A piggy bank of commands, fixes, succinct reviews, some mini articles and technical opinions from a (mostly) Perl developer.

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Showing posts with label spyware. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spyware. Show all posts

Good enough software

There's so much software available these days, it's difficult to find which is the best without laboriously downloading, installing, configuring and testing, which I don't often have time for. Unfortunately a large proportion of software is simply not good enough, or its features are poorly described.

Here is some "good enough" software I've found for Windows:
  • To diff directories, e.g. sync music or photos: FreeFileSync 6.3
  • To diff the content of files, e.g. source code: WinMerge
  • Windows Explorer alternative: xplorer 2
  • To encode mp3s: LAME
  • To see where your disk space is being used: Treesize
  • To remove spyware: Spybot: Search & Destroy
  • Torrents: qBittorrent
  • N64 emulator: project64
  • Programmer's text editor: Notepad++
  • ebook management: Calibre
  • Manage iPhone music outside iTunes: Media Monkey
  • Graphics maniplation: GIMP
  • Rename files: Bulk Rename Utility
  • Macro recorder: Autohotkey
  • Media player: VLC, or MPC-HC (not tried)
  • Music player: Winamp
  • Documents and spreadsheets: Microsoft Office
    • (LibreOffice and OpenOffice are NOT good enough)

Your PC does not need dynamic wallpaper or a health check

Do not install any of the following types of programs, they are almost guaranteed to be spyware, slow down your computer, and be difficult to remove:
  • Dynamic wallpaper/screensaver
  • PC health check
  • Speed up your PC
  • Clean your PC
  • Any new special anti-virus program (you should only have one trusted anti-virus program)
  • Defrag your computer
Instead, use Ad-aware or Spybot Search & Destroy to keep your Windows computer clean.