I have a new computer!

And I can't type my title correctly half the time.
So, anyhow, Windows 7, Home Premium, good video card, even if it's not the best video card in recorded history.
Of course since I'm now starting from scratch, with only a few things that are important to me, like porn, I'm curious what things I should download to make my computer experience more awesome and not full of suck.
Anti-virus suggestions, and Spybot based programs are nice as well.
If Spybot is even still around.
Basically, firewalls that are not $30 a month, , and good anti-viruses that don't cost that much, and don't suck as bad as Norton did about 8 years ago.
Also, my computer case is huge. Seriously, the thing could double as a blast door.

 

http://privacyware.com/PF_support.html

I stopped using Comodo. This is what I replaced it with. It works well.

Spoiler

Sadly it does not feature porn. Sorry.

 

Thank you both.
I will grab that Privacy thingy.
I decided to use Avast.
I'll grab Spybot later.

 

I suggest this for videos: http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/

This for looking at picture files: http://www.irfanview.com/

For Office programs, I suggest: http://www.libreoffice.org/

For text editing: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

Time for bed but there are four recommendations for you.

 

I demand a picture of the computer. Such a thing is traditional, and pleasing.

 

I have no way of doing that, Mining. I don't have a scanner/video camera.
The best I can do is mention is the case is a Cooler Master Haf 912 series.
And I already got Ifranview and MPC.
And what about Open Office? That's an awesome word based program.

 

Open Office is a dead project. Libre Office is the replacement project of the same thing.

 

For dealing with pretty much any archive file format I would recommend 7-zip.

Listing to music I would recommend foobar2000.

For video codecs I like CCCP, which comes with the video player LionsDen recommend.

I like TreeSizeFree for figuring out what is taking up hard drive space and cleaning it up.

I would also recommend the free version of MalwareBytes as an addition to whatever anti-virus you go with.

 

A little mention about K-Lite Codec Pack, I couldn't play Divinity 2: The Dragon Knight Saga because the videos demanded that Windows Media Player play them. Even upgrading to the latest version and making it the default player for .wmv files still caused the game to be unplayable. Then I read that someone had problems along the same vein and installed this and it started working fine. So I installed it and now Divinity 2 play perfectly. This is a link to one of the places that has it, can't remember if it's the one I used or not since I googled it.

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/k_lite_codec_pack.htm

 

Well, good thing I don't plan on playing Divinity 2 anytime soon.
Didn't know that Open Office kicked the bucket. It was what I used for all my stories for at least 3 years now.
I hope Libre loads them fine.

I really probably should grab the K-lite codec pack. Nothing like basically every codec ever except Vivo.
Anyone remember the Vivo player craze? and it's amazing 240 x 160 resolution? Back when 800 x 600 was hard to get reliably.

Been playing a bit of Terraria with the Omnir and Avalon mod packs combined.
also been playing King's bounty: Crossworlds.

 

LibreOffice loads OpenOffice files fine. It is OpenOffice, just forked because of the crap they were pulling. It doesn't support the real old formats anymore but anything created in 5 to 10 years should be fine.

 

I strongly suggest installing VLC Player first, then the K-Lite Mega pack. You can do it in any order, but each by default tries to grab up all file associations. Doing it in this order means that after VLC grabs them, K-Lite will take them over. (But it is a trivial thing to get them set however you want. And I know you can figure that out with ease.)

Why do I suggest this? VLC does not install codecs at all. It has them built into the player itself. So it will not conflict with K-Lite like other such products. Both are free, and there are very occasionally a video or two that will not play with Media Player Classic from K-Lite's pack. 99% of the time they will play just fine with VLC.

Generally I prefer MPC over VLC. But they are both excellent players. If I could only ever have one, strange as it seems I would undoubtedly choose VLC. The reasoning is that since everything it needs to play is compiled into the player, it cannot suffer from broken codecs that happens from time to time when you install other software that should not 'eff around with installed codecs, but does so anyway.

Check that link out and read up on the codecs and libraries VLC produced and maintains. If it were not for them, K-Lite would not even be possible. libdvdcss is a library they made that is used each and every time you attempt to play a "encrypted" DVD movie. Yes, that includes the ones you paid for and should have the legal rights to watch without issues. It simply attempts hundreds or even thousands of brute force decryption methods in a fraction of a second until it finds the correct one for that DVD. Then it can be played as if you had set the region code correctly for that particular region. I have bought DVDs that arrived only to discover they were not actually the correct region for myself. (Region one is where I live.) But thanks to this library I can play it in any player I want so long as it uses this free library. And I *NEVER* set a region on my DVD drive.

As for viewing images, I prefer XnView. It is freeware, and as close as I have found to the timeless ACDSee Classic. ACDSee Classic is very old now, and does not support many somewhat rare image types. XnView does however. I open an image and scroll through a whole directory of images with the mousewheel. So simple a function, yet so easy and enjoyable compared to those that require a keyboard key to do this.

I have loads more suggestions, but why not save us each some time and not bore you to death? Tell us what you need/want. We can share our solutions to the same problems.

 

Oh, grab Clamwin and Clam Sentinel. Then uninstall that garbage antiviral junk. They all claim to be unbiased, but they often have false positives. Clamwin does not. Clamwin is freeware and has no commercial version, so no incentive to make you think the whole world is out to get you. (Clam Sentinel is the tool that allows Clamwin to scan files as they are accessed like most AV suites do.)

Things like cracked executables are added to the "Unsafe/Malware" list of commercial AV suites the day they become available. Despite the fact that most of them are perfectly safe. I am not supporting piracy, but I keep my original discs safe and use cracked executables to avoid destroying the disc by having to handle it every time I start one of those games. Hell, they even add trainers/cheats to the list for fucks sake.

Some AV suites may be decent and may not do this junk. But it is so common that I refuse to touch the garbage.

*Edit* By the way, Spybot Search and Destroy is not an AV suite. I just wanted to clarify that since I am busily trash-talking them. I use Spybot myself. It is invaluable.

 

I didn't know this.

 

The "Dead" part may be misleading. But Open Office is going a different direction from what earned it so much respect. For proper details, use the search engine of your choice. But Libre Office is every bit as good as Open Office was, and a bit better in some areas.

 

I'll keep Avast for now, Omni.
I used to have AVG. So, I would imagine Avast is better.

I'll keep everyone updated on various things.

 

Media Player Classic is awesome, even lighter than VLC, and cracks nearly all the nuts you throw at it. For the rest, K-Lite + VLC should see you through.
A program which I have learned to love a lot is MediaMonkey, it's for music. I never tried Itunes (and don't want to, thanks.), but MediaMonkey is awesome for organizing your music, cataloguing it and obviously playing it Don't know how the free version is, but should have most of the features. The CD ripper is really good too, and it's pretty lightweight and doesn't complain about my 50 GB of music
We are also missing Thunderbird, the one and only E-mail program, though sadly it's not as lightweight as it used to be. Does everything and everything pretty well (or is it good in this case? Not sure...) .
I also love Launchy, a super simple little program that lets you open programs and files with a few keystrokes, has really increased my PC browsing speed. Extremely streamlined, only launches programs, no ballast attached

 

Don't know how they compare feature-wise, since I basically only use it as a program launcher, but it sits happily at around 20k memory all the time, on Windows 7 64 bit, so I guess it has been fixed