Monday, December 4, 2006

Things you should install to make a better Windows XP

If you are like me you spend a huge amount of time using Windows XP. There are many tools that can improve your experience with a small amount of effort. My choices are:

Firefox
Free, fast and more standards friendly browser. Even if you use Internet Explorer make sure you have this one in your toolbox.
Foobar2000
A lightweight audio player. I use it because it's small, fast, uses very few resources and I never had problems with it. If you like to just listen to music it can be your choice too. No bloat included.
Google Desktop Search
Will help you to find anything faster. A single tools to search in your emails, files and web history. There are many plugins and gadgets you can use with this great tool.
Media Player Classic
Small and fast video player. The project it's not very active lately but I hope it will come back.
IrfanView
The most popular image viewer. Huge list of supported formats, fast, small.
ConTEXT
They say: ConTEXT is a small, fast and powerful freeware text editor, developed mainly to serve as secondary tool for software developers. I agree.
Process Explorer
Released by SysInternals this tool is a major Task Manager improvement. You can diagnose almost any activity in your system, from memory leaks to opened files, spyware activity and more. There are also two more tools from SysInternals you may find useful: Filemon and Regmon.
VirtualDub
It's a small video capture/processing utility. If you ever need to change the format of a video file use this tool.

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