Essential Software
February 8th, 2008
I recently got a new laptop, Dell Latitude D430 dual-core and 32Gb Solid State drive, and needed to install the necessary essential software i.e. the software I just can’t live without.
Here is what I noted installing (but not necessarily in this order)
| Software | Notes | URL |
| Picasa | for viewing, organising and editing digital images | http://picasa.google.com |
| Adobe Reader | reading PDF files either locally or on the Web | http://www.adobe.com |
| Internet Explorer 7.0 | Web Browser | http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx |
| Microsoft Windows Media Player | Media Player | http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/default.mspx |
| Visual C# Express Edition | Development tool for building applications using C# | http://www.microsoft.com/express/vcsharp/Default.aspx (and other express products available at http://www.microsoft.com/express/) |
| Jing | Capture images and record video from your desktop | http://www.jingproject.com/ |
| Google Toolbar | Google Toolbar | http://toolbar.google.com |
| Firefox | Web Browser | http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/products/firefox/ |
| Free Download Manager | Download Accelerator and Manager | http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/ |
| NotePad++ | Free source code editor and replacement for Notepad | http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/ |
Closely followed by
| Windows Live Writer | Desktop application for easily publishing content to your blog. | http://get.live.com/ |
| Windows Live Photo Gallery | Desktop application for organising those digital images | http://get.live.com/ |
| PaintShop Pro | Image Editing application | http://www.corel.com |
| ActivePerl | Complete ready-to-install Perl distribution | http://www.activestate.com/downloads/ |
| ImageMagick | Software Suite to create, edit and compose bitmap images | http://www.imagemagick.org |
| Winzip | Windows compression utility | http://www.winzip.com |
I thought you didn’t like this machine and weren’t going to use it!
Looks as though it was my only choice in the end …