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Applications & Fixes

Comments

  • Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 90,537 Mod ✭✭✭✭Capt'n Midnight


    Link to the old thread.

    Link to settings to make Windows Vista much faster. (Mukki)

    Some handy apps for a new PC

    http://pcdecrapifier.com/ - remove the crap that comes preinstalled on a new machine

    http://ninite.com/ Tick the apps you want to install. The installer can also be used to update apps later on.

    Note Secunia PSI listed above will can also patch most common apps.


  • Registered Users Posts: 1,456 ✭✭✭FSL


    http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/ Great for creating a multi boot USB. You can include rescue disks and anti virus scanners as well as live distros, thus giving yourself a very useful tool.

    Comes in both Windows and Linux versions.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 11,924 ✭✭✭✭RolandIRL


    CCleaner - Crap cleaner.

    Revo Uninstaller - what Add/Remove Programs should be.

    Malwarebytes Anti-Malware | SuperAntiSpyware - On-demand malware scanners.

    Teracopy - Alternate to built-in windows copier. Allows pausing and queueing of copy & paste jobs.

    Treesize Free | WinDirStat - See how much space is taken up where and by what

    Fences - Just handy for organising your desktop, stops icons rearranging after exiting full screen programs (used to happen me a few times in XP)

    Search Everything - Alternative to windows search.


  • Registered Users Posts: 552 ✭✭✭Carraig Fhearghais


    Not sure if this has been posted before (apologies if it has, I couldn't see it in a search of the boards)

    There is an update for Windows 7 to allow you to preview RAW files in the 'windows viewer'

    MS Camera Codec Pack

    http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26829


  • Moderators, Arts Moderators, Regional Abroad Moderators Posts: 10,999 Mod ✭✭✭✭Fysh


    Secunia's Personal Security Inspector v2.0 is out now, and includes the ability to automatically patch/update vulnerable or out of date packages. Potentially very useful if you're used to being the family tech support person.

    CPU-Z is also a very handy little utility for identifying system specs from within Windows. If you download the zip version you don't need to install it, just run the executable.


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  • Moderators, Arts Moderators, Regional Abroad Moderators Posts: 10,999 Mod ✭✭✭✭Fysh


    Recently while sorting out a home DVD project I ended up trying out DVDFlick and DVDStyler. As far as I know they aren't as sophisticated as commercial products, but on the other hand they are free and seem to work reasonably well.


  • Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 90,537 Mod ✭✭✭✭Capt'n Midnight


    PDF's Free software

    Sumatra PDF is a free PDF, eBook (MOBI), XPS, DjVu, CHM, Comic Book (CBZ and CBR) reader for Windows.Fast no frills reader

    Foxit PDF reader is fast, lightweight and allows you to open pdf, view pdf, print, and read any PDF files. - you can also redline PDF's, this allows you to add a layer of comments and text , basic freehand drawing , and highlighting too. Very handy for notes

    Free reference manager and PDF organizer | Mendeley and 500MB of storage for PDF's can highlight them and add notes and search the text across all of them. Integrates in to word and openoffice so you can add references easily - pick the format from a list - for libreoffice you have to click on the .oxt file in the openoffice plugins folder

    PDFCreator - The free PDF Creator and Converter - print any document to a PDF also prints to .jpg . png pictures and multi page TIFF's

    PDF Split and Merge works at page level, allows you to join pdf's together or extract full pages , handy for adding Graphs and Appendices to reports


    You can stop reading now there rest is for completeness sake
    To protect a document a little you can print it with pdfcreator
    at this stage you can copy text so use Adobe Acrobat to open it , when you print go into advanced and print as image to pdfcreator having set the security options in pdfcreator to whatever you like , it won't stop OCR but will make it a little more difficult, after that you are down to watermarking documents

    Adobe Acrobat X is bloated, but it now has an option to convert PDF to word or excel online, haven't tried it yet, but I'd guess it respects some of the PDF security settings - most of which you can remove with a pass through pdfcreator.

    many scanners give you the option of scanning to PDF, but you can use pdfcreator and pdf split and merge to assemble images into a pdf manually if you felt inclined.

    [RANT]
    - Don't use Acrobat unless you need to be 100% sure the document looks fine in it. It's bloated , it needs monthly security patches that are bigger than most of the following apps. And most importantly most of the patches are for functionality you don't actually need.

    PostScript is a Turing complete stack language. This means it is impossible to for Acrobat to detect all possible nastiness a pdf document. Simple as. Last Christmas there were some patches for HP printers, since you could use postscript in a doucment to change their firmware. Zombie printers :eek:[/RANT]
    If you've got this far and you have a HP network printer, please update it's firmware if there was a patch released last December.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,091 ✭✭✭Antar Bolaeisk


    Chocolatey - Package manager for Windows. Not an exhaustive list of applications but quite a lot of the useful stuff is there. Can be used in a similar fashion to ninite though not as user friendly. Quite handy for keeping things updated.


  • Registered Users Posts: 83 ✭✭rayzercork


    Ninite - Takes out all the hassle of setting up a system, pick the programs you want then grab the installer and it installs everything

    Etcher &
    Rufus - For creating live Usbs


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