Power User Application Guide v.1

Last Updated May 15, 2006

Here are some applications that I feel are a must haves! If you have a favorite application that you feel needs to be on here please feel free to give me a shout! Due to the fact I don’t have a decent OS X box…yet this guide is currently only for Windows.

Firefox - The award-winning, free Web browser is better than ever. Browse the Web with confidence - Firefox protects you from viruses, spyware and pop-ups. Enjoy improvements to performance, ease of use and privacy. It’s easy to import your favorites and settings and get started. Download Firefox now and get the most out of the Web. Check out my Firefox Guide here.

Security

ZoneAlarm Free - ZoneAlarm Free makes it easy. Unlike other personal firewalls, ZoneAlarm protects automatically from the moment it`s installed - no programming required. ZoneAlarm Free can barricade your PC with complete and immediate port blocking. And, then runs in Stealth Mode to make your PC invisible on the Internet - if you can`t be seen, you can`t be attacked. ZoneAlarm Free delivers simplicity without compromising your security.

A getting started tutorial explains controls and alerts to get you up and running quickly. And, to keep you confident that you`re always protected, intuitive color-coded alerts rate security risks - in real time. For basic, “no frills” firewall protection, ZoneAlarm free is the popular first step for many home PC users. And it`s still FREE for individual & non-profit use.

AVG Free - An awesome free anti-virus solution.

Spybot - Spybot - Search & Destroy can detect and remove spyware of different kinds from your computer. Spyware is a relatively new kind of threat that common anti-virus applications do not yet cover. If you see new toolbars in your Internet Explorer that you didn’t intentionally install, if your browser crashes, or if you browser start page has changed without your knowing, you most probably have spyware. But even if you don’t see anything, you may be infected, because more and more spyware is emerging that is silently tracking your surfing behavior to create a marketing profile of you that will be sold to advertisement companies. Spybot-S&D is free, so there’s no harm in trying to see if something snooped into your computer, too

Ad-Aware - Ad-Aware SE is the latest version of our award winning and industry leading line of antispyware solutions and represents the next generation in Spyware detection and removal.

It is quite simply the most advanced solution available to protect your privacy. With the all new Code Sequence Identification (CSI) technology that we have developed, you will not only be protected from know content, but will also have advanced protection against many of their unknown variants.

Designed for Windows 98, 98SE, Win ME, Win NT 4, Win 2000, and Win XP Home/Professional you can be sure that you will have the most effective privacy protection that has ever been offered by Lavasoft.

Ad-Aware SE Professional edition will comprehensively scan your memory, registry, hard, removable and optical drives for known Data-mining, aggressive advertising, Parasites, Scumware, selected Keyloggers, selected traditional Trojans, Dialers, Malware, Browser hijackers, and tracking components.

Audio/Video/Still

WinAMP - Nullsoft Winamp is a fast, flexible, high-fidelity music player for Windows. Winamp supports CD, MP3, WAV, Audiosoft, Audio Explosion, MOD and other audio formats, custom appearances called skins, plus audio visualization and audio effect plug-ins. additional features including free-form skins, a new decoder, built-in cross fade, and an advanced Media Library .

iTunes - iTunes is the easiest way to organize, share and listen to music on your computer. Find new favorites. Manage your growing library. Enjoy iTunes, the best friend an iPod will ever have!

VLC Player - VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVD s, VCD s, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

IfranView - IrfanView is trying to create new and/or interesting features in its own way, unlike some other graphic viewers, which whole “creativity” is based on feature cloning, stealing of ideas and whole dialogs from ACDSee and/or IrfanView! (for example: XnView is stealing/cloning features and whole dialogs from IrfanView, since 5+ years).

Must Haves

WinRAR - WinRAR is a 32-bit version of RAR, the powerful archive manager. RAR files can normally compress files up to 10 percent more than ZIP or ARJ files. WinRAR is a powerful archiver. WinRAR provides complete support of RAR and ZIP files, unpacks 7Z, ACE, ARJ, BZ2, GZ, CAB, ISO, JAR, TAR, LZH, UUE, Z. Among WinRAR features are strong compression, volumes, encryption, self-extracting modules, backup facilities. Features include strong compression, processing of non-RAR archives (such as ZIP, ARJ, and LZH), long filename support, programmable self-extracting archives (SFX), volumes, damaged archive repair, authenticity verification, embedded file comments, and encryption.

Nero - Nero 7 Premium enables the user to experience digital media in completely new innovative ways. With the addition of a Nero Home – media manager, you can now have the complete PC and TV experience. Whether you want to access your media files from the comfort of your living room, or complete digital media projects on your PC, Nero 7 Premium is all you need.

Now, with more features than ever before, this powerful software can transform your digital photos into professional animated sideshows, backup all of your valuable data, manage or search your media files, edit video or photos, create DVDs (including menus), and stream your files over a media server, and compress files to take on the go. Beginners and experts alike will be amazed by what one solution can do. Really, it’s that good.

Web Tools

GoodKeywords - Good Keywords is for finding the common words people usually search for. For example if you type ‘ computer ‘ the Overture/GoTo search suggestion tool will tell you that during the last month the word ‘computer’ was searched 459549 (these numbers are not exact and are used as examples only) times at Overture.Com. Similarly ‘ computer game ‘ was searched 302207 times. Also, given one word it will tell you all relevant combinations of that word (again this is based on actual searches done by people).

PuTTY - PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator.

FileZilla - FileZilla is a powerful FTP-client for Windows 9x, ME, NT4, 2000 and XP. It has been designed for ease of use and with support for as many features as possible, while still being fast and reliable.

Cool Tools

Samurize - Samurize is an advanced system monitoring and desktop enhancement engine for Windows 2000/XP/2003. IT professionals, overclockers, gamers and desktop modders alike use Samurize for system information, weather reports, news headlines and much much more. And best of all, Samurize is 100% free!

Stickies - Stickies for Windows lets you put yellow sticky notes on your Windows desktop, much like the popular MacOS application. It is very simple, very customizable, and completely free!

Yahoo! Widgets - Bring life to your desktop with fun, stylish, and useful Yahoo! Widgets. To get Widgets on your desktop, you first need to download the Yahoo! Widget Engine.

Network Stumbler - Network Stumbler is a packet sniffer for wireless networks. It supports wireless network cards that use the Hermes chipset, including Lucent, Dell True Mobile, Compaq WL 110, Elsa Airlancer and several others. We have installed but not tested this version, since our wireless card was not compatible. This version is currently in beta testing.

SiSoftware Sandra Lite - SiSoftware Sandra is a 32 and 64-bit Windows system analyzer that includes benchmarking, testing and listing modules. It tries to go beyond other utilities to show you more of what is really going on under the hood so you draw comparisons at both a high and low-level in a single product.

Using SiSoftware Sandra you can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, memory, sound card, ports, printers, network, Windows internals, AGP, USB2, ODBC Connections, Firewire etc.

You can save/print/fax/e-mail/post/upload or insert into ADO/ODBC databases reports in text, HTML, XML, SMS/DMI or RPT format.

This version supports multiple sources of information gathering including: remote computers, PDAs, Smart Phones, ADO/ODBC databases or saved system reports.

All benchmarks are optimized for both SMP & SMT (Hyper-Threading), up to 32/64 CPUs depending on the platform.