Paul's Windows Software picks

Miranda IM : light weight and portable (don't we like those!) msn, gtalk, aim replacement. Very handy especially if you have preconfigured packages .. suddenly can't find them at hand. But please comment if you know those tweaked versions. Much prettier interface. It doesn't require you to update like Windows Live messenger does. No ads and tabs. It'll save a lot of memory. The draw backs are: It doesn't support offline messaging (I hate that!) and it doesn't support voice and video chat (I use skype for video chat anyway). I have also tested aMSN which has a long way to go from apple to PC. Pidgin or Gaim is not so impressive as they are in inux and they use the heavy GTK packages that you really don't want it you don't even know what it is. Trillian is much less configurable and is not totally free.

Opera: See my older post.

Mplayer for windows package: This is a specific package I am referring you to. Mplayer's slogan should be "Everything but fire is played". Mplayer is imported from Linux and other versions have little glitches here and there. This one so far works perfectly. KMplayer has been kind of buggy for me when you enlarge the screen. But there is the possibility that I just didn't find the good packages. Other packages of Mplayer that I have used have glitches too. Media Player Classic is stable and little but the forward 1min, 5 min, volume up and down, all kinds of hotkey possibilities are offered by Mplayer. VLC can be used portable but it is not as stable and omnipotent as Mplayer. Realplayer, Quicktime player are just gawdy and too bloated.

Executor: Great program launcher. You don't have to double click the shortcuts which gives your fingers cramps anymore. It has customizable keywords, shortcuts etc. The program is not as good looking as launchy , but launchy is kind of buggy on Windows 2003. So I use executor, otherwise, you can totally use launchy. They act a little differently. Launchy does type as you go through directories yet executor finds what you want within what you have predefined. So they function differently, you'll see which you like.

Dexpot : A virtual desktop manager that works perfectly. Supports a vast amount of hotkeys that I haven't really all figure out. But it is there and if you want to use them, it's straight forward to check what they are. It also has simple settings and it works portably. The other VDMs are all costly or buggy, so I think this is the best one. Topdesk is tested. It is not free and it is buggy under Win2003. I'm sure it works fine with WinXP but which doesn't. Winflip doesn't response very quickly and is a little bit buggy sometimes. I just saw someone digging my blog (thanks) metioning TaskSwitchXP. It is a great application. But if you have dexpot, you're busy playing with your workspaces. You have no time to bother with alt tab replacement. If you want to switch to other tasks, you can press win + f2 in Dexpot. It gives you something like Expose in Mac which lets you see a catalog of windows. But TaskSwitchXP could be useful if you are well organized and can hold everything in one windows. So I'll recommend this too.

Directory Opus: It breaks my dream for all freeware in this post but it has 6 editing modes right at hand, horizontal split, vertical split, explorer, image... You really need them all for different daily tasks. (Imagine click the windows explorer around...) It is the only explorer replacement that I find very capable. Total commander, free commander, magellan explorer, xplorer2 , etc, etc are tested. Again, the software supports hotkeys which is my personal favorite feature of softwares.

Mozilla Thunderbird : Email client. What can I say? It can be portable, it supports MSN, Gmail, Yahoo, and everything else. Sometimes the extensions are a little buggy but every other email client doesn't match up to this except maybe outlook. But you lose everything if you have a technical emergency with outlook. So I recommend Thunderbird. Eudora, The Bat!, foxmail are just not easy to setup, do not have a huge user base to help you with problems, so I even omitted the links. Search them with google if you are really rebellious and tell me what do you think.

FastStone Image Viewer:
You can see what it is and you'll see how cool it is. ACDSee almost set the standard but it's getting slow and bloated. IrfanView has good funcionalities but looks too primitive and the interface is not as intuitive. Picasa works great with photos but if you need to view images for other things, it is kind of inconvenient.

Winamp 5.5: I know this sounds old but just in case you deserted Winamp like I did a few years ago, it's time to pick it up again. I think nowadays, for a media player, the bottom line is a media library compatibility. Windows Media Player comes with one but windows media player is just too resource consuming. Foobar has none yet and MusicCube which is a great open source media player has one. But winamp is much cooler than MusicCube and works more smoothly. There are other stuff like MediaMonkey. It works fine but you need to pay for certain features. So, our old friend winamp won back my heart.

My goal is to keep things as clean and simple as possible. Just like the way I like softwares.

Regarding comments, I would love to receive suggestions of other softwares. Even though my comment on each software is short, I've spent much time trying these softwares. A lot of the long reports are probably made after 1 or 2 runs, so they don't really tell you about true long term user experience. One more thing is I will only write about softwares where you have alternatives some of which are probably free and some are not. Softwares will show up only in groups because I think it's meaningless just to suggest a choice where there's no choice to make. (I'm a blogger, not a parent. )