quality Shuffle play I’m all over it. As it is, I listening to music all day everyday, and right now nothing does it better for me than iTunes.

Notepad++
Let’s face it, Notepad is great, but it could be a whole lote better. With the ability to haved tabbed Windows and understanding the syntax of tons of common languages the free Notepad++ is the way to go. Daily to-do list generation, quick notes, batch file creation and more are made easier with this little program. Only thing they need to add is a replace Notepad.exe function and the program would be perfect. I even wrote this blog post in it before putting it to Wordpress.

uTorrent
See the previous note about being a media junkie. uTorrent is my preferred torrent program seeing as how it is small and I hardly know it’s running. Each new version brings with it more features and more power. I download all my TV and Linux ISOs and the like via BitTorrent, and uTorrent is the work horse that gets the job done. I used to be a Azureus user, but being Java based it would just suck up the resources when left running for days on end, and I’m just not willing to accept that, even if I can afford the resource useage.

GAIM
I have a lot of people that I keep in touch with and they all use different IM networks. I have friends on MSN, Yahoo, AIM and GTalk. I’m not one for needing to run 4 seperate programs to talk to them all, so GAIM is the perfect solution for me. I am an old school Trillian guy, but they just moved in a direction I wasn’t a huge fan of a few years back, so I switched to GAIM and have been quite happy ever since. The project is well maintained and major problems are fixed very quicked (case in point, the MSN error with the Beta3 of version 2 a few months back). GAIM allows me to keep in touch with all my friends in a single unified messaging application.

I’m curious what you guys all consider your top ten can’t live without programs, let me know in the comments section. Don’t tell me what I missed, because this is my own personal can’t live without list, not yours. =P